Ride Africa – A General Retrospective

First of all, my deepest apologies to all those I promised regular updates throughout the week of Ride Africa. I had grand plans of posting each day, giving immediate impressions and descriptions of what we’d seen and done. But the reality found once getting on the ground made finding the time to do that a bit trickier.

So, here’s a general overview of the event, and I’ll follow this up with further posts talking about each day in a bit more detail.

BTW - child.org is still fundraising and is running a targetted campaign to support their brilliant Team Dad outreach programme (vital work in areas that are still deeply patriarchal), so if you would like to donate a few pennies please use this link which will see any donations made this week DOUBLED!

Each day consisted of an early start, with timings confirmed at the previous evening’s dinner and accompanied by either groans or cheers from the collective, depending on the exact time announced! Our luggage was all labelled, and each morning we would bring it to reception where the hard-working porters would whisk it into a truck and set off ahead of us to the next overnight stop. We were also issued with bright yellow dry-bags for our in-day requirements – suncream, snacks, energy gels, rehydration salts etc. and these would accompany us on the ‘bag-bus’ so we could access them at each pit stop.

Logistics, logistics, logistics!

Breakfast was a buffet affair, with loads of options to choose from to fuel up ahead of the day’s riding. There were all the usual things you’d expect at a hotel breakfast (cereals, juices, hot drinks, eggs, bacon and sausages) but also some more interesting things – like sweet potato, mandazi (a deep-fried dough) and wimbi (a porridge made from millet flour) which was watery, but did fill the belly nicely! And of course there was lots of delicious fresh fruit, including bananas, which although small, everyone agreed that they tasted more of banana than anyone had ever experienced!

After breakfast we’d assemble at our bikes, making last-minute adjustments, applying suncream, filling water bottles etc. before we were led in a group warm-up by one of our wonderful nurses, Penny, and the Simbaz – our incredible Kenyan cycle guides (all professional cyclists and led by the outstanding Gicheru). We’d then have a briefing from Liam, one of the Fuel team of cyclists (a cracking bunch of lads from Ireland) whose job it was to keep us all safe and the bikes in good working order. Liam would describe the day’s route, highlighting any particular points of interest, climbs, and areas where we’d need to be particularly careful. By the end of the week, we’d worked out that some of these (especially the estimation of the difficulty of the climbs) might need to be taken with a pinch of salt!

Our fabulous support team 💗

We’d then spend around eight or nine hours on the road with lots of stops for refuelling and rehydrating. Every 10-15 miles, the entire cavalcade (police on the roads or Kenyan Wildlife Service in the parks, Land-Rover, cycle guides, outriders, 37 riders and two buses) would pull over and the child.org team (Chege, Sian, Hattie, Lucy plus many others) would produce giant bottles of water, fresh fruit and snacks from the back of the Land-Rover and set up an impromptu feed station, all accompanied by a speaker blasting some motivational tunes (and some questionable dancing).

Middle of nowhere food station 😋

Sometimes these stops would be in the middle of nowhere, and sometimes on the side of a busy road near a village. Either way, within a couple of minutes the local kids would come over to say hello, see what was going on, inspect our bikes and share some fruit with us. During these stops nurses Penny and Ashleigh would circulate through the group, making sure everyone was ok and still in good shape to continue, dispensing additional suncream and/or hugs, as required.

Lunch was generally a longer stop, and we had the opportunity to experience it in several forms: one day we were supplied with a packed lunch by the previous evening’s hotel which we ate in Lake Nakuru National Park. On another day we cycled to a beautiful golf course, were welcomed with menthol-scented cold flannels and had a sit-down meal in the club restaurant. And my personal favourite, on entering the Mara North Conservancy, we had the ubiquitous rice, dahl, chapati and steamed greens meal that we’d seen a lot so far, but this time prepared for us by a lovely team of local people and eaten all sat together on the grass under a tree for shade.

After a full lunch, it would be back on the bikes and after another briefing of dubious accuracy, we’d do another few hours of riding and break stops before getting to our final destination for the night. I’ll talk more about the places we stayed in subsequent blogs, but they were all very serviceable, and most were spectacular, so we were often welcomed with cold flannels, juices, cheers, or song and dances. Check-in was all handled by the child.org team on our behalf, so we could sometimes grab a cheeky beer while that was going on, before collecting our room keys. We’d get to the rooms and find our main luggage waiting for us, left there by the porters.

We’d then have a little time to refresh and shower off the day’s dust and sweat. Some people found a little time to jump in the pool, but there was usually only an hour or so before we’d meet up again to have a talk or a workshop on the work of child.org, which was fascinating and really helped bring home the main reason we were all out in Kenya -  our struggles with heat, long distances, bumpy tracks, saddle sores and all the rest of it, all paled in comparison to the difficulties faced by women dealing with the same issues, only when pregnant. I’ll definitely post much more fully on these topics soon – but I can say with absolute certainty that your donations and support have gone to a fantastic cause and are driving real positive outcomes in Kenya.

Pre-dinner discussion with child.org's fantastic Chege

These talks would be followed by dinner, which like breakfast was a buffet situation. The rice, dahl, chapati and greens would be a recurring option in most of the places we stayed, but we also had other options, like ugali (boiled white maize flour, coagulated into a dough and fantastic for soaking up delicious sauces!), steamed red snapper, stewed chicken or goat, slices of tender beef grilled to order, plus sweets, puddings and more fruit to follow. Dinner would be accompanied by the daily awards (e.g. numpty of the day, pretty princess!) which were nominated and presented by members of the various support teams. Plus the dreaded announcement of the following day’s start time!

After dinner we were free to use the hotel/resort facilities, and some of them had spa facilities, pool tables, sport on TV, as well as amazing options for looking at wildlife (which I’ll get to in future posts). Some people took advantage of these, others went back to their rooms to relax and read, and others opted for a couple of beers in the bar, chatting about the day’s ride, the lessons we’d learnt and the journey to follow the following day. But it wasn’t very long before all of us fell into bed, ready to get up and do the same again the next day.

Before signing off, I’d just like to give a shout out to Spencer, my fellow member of the Worker’s Beer Company management committee, phenomenal cyclist, honorary Simba, and my roommate on this trip. Spence was a fantastic buddy, supportive and generous, incredibly knowledgeable on all things bike and truly inspirational when powering up the climbs! Being able to share this incredible experience with someone like Spence made it all the better and hopefully we’ll get to do some more stuff like this in the future.