The day it snowed

PG: Parental Guidance
If you are one of my parents, then you are advised to skip down the page to the 'And Finally' section, as this post contains some material that you my find worrying.

South Africa is in Africa right? The land of lions in the streets, elephants in your vegetable patch and red hazy African sunsets. Nowhere in my geography textbook did it say anything about snow. A cold front has been moving up from Cape Town over the last few days, and successive farmers have warned me that cold weather was approaching. I didn't take their advice too seriously, as the Karoo farmers seem to think anything less than 30 counts as a cold snap. Change was definitely in the air, however, and on my last day of riding across the plains I picked up a serious force 5 head wind which whipped up a dust storm at one point.

As a prelude to the story I'm about to tell, I just want to point out that I do have some fairly sedate days of riding, and some even more sedate rest days. It's not a life threatening adventure everyday, but this would be a pretty boring blog if just recounted each day as it happens, so without further ado, here's another epic day for you...

Yesterday's ride took me up a horse track ascending the Aasvoelberg mountain from 1400m (elevation of the farm at which i slept) to 2200m. I didn't have directions at the start of the day, but the arrangement was that once up the mountain, I would have cell phone reception and the directions would be waiting for me in my email, and there was only 1 track up the mountain. Sounded easy enough I thought. The farmer told me I needed to ascend to the top to cross over into the neighbouring land, so off I trotted. There was already a strong wind blowing as i left the farm and by 930 it started to rain, and the surface turned into a mud bath. My tires soon clogged with mud and I had to push. So sticky was the stuff, however, that after a hundred metres I couldn't push as the mud had clogged everything. I felt as though i was swimming in treacle, each cycling shoe weighing an extra kilo from the mud. I was feeling in high spirits after a run of pleasant riding days, so this didn't do much to dampen my spirits, i just declogged my tires with a stick and headed cross country, pushing across the low shrubs to avoid the mud. About 20% of the track was rideable due to the freezing rain, which was now coming down heavily, and the mud. So I pushed my way steadily up to 2180m where I got cell reception and discovered I should have crossed the ridge 200m below. And then I got a puncture. Next the cloud descended reducing the visibility to about 100m. As i sat down to change my tube it began to snow. It was so much bad luck in such a short space of time, I half expected the rock I was sitting on to morph into Jeremy Beadle, and for a helicopter to whisk us into the You've Been Framed studio, but it was not going to be that easy. It took me nearly half an hour to change my inner tube as my hands were frozen. My cycling gloves had gotten soaked in the rain, and I was down to latex surgical gloves. I'm not sure what the temperature was, but I sucked some juice through the exposed tube into my backpack and was reminded that I have sensitive teeth. The simplest operations become painstakingly difficult when you lose the use of opposeable thumbs. I had to use my leatherman with both hands to remove the rubber cable boot from my V brakes. If that sentence doesn't mean anything to you, then It's kind of like using an electric hedge trimmer to open a packet of crisps. Whilst inflating the new tube, my pump seized up with puncture sealant from the tube. The tire was only up to a poor 15psi, but there was no way I was going to dismantle the pump and clear the blockage whilst exposed on mountain face, so I continued with a half inflated tire for the rest of the day and hoped that i wouldn't get a pinch flat as that was my last spare tube. By this point it was about 1530, and I had travelled less than 10km from the farm I slept at the previous night. I still felt fairly happy about things though. I've learnt not to get too stressed about the onset of night, provided you're on a road. Once the sun sets, It's not really that bad out here in the sticks with no cars or people to compete with. But I was still some way from a road.

Whenever you hear a story about hiking in the wilderness, there's always that phrase hidden somewhere "be prepared because the conditions on the mountain can change suddenly." Well that's what happened next. The wind picked up and the snow became a heavy fall, but I was prepared equipment wise, and felt warm (except for my hands). I wasn't prepared for how difficult the navigation would become. Within half an hour the farm tracks by which I was trying to descend the mountain started disappearing beneath the snow, and the visibility afforded little chance to orientate with my surroundings. And, you guessed it, the GPS batteries started to die. Thankfully I just about had cell phone reception, and by calling David with my GPS position a couple of times I was able to orientate myself (OK, David was able to orientate me). It was in these moments when I stopped and waited for David to calculate my position that I realised how cold it was. My speech had become slow and slurred because my face was so cold, and I had ice on my beard (having a beard really helps in cold weather though). Whilst I waited for him to ring me back, I seriously considered getting out my emergency equipment and trying to find shelter to weather the storm, but I was somewhere nearby a farm, apparently, and the lure of tea and a fire was strong. I had been scared to leave the farm tracks because they were all I had to orientate by in the snow, but I finally abandoned faith in the tracks and just headed straight down the ridge, which turned out to be the right decision.

By the time i made it off the ridge the sun had set completely and the moon was obscured by snow clouds, and once again I was dependant on my head torch for navigation. There wasn't enough snow to get the snowboard out, but enough to make things difficult for me. My bike was operating at about 20% - the wheel rims were frozen, so virtually no brakes, the freehub was frozen so for every turn of the pedals I lost a quarter rotation in slippage, and the gears had frozen, although thankfully in a moderately useful gear.

It's funny but I was never overly worried about the situation. I think that had this episode occurred a couple of weeks earlier, I would have been a nervous gibbering wreck and just collapsed somewhere and cried. The biggest change has been to my health. After 3 weeks on the trail, I now feel about as fit as I've ever been. I'm consuming a huge amount of food everyday (for a change) and throughout the pushing and snow and navigation problems, I never felt as though my body or energy levels would be the weak point. The worst case scenario would be that I abandoned my disfunctional bike and hiked down the hill to the nearest farm, which I felt that I would have energy to do.

I took a wrong turn and instead of hitting the public road, I found myself in a crop field. I could see faint lights off in the distance, and decided they might be coming from a farmhouse, so I started to push my bike across the muddy field. Just then, by chance I turned back and saw the angel. The light descended slowly from high up on a ridge, and became 2 headlights as it neared. I flashed my headtorch and headed straight for the pickup. As it came level with me on the other side of the field, I started to shout, and it stopped. But then just as suddenly it moved off again and my heart sank. I started to run directly across the field, thinking that perhaps he hadn't seen me, but he was just driving to the gate at the end of the field. I was actually only 2km away (if you're a crow) from the farm house when i was picked up, but i was thankful to get into the cab and out of the wind and snow for the first time since starting up the mountain 9 hours previously. The pickup was the first real sign of anyone else I had seen all day. The farmer had heard that i was on the way down the mountain, and knew the route to the road i was supposed to follow. He had traced the route and followed my bike spoor (tracks) to see where I had gone wrong. It made me smile to think that he had used tracking skills to locate me in a muddy field in the pitch black night.

The next morning I found out that the temperature had gotten down to -6 at the farm house in the valley, where they'd had only a dusting of snow. I'm not sure what the temperature on the mountain was, particularly with the additional windchill, but It's probably a good thing I didn't try and sleep it out. I couldn't operate a camera that day, (I couldn't even unbuckle my cycle helmet, I had to ask the farmer to do it for me), so I don't have any photos of the snow as it came down, suffice to say it was a whiteout. I watched the weather forecast the next morning and the farmer's wife pointed out our location on the weather map of South Africa, right underneath the 'N' of 'HEAVY SNOW'. This is the view of the mountain that i crossed, taken the next morning:

I left my bike in the farmer's pickup that night, which was stored in his barn, but the next morning it was still clogged with snow and ice. We used hot water to declog everything, but as I rode off from the farm house 10 minutes later, the hot water had already frozen all of my cables, so for the rest of the morning i had no gear changing ability unless i stopped and strategically kicked various components.

That day was 2 days ago now but i still haven't gotten the feeling back in my fingers. Thankfully they're not black though, so I guess they'll fix themselves eventually. I'm using this rest day to organise some better gloves, and to weather proof my bike.

And Finally

(Hi mum!)
As always, thanks to everyone that has emailed, texted and commented their support, It's always a treat to get into cell reception. I'm resting today so I'll try and catch up with a few emails.

I've been asked to provide an indication as to my current position along the trail. I must admit that the reason I haven't done this before now is that on a day to day basis I don't really have a clue, I just wake up, ride, sleep, repeat! Today I am resting and it is day 26 of 38 planned days to complete the trail. I'm not certain how many kilometres I have covered as my cycle computer packed up a week ago, but looking back over the directions, I should have covered about 1630kms, leaving about 700kms to go. I'm due to finish the trail on 5th June.

Hello to my "London to Malawi Overland" Facebook followers! I'm not really sure what face book is but I can only assume from the name that It's some kind of giant internet sized book of faces. Assuming I'm correct, here is a recent mug shot of yours truly for the album.

If you haven't gotten around to sponsoring me yet then you've obviously got time to do it now since you've made it to the end of another long blog post. I notice that I have 81 Facebook followers, but less than half that many donations... No pressure.

Cheers,

Alex