Mozambique

Hang on a minute! What happened there? Last time I wrote I was a couple of days from completing the Freedom Trail, the solo offroad ride across South Africa. I am pleased to say that I have now completed this. However the blog has fallen behind, and I am now in Mozambique, having already ridden through the rest of South Africa and Swaziland. I had a series of long tough days cycling through the rest of South Africa and then lost cell reception abruptly, so I haven't been able to update the blog for a while. Let me bring you up to date...

The end(s) of the Freedom Trail

I rode into Pietermaritzburg on Sunday, the end of the Freedom Trail, on my own and to a tangible lack of fanfare. The kitchen in the guesthouse where I was booked in was closed for the weekend, so I walked 2km to the mall and celebrated bachelor style with a pint of Guiness and a takeaway pizza eaten in a fastfood restaurant doorway. Forgive me, I'm painting a somewhat drab picture of the end of the trail, which doesn't really do the experience justice at all.

There were actually 2 earlier points during the day when I considered that the trail had ended. The first came at about 9am that day. I spent the night on a private nature reserve at the top of a 1750m peak, although when I arrived the previous evening the peak was above the cloud level, so I had no idea about the spectacular view that awaited me in the morning. Setting off after a relaxed breakfast, I ascended the final 50m to the peak, and looking out for the first time to the East, saw the Indian Ocean. The ocean must have been about 100km away, but it was a fantastically clear morning, and there it was, the Eastern coast of South Africa. I would spend much of the day riding tar roads into Pietermaritzburg, and the sense of being on the trail faded away. The city hit me suddenly when I encountered the first traffic light I had seen in 5 weeks, and somewhat symbolically it was red. Being forced to stop in my tracks by some unseen computer somewhere marked the second point at which I felt that the trail really had come to an end.

The Freedom Trail in Numbers

I know that I will look back at my time on the freedom trail fondly for years to come, it has generated a lot memories that will stick, and I've met some wonderful people. It's difficult to sum up the experience in a few words, although if you've been following the blog you will have a reasonable idea already, so I've decided instead to sum it up in numbers.

• INFINITE number of expletives muttered under my breath (OK, sometimes shouted), usually whilst climbing hills or realising that I have another puncture.


• 3001m maximum elevation reached, although not actually part of the trail


• 2432kms of Mountain Biking


• 100kms of tar road in total


• 50 punctures fixed


• 15 kgs of luggage carried on my back


• 10 hours of servicing required on my bike on completion


• 5 inner tubes written off


• 4 languages in which I learnt to greet passers by


• 3 times I was set to give up as soon as I regained cell reception.


• 3 offers of marriage (all pre-beard)


• 2 Tyres ripped COMPLETELY to shreds


• 2kms of trail skipped when i got a lift (The Day it Snowed). And no, you can't have your sponsorship money back.


• 0 times I felt unsafe

Open letter to Freedom Challenge Competitors

If you're one of the people that's been following the blog because you are competing in either the Freedom Challenge, or the whole Extreme Triathlon this year, then firstly, good luck. The best advice I can give regarding the Freedom Trail, is that I found it to be far more a mental challenge than a physical one. With that in mind, the following things helped me complete the trail:

• Remember to look behind you - often the tough climbs absorb your attention, but the motivation you need is waiting in the valley behind.


• Take the time to stop and repair your bike during the day. I found that jumping gears or a rattling chain could sap my motivation slowly, but took only minutes to fix.


• You will experience a variety of qualities of food. Carry toilet paper. Lots of toilet paper.


• Talk to your hosts. I often found that the tensions of a bad day would melt away with an indepth conversation about cattle farming or South African crime (topic of national preoccupation). Obviously this will be difficult if you crawl into the farm at 1am and want to leave at 6.


• Stay positive. Losing your temper doesn't get you any less lost. And unless you've done the trail before, or are riding with someone else that has, you will definitely get lost. Many times.


• Your backside will take a pounding the likes of which mere words cannot prepare you for. You have been warned.

What happened next?

The end of the trail also marks the beginning of the final phase of my journey, to cycle (rather than mountain bike offroad) and camp my way to Malawi. I had a day of rest in Pietermaritzburg, which turned into a frantic race to collect my camping equipment from the post office, pick up bits of missing kit and food, and get my bike serviced. The latter turned into something of a marathon task - I dropped my bike in to the workshop at 930 and pitched up at 1630 to collect it, but it took until 1900 to finish the work. The kind guys at Hattons Cycles stayed behind to finish the job, long after the door closed, so that I could leave in the morning. Thanks guys!

With the addition of about 20kgs of camping equipment, panniers and food, my bike felt noticeably heavier despite the transition to tar roads, and the fact that mechanically, the bike has probably never been in better condition. I have been on the road for 11 days now, stopping in Greytown, Tegula Ferry (highest mortality rate from TB in South Africa apparently), Dundee, Vryheid, Pongola, Big Bend [Swaziland], Mbluzi, Marracuenne [Mozambique], Macia and xai-xai. I've heard that there have been some route suggestions on the Freedom Trail website, but unfortunately I can't view it on my phone (David: pocket PC friendly version please ;), if you've got any suggestions, then either email me (alex.butcher at gmail.com) or post a comment on the blog. So far It's going well, although I've discovered that light weight camping equipment is about as useful as a T shirt once the night time temperatures fall below about 10, which happened every night until Swaziland. My emergency blanket was promoted to regular sleeping bag wrapper, and I slept in all my clothes. Things could be worse though, on the whole I'm enjoying the freedom of picking my own route, and the challenge of increasing the daily target distance. I have a couple of 180km days coming up. My legs are getting used to the additional weight now, and with the excellent flat tar roads in Mozambique I don't see it being too much of a problem.

Swaziland

The lonely planet sums up perfectly the effect of crossing into Swaziland:

"Free of the baggage of crime and racial animosity (past or present) endured by South Africa, you can feel the undercurrents of tension fade away almost as you cross the border"



I very much enjoyed my 4 day stay in Swaziland. The highlight was riding through the Hlane Royal National Park. I'm a big fan of locally sourced food, and I hate food going to waste, so when I saw some sugar cane fall off the back of a lorry (honest guv. No, really) I was pleased as punch. Peeling it with my leatherman and taking a big bite, I glanced across the road and saw a big baboon that had had the same idea. Only, being 100 million years behind me on the evolutionary timeline, it was using a swiss army knife. I looked across to my left and finally saw a herd of buffalo, the animals that I had come so close to in South Africa but failed to spot. Well they saw it never rains but it pours, there must have been 30 around the dam about 200 metres from me.



Food logistics Swaziland style. I'd like to think that this shack hides an escalator to a 1000sq ft basement office area where hundreds of clerks man switch boards and direct millions of tons of food around southern africa. It actually shelters a guy selling cashew nuts.

Mozambique (so far)

I had visions of reaching the capital, Maputo, being another milestone on the journey. Emerging from the interior of southern Africa, I would race across the flat land of Mozambique on the same day i crossed the border, throw down my bike on the white sand and plunge head first into 25 degree tropical waters, so marking the completion of travelling from the west coast of Africa to the east. The reality has been somewhat different. I entered Maputo using the hard shoulder of the Estrada Nacional 4 toll road, which is pretty similar to the M25. I had no intention of navigating this capital on my bike in fading daylight, so I headed north up the coast aiming for the first resort hoping to camp on a beach. After 140kms, including a border crossing, my legs had had enough, and I settled for the first campsite I saw, notably not on the coast. I got food poisoning as my 'Welcome to Mozambique' present. Being ill away from home is bad enough, but vomiting all night when camping is even worse. Enough said about that I think.

Paul E gave me an excellent portuguese phrase book before I left, which has come in handy many times already. It is, however geared to a stay in Portugal rather than one of it's 3rd world colonies. I have found a couple of missing entries:

• Senhor, please deal with this stray cat before I throw it at the wall


• Is this agricultural stream water really safe to drink?


• Sorry about all the vomit around the campsite

And Finally

Well that's enough for this week. Sorry this blog has been a long time coming, but I had no internet access for a while. Thanks to my brother for somehow getting me connected to vodacom mozambique from tech-central in Balham, London. There have been a couple of late comers to the sponsorship page this week, i see, and we are tantalisingly close to the target of 3k, so if you were holding off because you didn't think I'd make it and you know that just giving won't give your money back, then you no longer have anything to worry about, I have done it. Everything else now is just a bonus.

Bye for now

Back to Mountain Biking

Just in case you thought I had turned into some kind of rad snow bum, I am actually still mountain biking out here. After my not so restful rest day, I entered the final week of the trail via South Africa's highest road pass, Naude's nek.

The foot of the pass

The 600m climb was on a fairly good surface road, which deteriorated on the other side. Nearing the top I was overtaken by the only vehicle I saw on the pass - a police truck. Five minutes later I overtook the same police vehicle on the way down using the verge of the 1 lane pass.

The er, head of the pass. Still pretty cold at 2500m

Leaving Rhodes with it's skiing resort and helicopters, and descending into Vuvu was like taking a trip back in time. As I travelled over the grass plateau I passed several horse mounted shepherds and cowherds (?) watching over their animals which grazed on communally owned land. They ranged in age from about 11 upwards. Descending from the plateau on heavily worn cattle tracks that had created smooth funnels in the red earth, I emerged in a completely different world from the relative modernity of Rhodes. The village at the foot of the hill was without electicity, there were no vehicles and no generators. The first thing that struck me was the mix of sounds that came from the 60 or so mud huts and rondavels. From my vantage point on the hill 100m away it felt as though I could hear everything that was going on in the village. The well spaced plots had no dividing fences or bushes to muffle the noises of village life, and the air was filled the sounds with cowbells, kids playing and women singing.



I spent the next 3 days riding through this area, Matatiele, and for 2 of those days I was accompanied by a local guide. I wasn't 100% sure why I needed a guide for this section of the trail, but the reason soon became clear. There are only a handful of marked vehicle tracks on the map, and the freedom trail takes many of the unmarked informal paths and cattle tracks that snake through the middle of villages and fields. I don't think I saw any road signs for 3 days. Thankfully my guide, Tsepu, grew up in this area and works as a hiking trail guide in the surrounding Drakensberg escarpment, and seemed to know his way around the rabbit warren of cattle paths and vehicle tracks.

Three of next four days I would stay at accommodation without electricity, the first night in Vuvu being the most basic. Tsepu and I shared half of a hut, a rough partition dividing our space from that of a teacher from the local school. My candle lit dinner for one consisted of steamed bread and chicken. It was simple yet tasty, which was fortunate, for I would eat the same meal for breakfast and lunch too.



The Vuvu junior secondary school was certainly the most impressive building in the village, being built from fired bricks, and having solar electricity for lighting. Link Community Development works with this school, and in the morning I had a look around. The facilities available in the School are quite basic, but the backdrop of the playground was pretty spectacular. Looking around the administration block, I was struck by the fact that they have 2 teachers assigned to their HIV/Aids work for a school of 400 primary aged children. I guess I just naively hoped these smiling kids would somehow be isolated from the horrendous infection rates in this part of rural South Africa.

Ntskeni

After Matatiele, I spent 2 days riding in the Ntskeni nature reserve. The area is characterised by marsh and grassland, but took on a strange post apocolyptic look in the wake of a recent unchecked bush fire that has left much of the area a blackened wasteland. In the morning I climbed up to the ridge line below the 2150m peak of Ntskeni itself and the view was simply breathtaking. I've come to expect not to see signs of human activity in the nature reserves, but the combination of the steep mountainous landscape and morning mist was stunning.





I got pretty lost trying to pick my way down the steep ridge, and strayed into a forestry area. Attempting to find a road to the foot of the mountain, I crossed a fallen tree that had been dragged across the track, and startled two men and four dogs sitting just across the path from me. I said hello and reached for my map to try and orientate myself, but no sooner had I opened my mouth they jumped up and ran away as if they had seen a ghost. I don't think it was the beard, but I can't be sure. The lodge manager of the previous night had told me about farmers from the nearby village of kwahoha cutting the fences of the reserve to illegally graze their cattle on the fertile nature reserve grassland. I suspect I must have disturbed some of these farmers.

And Finally

Well there were some sensible suggestions as to what is wrong with this house, but nobody got what I was aiming for. Usually if windows of an old house are bricked up then you see new bricks plugging the holes in old bricks, but this building is built with modern kiln fired bricks, but the windows are plugged with local stone and concrete. Weird no? I'm sorry if you were hoping for something funny...

There hasn't been much change in my finger tip situation, in that i still have pins and needles in the tips when I touch anything. If i don't regain feeling in my fingers soon I am going to sue The Freedom Challenge. David the trail organiser told me to be prepared for temperatures ranging from +35 to -5, but when I arrived at the farm on 'The Day It Snowed' the thermometer clearly showed -6, a low for which I was completely unprepared.

Apologies are due to many of you - thank you so much for all the emails I have received over the last couple of weeks, but with the lack of power and cell reception I have fallen behind in answering them, but I hope to catch up over the next week.

With only a couple of days left of the Freedom Trail to ride, my thoughts have already begun to turn towards the next and final phase of this journey, the haul to Malawi. I will try and think of something meaningful to say before then, to sum up the last 5 weeks.

Until then, reader.

Conditional Sponsorship

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Earnshaw
Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 08:42:00 +0100
Subject: Sponsorship - Conditional £100
To: Alex Butcher

Hi Alex,
Been watching you blog avidly. Well done mate. Best news is that
you've recovered.
On the sponsorship note. I am willing to stump up £100 on the
condition that you publish a picture in your blog with you pulling a
face like a pig and giving the camera the finger.
Otherwise it will only be £50.

Cheers
Andy Earnshaw

In response

Andy, I think You'll agree I have mastered my pig impression since my UBS days.