Well, it’s taken a while but I have finally managed to sift through the thousands of pictures taken and edit only the very best. You can even buy prints of them if you’d like…
This is what ended up happening. Mostly.
I’ve had many, many stupid ideas in the past. A few of them have come back to bite me, some have worked, but most never came to fruition. So it is with a certain sense of anxiety that I realised the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard of was actually going to happen. Nick and I decided to ride a couple of bicycles from Cape Town, South Africa all the way up to Kampala, Uganda. A journey nigh on 5,000 miles long. Things didn’t entirely go to plan though.
Our route wasn’t fixed and its principle wasn’t to get us to Kampala using the shortest route or in the quickest time. Its aim was to allow us time to enjoy our adventure, to meet new people and learn about different cultures.
Our preliminary route took us north from Cape Town, into Namibia and then west into Botswana. From Botswana we travelled into Zimbabwe before heading north into Zambia near Lake Kariba. Then we planned on cycling to Mozambique via Harare and then north through Malawi. That would have brought us into Tanzania where we would continue north until just before the Kenyan border when we planned to head west to meet Lake Victoria. With the journey nearly complete we would nip into Rwanda before crossing into Uganda for the final push to Kampala.
We were so, so naive.
To understand how naive and foolish we were before starting this trip, take a look at the following blogs I posted during the trip to find out what actually happened. Hint: a lot of things weren’t supposed to happen. The blogs contain accounts of complete stupidity, generosity, near arrest (a few times) and some photos. What actually happened was even more stupid than the accounts suggest – some things were left unsaid for my mother’s sanity. This includes the threat of Zimbabwean prison:
“I will come over there and arrest you. You are not in Europe now.”
– An irate Zimbabwean park ranger.
and Nick and me swimming across a river in Botswana, near the Okavango Delta, having not done a very thorough check for crocodiles.
You can view the more artistically minded photos by clicking on the Photography tab above, or you can see all of them here.
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Since my last update Nick has had an operation, I’ve climbed a mountain, fallen off my bike, relaxed on a beach and made it to Kampala. I haven’t done much cycling though.
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I think it’s safe to say we’re getting a bit bored of cycling. So we haven’t done an awful lot of it recently…
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Anybody following our progress very carefully via the tracker recently will probably have had a good old laugh. It’s been a frustrating couple of days but some fantastic people have made it good fun.