The Tour d’Afrique

I’m pretty lucky, I’ve had the chance to go on some pretty cool adventures over the years. I’ve traveled all over the place to ski, to climb and to experience just being there. With my work for Lonely Planet I’ve had the opportunity to combine my passion for travel and for writing towards a common goal – I’ve had the opportunity to see the world and call it a job. Every now and again, an opportunity comes along that surpasses my lofty goals and aspirations – and when those chances come along, you have to grab it.

I’ll skip the melodramatic preamble and get right to the meat of the matter. Every year a race of sorts is contested in Africa. The Tour d'Afrique is a cycling expedition that begins in Cairo, Egypt and concludes on the beach in Cape Town, South Africa – some 11,000km away. You can race as an individual (if you are completely insane…) or as a team. Teams of 8 race in relay fashion, with team members taking a leg each before passing the baton onto the next team-mate. Lonely Planet has put in a corporate team into the 2009 race (which starts in early January and finishes in March) and asked staff and authors if they’d be keen to join the adventure. Needless to say I was already composing my, “please, please, please can I go?” email within a few seconds of hearing about the opportunity – you have to go for these things!

After much deliberation and a committee based decision, I have been named to the team! I’m taking the first leg of the race, starting team LP off from Cairo, Egypt and biking 2000km south before passing the baton to my team-mate in Karatoum, Sudan. We’ll start at the Pyramids; follow the Red Sea and the Nile before crossing into Sudan. In The Sudan we’ll bisect the desert like camel trains before rolling into Karatoum the capital some 20 days later.

It’s going to be an amazing trip – to say the least. The setting and the challenge of the expedition itself are going to be mind boggling. It’s going to challenge every sense of my being – it’s going to be amazing, inspirational, fun, interesting, hard, hot, bloody awful at times and an experience I’ll never forget! Stay tuned for more about the road to Africa, the training, the preparation and the trip itself – I’ll be blogging about my entire experience.

“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
– John F. Kennedy 1962

http://www.tourdafrique.com/tourdafrique/index.html

live your dreams…
SK