Packing my gear for TDA—a miracle of organization and compartmentalization
As a novice to camping, cycling, and gadgets of all kind, organizing all my gear has definitely been the biggest hurdle for me. I cannot yet conceptualize that actually cycling through Africa might be any more cumbersome than that. After weeks and weeks of visiting cycling and outdoors stores, researching online, and box after...
Packing my Koga bike for the flight in 25 simple steps
Managed to pack my bike on my own—wahoo! Can’t wait to unpack this in Cairo and find out whether I did well enough to keep things safe, or screwed up big time. Fingers crossed for now!
My almost perfect bike that won’t make me a racer
New to cycling and touring, organizing a suitable bike turned out to be quite a challenge for me. Scared of all things that could go wrong, I set out to find a bike that would meet each and every of our tour operator’s recommendations. Here’s the result, the details of which I’ll explain further below. First,...
3 ways to have a social impact, or why I’m not fundraising directly
At the outset, I had very ambitious fundraising ideas for cycling Africa. I didn’t want my adventure to be just about me and my personal achievement, but to use it for a bigger purpose. Now you may wonder what happened to those ideas, or perhaps even how you could contribute to such bigger purpose. Before I explain...
The idea behind “one lesson a day”
Throughout my cycling tour from Cairo to Cape Town, I’m planning to write one (very) short story each day about something I’ve learnt. The idea is very simple—share my experience with you in a more interesting way, leverage the power of writing to accelerate growth, and keep it in a format that hopefully I will find manageable. So...
How to save TDA’s cycling route for offline map viewing
Hello fellow riders! While setting up my interactive map for this blog, I’ve learnt that it’s very easy to save the TDA cycling route onto our smartphones for offline viewing. I thought you might also want to do so. The same, by the way, applies to all cycling or other routes created in Google My Maps. If you haven’t done...
Acclimatizing in Dubai
Admittedly, the temperature in Dubai in winter is rather pleasant. Neither did I cycle hard enough that it might qualify as proper training. However, cycling in Dubai helped me test my gear and get used to my new gadgets. For example, I learnt that tablets aren’t powerful enough for video editing. So, to my wallet’s...
Interactive map
On this map, I’ve overlayed our planned Tour d’Afrique route (red) with my actual cycling data from Garmin/Strava (green), as well as photos and other interesting information. While cycling, readers were able to track our progress and follow my experience live.
