While the day-to-day structure of life is routine and simple, the experiences here are exciting and emotional. That is really what I am here for, to collect memories of awe, triumph, frustration, joy, and even terror.

I had wondered how long into the tour it would be before I experienced my first ‘meltdown’. As it turns out, it was three weeks. The day before we cycled through Dinder National Park in Sudan I had the most terrifying experience of my life. Whether the danger was real or perceived doesn’t matter much – the next morning I was still shaking. It happened like this:

After taking a wrong turn early in the day, I was several hours behind schedule, the last rider on the road with not enough time to make it to camp before dark. I was not really concerned, since the tour directors knew where I was and were planning to come fetch me in a truck before night. But as I was riding along and the sun was dropping lower and lower in the sky, no truck seemed to be coming. The sand and gravel road was meandering through small villages and would split into separate directions which would later rejoin. I thought perhaps the truck might have passed me in one of these splits? Or maybe I had wandered off the route again. As the last bit of sun disappeared behind the horizon, I got off my bicycle and considered the options. I could sit down on the side of the road and wait, but didn’t really like the idea of being a foreign female out by myself after dark in rural Sudan. I could try to hitch a ride to camp, but in the dark it could be near impossible to find and I was growing less sure by the minute that I was indeed still heading the right way. Then a bus came. It was brimming with people in every available spot, even packed onto the roof and they all wanted me to get on. Camp was supposed to be near the town of Azaza and after a lot of pointing, repeating the word ‘Azaza’ and other language-free communication, I decided that I was safest surrounded by people on the bus. They hauled my bike onto the roof and gave me the seat beside the driver.

That bus was my cocoon. I felt safe on the bus, but feared the inevitability of getting off of the bus. Around every half-mile, the bus would go through another village where people would get off and in each of these villages, the bus driver tried to convince me to get off as well. He seemed to be saying that Azaza was far, or maybe that the bus was not going to Azaza. Moreover, at every stop there were several young Sudanese gentlemen offering to host me for the night. It was now pitch black out and although I was watching diligently for the truck that had promised to come get me, it was nowhere to be seen. Why had it not come? Either it had missed me in a village, or I was terribly off-route. After a while we reached a village where there was a man who spoke some English. He told me that the bus would not be going to Azaza that night, but maybe I could pay the bus driver to take me there. Hopefully in Azaza there would be a person who knew where the group of 60 cyclists were camping.

I never went to Azaza, though, because in that village were a couple police officers who must have heard the news about the lost female cyclist riding the bus. They did not speak any English, but they seemed to want me to get off of the bus and go with them. In Ottawa, I would trust a police officer with my life. In rural Sudan I was more scared to go with them than to be on the bus. But they moved with purpose and that gave me confidence. After loading me and my bike in their truck, we set off in the direction I had been going. A few km down the road we intercepted the TDA truck. An hour and a half after sunset, only 3km from camp I let out a huge whimper of relief.

That night in my tent was where I had the meltdown. I never expected it to be the result of stress and fear. I was expecting it to be a result of exhaustion, home-sickness, or culture shock. That night I had been so terrified that when I woke the following morning I was still shaking from the after-shock.

You might be reading this, thinking that it must have been such a terrible experience. Perhaps I’m angy, or upset. Really, this is a memory of the trip that I will cherish and recount forever. This is what it’s all about. Experience.

1. I really should have invested in a better tent.. my parent’s 30 year old tent is a classic and has so much style, but modern tents have had many improvements.  Most prominently is the lack of cords with pegs – modern campers are not accustomed to these and have a habit of tripping over them in the middle of the night.  This results in my rude awakening as the tent crumples on top of me.  Then again, I will never accidentally wander into another riders tent, and I would not trade mine for the world.

2. Habituation does not apply to the 5am call to prayer.  All mosques here have lound speakers on their roofs so that the entire surrounding area hears the pre-sunrise prayers (which come as singing).  Moreover, no matter where you are in the desert, you are always within 100m of a mosque.  The call to prayer comes about half an hour before we typically wake up and it is often beautiful and in tune.  This is not always the case – last night my tent was within 10m of the closest mosque and blasting!   In most of the villages we camp, there are four or five mosques… some of these coordinate with one another, so we get a series of four or five calls.  In other villages they are in direct competition and we get a cacophonyof rythm and sound.

3. Sudanese pita bread is far superior to Egyption pita.  It is like comparing a light rye bread to a french bagette – the Egyption pita is healthy whole grain, but the Sudanese pita is white, fluffy and melts in your mouth..  mmmmmmmm.

4. No matter what way you look at it, being told you can’t play because you’re a girl hurts.  I still need to digest this one a little bit, maybe i’ll talk more on a later blog.

It is day 4 of the tour and we have set up camp on the beautiful beach at a resort hotel in the town of Sadaga on the Red Sea.  We have almost sixty riders in our group, all with the same enthusiasm and excitement for the following four months of cycling and each with our own personal strengths and limitations.  The last four days have been  full of adaptation as we get used to our new lifestyle and situation.  Each day begins at 5:45 with a musical wake-up call.  By 6:15 we’ve got our gear packed, tents stowed.  Then breakfast and on the road by 7:00.

The biggest challenge of the first few days is our adapting bodies.  It seems like almost everybody has some sort of injury – mostly saddle sores (blisters on the bum from too much biking), knee pain, neck and shoulder pain.  It seems like half of the conversations around camp have been about health/body/injury issues.  Who knew that bowel movements were an appropriate topic of discussion at breakfast time!  For me, it’s been knee pain.  This certainly isn’t a surprise, I knew before I began that this was going to be the single greatest adversary of mine for the journey to Cape Town.  Everything was going well until Day 2.  The day that we will all be talking about until a day that is worse comes along.  It was going to be tough on it’s own merits at 168km through the gravel desert by the red sea. With 60km to go the group I was riding with was in high spirits, expecting to arrive at camp with enough time to set up our tents in daylight!  But fortunes change so quickly in the desert and headwinds kicked in.  It was a ferocious headwind!  After four hours of hammering into the wind, we got through those 60km to arrive at camp just at sunset.  We are absolutely not permitted to ride after dark, so about a third of the riders did not make it to camp that day and had to be picked up by the trucks or hitch-hike in.

In retrospect, it may not have been wise to push my body so hard on just the second day of the tour – but that feeling, to see the tents of camp off in the distance after over 10 hours of biking, knowing that if I had been fifteen minutes further back the road I would not have been permitted to finish.  A feeling like that made it worth it.  My knees disagreed and now two days later I made the responsible choice and hitched a ride in the truck to give them a day for the inflammation to subside a little bit.  Tomorrow we ride 140km away from the red sea inland towards Luxor and the valley of the kings and queens.  The day starts with 40km of uphill and my spirits are high.  I have confidence that my knees will be pain free!

While I expect that this trip will give me so much, I wish to give back with something I strongly believe in: bicycles.  The most accessible, sustainable and efficient form of transportation in the world.  The tour d’afrique foundation (www.tourdafrique.com/foundation) has been providing bicycles to healthcare workers in Africa for a decade.

1 cent/km = 100 $ US = 1 bicycle in the hands of  somebody in the African community.

I will be tracking my progress (both across Africa and towards my $2000 fundraising goal on this website.  If you would like to help out with a donation, let me know

Special thanks to Greg Christie (www.gregchristie.com), for finding me the perfect ride for this trip and all the other bits of equipment.