Sean Maher's blog

I don’t like Christmas. It’s not because my shoes are two sizes too small like the Grinch, it’s not the commercialisation of a religious festival I disagree with, it’s not even the repeats on television and the half-baked Christmas specials of shows which are average at best. I just don’t like it.

It is 600 miles to Agadir, the last major city in Morocco and the point at which I will asses the safety further south. Three Spanish nationals are currently being held hostage by terrorists in Mauritania, a new development since my last post, and things look bleak for the future of Riding out the Recession.

Paul Kimmage’s book Rough Ride has a disturbingly detailed description of a rider who decides to race a stage of the Tour de France with a stomach upset. With this image burnt into my brain I decided to spend the day in bed with a soaring temperature.

I want you to imagine a scene. I will describe it for you…actually I wont. Just imagine the set of Zorro but with a motorway running through the middle.

I was cycling along an agricultural road through acres and acres of ploughed farmland, I was feeling lied to. These were definitely plains, in Spain, and Eliza Dolittle had misinformed me about the rain. It was blistering sunshine, their was cracked, sun-baked earth in every direction. My panniers, however, kept hopping off on the stony, uneven surface of the road. I hadn’t seen a car all day.

I am in Medinaceli 160 km away from Madrid. I just cycled 80km from Soria and have cycled 410km, minimum, since last Monday. I am still a long way from Tarifa and the ferry to Morocco and I have underestimated my budget for Spain by half!

So this is it.

Tomorrow I will cycle from Cape Cornwall to my house. On Sunday from my house to Plymouth and then I will catch the ferry to Santander. In less than 3 weeks I will be in Morocco, I could be in Mauritania by Christmas. Sometime in the future I hope to roll into Cape Town on my bike.

I am not leaving for Africa tomorrow.

This trip seems to be cursed as ever since I started planning it, everything has started going wrong. I wanted to pass my driving test before I left but after controversially failing I have only been able to book one test date since August and that got cancelled and rescheduled for Monday. So now I can’t get the ferry on Sunday and therefore have to put everything back by one week.

Two weeks to go.

Two weeks to go.

I’m well aware I just wrote that twice. But it still hasn’t really sunk in that i'll soon set off on my journey from the UK to South Africa. I thought repeating it might help. It hasn’t.

Two weeks to go!

So I suppose this is a time to reflect on just how long two weeks really is.

I have two problems with MSG bikes who carried out the ergonomic fit for my new bike yesterday. The first is that upon measuring my hands I was told they were ‘medium’ sized. Medium? No man likes to have his hand size downplayed. We all know how the expression goes: big hands, big... actually I’m not sure that is a particularly well known expression at all.

The other problem I have with MSG bikes is that there is not a similar shop nearer to me as I could have spent hours in there and gladly ridden every bike they had in stock.

Road.cc wrote an article about my trip from Cornwall to Cape Town last month and I thought it was about time for an update from the horse’s mouth.

My journey will hopefully start at the beginning of November and I will be travelling through France and Spain before hitting Africa. From there I will pass through Morocco, Senegal, Ghana and Namibia to name just a few of the countries on my route.