This Thursday (21 April) Look Mum No Hands hosts the launch party for the 5th edition of Mission Malawi so if you're up for a challenge pop along for a free Malawian gin & tonic, a bite to eat, and to find out more about a charity cycle ride with a difference.
If you take the Mission Malawi challenge you will be riding over 400Km of African dirt roads through spectacular scenery and raising money for HIV and AIDS work in Malawi. One of the things that sets this charity challeng apart is that participants also get to meet the people affected by HIV and Aids that they are helping.
Mission Malawi was set up by Les Pratt from back in 2004. Les didn’t want to ride the likes of the well-trodden, but slightly boring route of London to Paris, and wanted to raise money for HIV&AIDs work. But nothing fitting that description was on offer back in 2004. So Les set up a cycle challenge across Malawi himself, the first ride attracted 9 riders, the second 36 and Mission Malawi has never looked back since.
Mission Malawi 2012 takes place between the 12 - 23 May to find out more visit the Action Aid website www.actionaid and check out the film below of the 2006 edition of the ride.
Plucked from the obscurity of his London commute back in the mid-Nineties to live in Bath and edit bike mags our man made the jump to the interweb back in 2006 as launch editor of a large cycling website somewhat confusingly named after a piece of navigational equipment. He came up with the idea for road.cc mainly to avoid being told what to do… Oh dear, issues there then. Tony tries to ride his bike every day and if he doesn't he gets grumpy, he likes carbon, but owns steel, and wants titanium. When not on his bike or eating cake Tony spends his time looking for new ways to annoy the road.cc team. He's remarkably good at it.