Telegraph Online Part 2
Cycle of life: part two
Barty Pleydell-Bouverie
In the second installment of their cycling diaries, Barty Pleydell-Bouverie the leader of the expedition explains how he came to plan the bike ride across Africa and why it is so important to him
Barty Pleydell-Bouverie and his team of cyclists are making their way across Africa by bike to raise money for Tusk Trust www.tusk.org. Here, Barty reflects on the trip so far.
Monday, May 5 Craig had just groaned around a corner, hauling his beached bicycle and what was left of his humour behind him like a ragdoll, when the thought that had been buzzing ever closer to my consciousness finally crystallised: am I a sadist? To be fair to Craig, he was coping with the day better than most – but then no bicycle was ever designed to plough deep furrows through Kalahari sand, so a degree of consternation was only to be expected after a day of frustration and heat. In crossing the border from Namibia to Botswana, we had taken a route I had designed to give the expedition access to truly rural Africa. The downside is that rural Africa, especially in the Kalahari, has awful roads that challenge 4x4 engineering and laugh in the face of pedal-powered single-wheel drive. As we pushed, carried, and in Craig’s case dragged, our kit that day, the furrows ploughed in the road were no match for those in the team’s brows. For the last 18 months I have been single-minded in my determination to lead the Cycle of Life team into corners of Africa where people and wildlife live in the greatest proximity – those areas where the ideals of modern life totally fail to apply. I believe that rural Africa should be a land of opportunity for its people, rather than the epitomised image of poverty that most Westerners hold it to be. What makes me uneasy is that I also wanted to make this expedition a reality in order to pursue my very personal dream to learn Africa by immersion. advertisement  This is a dream that I’ve been chasing across conservation projects and community labour teams in southern Africa ever since my brother David lost first his heart, then his life to the continent almost nine years go. Like him, I love Africa and the people who live here; I love the simplicity of perspective it harbours – how the breadth of its horizon somehow makes life’s decisions seem straightforward. No amount of physical discomfort, not even labouring in a foodless Zimbabwe, has ever been able to offset the ease that I feel when in Africa. And knowing this, I could happily take on a day, or even a week, of sweating through the Kalahari with a bicycle as an anchor and still enjoy it – but this time I had dragged six other people with me, and they had no such reason to be cheery. So am I a sadist? Have I led people into their worst nightmare in the naïve expectation that they might uncover in it the same dream that I have? The Cycle of Life project has been built on my aspirations since the beginning, and what I’m putting the rest of the team through may seem cruel – the look in Craig’s eye certainly said as much… As it happens I needn't have worried – the experiences on this trip have so far outweighed the physical and emotional pressures of bicycling through the bush. People of all creeds and colours have shown us a generosity that has surpassed even my hopes and expectations, leading our disparate group of dirty travellers to muddle through our own problems in the knowledge that there are whole populations in Africa who deal daily with problems far greater than the roads of the Kalahari, and do so with monumental humour and irrepressible fortitude. |
posted by Jessica @ 09:27
0 Comments
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home