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Help Martin out!




I’m not sure if you heard about Martin Heng. Martin was a Lonely Planet rider on the 2009 TDA and accompanied you all from Nairobi to Lilongwe. I’m confident you all remember him as Martin is enthusiastic, strong, kind, smart, passionate, and was so much fun to ride through Africa with. Sadly, about a year ago, Martin was hit by a car riding his bicycle to work. His spinal cord was damaged and he is now a quadriplegic.

In some ways, Martin was lucky in that the lesion to his spinal cord was incomplete so he does have some movement below the level of his injury. All his muscle groups are working, although imperfectly, and over the last eight months he has learned to walk again, albeit with the aid of a walking frame and only over short distances. He has been attending the Royal Talbot Rehabilitation Centre in Melbourne but as it’s a government facility, there is only so much they can do and patients only receive an hour of phsyio and an hour of occupational therapy per day.

There is a new program starting in Melbourne in January 2012 called WALK ON which has intensive exercise therapy. The first two years post -injury is when the best chance of recovery is gained, so Martin’s time is critical. Of course, such private therapy doesn't come cheap and there is also the additional cost of his care.

Lonely Planet staffers are riding 60km or 145km on March 24th to raise money for Martin’s treatment. There are organized rides already planned in Melbourne, London and San Francisco. If you’d like to join one of these rides, please contact Rana.Freedman@Lonelyplanet.com and she can put you in touch with a ride leader.

Or if you’d like to ride on March 24th on your own and raise money from your own community to help Martin, you are most welcome! This is a very loosely organized ride and we’d love to have folks riding from all over the world.

And of course, the other option is donating directly to sponsor the riders, with your monies going to Martin and his family for this program.

Here is the website about Martin and his situation, including information on how to donate: https://sites.google.com/site/mhstepofhope/home  

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact

 Rana.Freedman@Lonelyplanet.com.

Posted March 22, 2012 by Tour d'Afrique Ltd.
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Carrots are 7000 Manat per Kilo


Budgeting for and keeping the books on our tours is certainly not your regular bean counting job. It’s way more interesting and challenging! Cycling around the world we transact in a myriad of local currencies, more than 40 all told, from Ethiopian Birr to Tajikistan Somoni to Zambian Kwacha, as we strive to keep our customers fed, our support vehicles running, and our tours on schedule. 

           
Tour d’Afrique Currencies

All of these transactions have to be converted into a hard currency, usually US$ or Euros, in reports to the home office where they are analyzed versus the tour budget by Brian, our accountant and numbers guy. He in turn enters them into QuickBooks which converts them again into Canadian $, our home currency, at each month’s official exchange rates. Ultimately the aims are to keep Revenue Canada happy and our organization in the red while we deliver, design and market cost efficient adventures of a lifetime.
 

Silk Route Currencies plus out of circulation Afghani Iranian and Iraqi notes

Fluctuations in rates of exchange, devaluations of currencies in unstable corners of the world, and unforeseen price increases in others add to the challenge. Some so-called developing world countries remain relatively cheap, while others are surprisingly expensive.


  Inflation a la Robert Mugabe - The world’s highest denomination note was worth about US$3 before it was removed from circulation a few years ago.

Our cooks probably have the most fun as they haggle in outdoor markets and with roadside vendors, shop for bulk purchases in the cities, and calculate in their heads and notebooks if the prices they are being offered constitute a bargain, a fair price or a conniving attempt to gouge us. Exchanging currency on the black market is a particularly risky proposition, especially when dealing with a currency that has a lot of zeros. 

Here’s an amusing anecdote from our Tour leader and former Chef, Miles MacDonald:

“I’ve had the chance to cook on most of our Tours and hence handle a wide variety of local currencies along the way. Way back in 2006 I was scouting the Azerbaijani section of our Silk Route Tour. When I entered the country I was confounded to find not 1 but 2 local currencies, each “floating” currencies and each with different denominations and values.  It was a recipe for confusion anytime I tried to make a purchase along the way. 

My first time entering Turkmenistan in 2007 was also mind boggling.  I gave $1000USD to our local support company for them to exchange into local Turkmeni Manat.  10 x $100USD bills can easily fit in your pocket.  When the local support came back they gave me a large canvas grocery bag full of giant stacks of Manat!  At the time there were 2 exchange rates, the “official” rate of about 14000 to the USD, and the black market rate which was about 22000 to the USD.  The largest bill available was 10,000 Manat = about 50 cents.  So I had something like 2000 bills with me.

      
  Miles and Manat

"Luckily in a country like Turkmenistan, especially as a foreigner with a local tourism agent following you around, worrying about theft is not paramount. On the other hand there are unsavory bribes to pay, and endless costly bureaucracy to deal with. Anyways, shopping at the market required lugging around this massive grocery bag full of money and taking out giant wads of cash every time I went to buy some watermelon or the incredibly delicious smoked sturgeon.  Even odder is that, surrounded by locals, I was the only one who found the situation funny.”

In short, just like riding on our tours, there is rarely a dull moment when it comes to forecasting, handling, and managing our financial resources.

Posted February 27, 2012 by Brian Hoeniger
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Randy in Patagonia




Well the first week of cycling is complete.  It was great exploration of the Lake district in northern Patagonia.  But I must admit that I have been a little spoiled in the past few years of vehicle supported cycle tours working with Tour d’Afrique!  Pushing all that gear up hills is tougher than I remember - or perhaps I am just older and outta shape.



Getting to Barilcohe was a convoluted series of planes and taxis and no one seems to cater to travel with a bike in a box anymore. You try to reduce fuel consumption and people just charge you more money for it. But we made it, even though US homeland security ripped open both bike boxes and did a horrible job of resealing them.  We´re just lucky none of the loose parts fell out.

 

We spent one night in Buenos Aires in transit. I can’t wait to spend more time there on our way home as it is truly an amazing city.  In Bariloche we took a couple days to assemble the bikes, unpack, repack gather supplies and do a little shakedown trip along Lagos Nahuel Huapi.  Our tour started with a series of short rides on really bad roads, but it was broken up with some incredible ferry crossings - snow capped volcanoes looming overhead. There was one section of road where the surface was so soft it was nearly impossible to climb. I was so excited to get to the top of the 4km climb and begin the 8km descent that I let go of the brakes only to blow a my first flat 1km into it.  My turn to buy the beer.
   
 

We have now entered Chile and are bunked out in the town of Puerto Varas. From here we are getting off the saddle and grabbing a paddle. This is where we begin a one week sea kayaking trip through Pumalim Park, paddle across hot springs, around erupting volcanoes and through sea lion colonies. Which all sounds great except for the weather forecast which is calling for rain from tomorrow until next Wednesday. Soggy!


Posted January 27, 2012 by Randy Pielsticker
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Canada sucks




TDA 2010 rider Tim Thomas weighs in on Canada and the climate crisis...


"Canada was clearly the bad guy during COP17. Why, because they decided early in the conference to leak their impending withdrawal from the Kyoto protocol. This news overshadowed the stale reality that the worlds' biggest emitters have never been part of Kyoto.

So where did that leave us? The conference was a success because everyone agreed to agree to continue negotiations. Oey vey!

Canada's bailout seems to highlight a deeper more important factor that is being overlooked. Canada doesnt really suck because Governments and Corporations will never compromise their clients' needs. We are their clients. So as long as we continue to demand a certain level of economic growth, coupled with the comfort of not having to endure change, our governments and the corporations of the world will never come to an agreement on how to adjust their policy and procedures for the good of the environment.

" We must remember that the real threat to democracy is not radicalism but stagnation, inertia and habit" - Wilmot James. We seem to spend our lives resisting and protecting ourselves from radicals, but fail to see that radicals prey on our fear of change. We also forget that we have comfortable and opportunistic lives because of our forefathers' willingness to change. I think the latter is true of anyone in the world who has the freedom to be able to read this.

Earlier this year I popped in an out of the Occupy Wall Street demonstration. I was proud to stand up to everything that was wrong with capitalism, until I looked down and saw a Venti Latte in my one hand and an IPhone in the other...what I hypocrite I am, I thought, as I slunk out of the demonstration.

I invite those of us who point our fingers at governments and corporations for their lack of environmental responsibility to first closely examine our own habits. The real threat to human economic growth is not those radical tree huggers, and the real threat to our environment is not actions of capitalist pigs...the real threat to both growth and our environment is our unwillingness as individuals to change.

Rather then take the approach of "Why should I change if my neighbor won't change"...rather Be the change and perhaps your neighbor will change."


Posted December 27, 2011 by Tour d'Afrique Ltd.
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Top Gadgets For Bike Touring



A guest post by our friends at Travelling Two: A resource for touring cyclists, they share with us some information on useful gadgets to take on the road. Just like many of their articles, the information is useful to those travelling on their own and for those participating in organized tours.

When the first round-the-world bike tourist, Thomas Stevens, began his epic trip in 1884, he was woefully short of gadgets. Stevens, as it turned out, was short of most things that bike tourists consider essential today.

It wasn't just that the ‘must-have' modern electronics such as laptop computers and a cellphone didn't exist in in the 19th century. Stevens didn't even have a tent. Instead, he carried socks, a spare shirt and a rain jacket in his handlebar bag. The jacket doubled as his tent.

Life has moved on, of course, and few of us will go on a bike tour without at least a couple gadgets in our panniers. We always try to keep Thomas Stevens in mind when we're choosing which new, shiny thing to take on a bike tour (Will we really use it? Could we do without it?) because every item has a financial cost and takes up room in our bags, but there are a few that we'd struggle to travel without.



#1. The Kindle – This is by far our favourite gadget of the moment. It's featherlight (just 240g), the cost is reasonable (under $200 U.S.), and it gives you access to thousands of books. For keen readers, the Kindle is a far better alternative than traveling with a pannier full of heavy books, not to mention the difficulty of trying to find English books in many parts of the world. The Kindle is also a great way to store and carry PDFs of repair manuals for things like your water filter and campstove. If all that wasn't enough, the batteries last up to a month so recharging it shouldn't be a problem. Read our full review of the Kindle.

#2. A Cell Phone – It doesn't need to be fancy a cellphone comes in pretty handy now that pay phones are almost nonexistent. At the cheap end of the scale, shops in much of the world sell basic, unlocked phones. This means you don’t have to use a specific mobile network provider. Just buy a SIM card and pay-as-you-go credit for a few dollars in each country, so you can make calls and send text messages. And if you don't want to buy a new SIM card every time you cross a border, you can always look at a global sim from a company such as GoSim.

You can also get unlocked smartphones, which allow you to check email, take videos, update a website and more, as long as you can snag a free wireless internet connection or you have a data plan. For more on accessing internet from the road, check out this helpful page from Tara & Tyler, who spent 2 years cycling the world.



#3. SON Dynamo – Once you're carrying a phone, camera, GPS and other gadgets on a bike tour, electricity becomes an issue; especially if you want to do a lot of camping. The SON dynamo is the solution. It's a German-built hub that sits in your wheel and generates electricity as you ride. The SON dynamo isn't cheap. Expect to spend $400-500 U.S. on a dynamo hub, new wheel and the convertor that runs between the hub and your gadgets. It is known to be very reliable, however, and once installed it will power almost everything (including your bicycle lights) simply by pedaling. This is enormously satisfying. The only catch is that – at the moment – it's not possible to recharge a laptop with a dynamo, so you'll still need to find a plug here and there to keep your computer running.

FRIEDEL & ANDREW GRANT launched into bicycle touring with a trip around the world. They pedaled 48,000km through 30 countries before settling down to ride bikes in The Netherlands. They share bike touring tips, reviews and advice on their Travelling Two website and authored the Bike Touring Survival Guide; a practical handbook for extended cycling adventures.

Posted June 23, 2011 by Guest Author
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