Holiday In South Africa!

After 5 years of living in England I finally managed to get to go back to my home country of South Africa for a 3 week holiday. I would have loved to have taken longer, but this was the most amount of time my company would allow, so I made the most of it.

I had 3 weeks to cram in visiting old friends, spending quality time with family, especially my mom, and at the same time do as much cycling as possible. Not an easy task! It was to Cape Town that I went and my aim was to get a lot of sun for my very pasty white skin and put in some mileage - the only problem is that I didn't take my bike with me, so the plan was to either rent a bike or buy one.

I ended up buying a second hand steel framed bike called an Alpina (I think they're South African bikes) that had shifters on the downtube and some dodgy pedal called Exus that worked with Look cleats. Anyway, the bike was a tank - weighing at least twice as much as my alu bike that was sitting in London, and the gears were not exactly suited for the mountainous roads and passes in and around the Cape: 53/42 x 12/23. Nevertheless, at £80 for the complete bike along with some free adjustments from the bike shop, I wasn't complaining and set off riding in earnest.

Between seeing friends and family and a few days on the beach, I managed to squeeze in 9 days and just over 700km of riding out of the 3 weeks that I spent in Cape Town, and here are some pics I took during those days of riding. The weather was stunning - never above 32 degrees celcius and not below 25, and I only experienced strong winds on 1 or 2 of the days - the rest of the time was perfect.