Gear

This is the geeky section of the blog.

In 2013 we cycled from Cairo to Cape Town with TDA; the list of gear below relates to that trip. We'll do an update with our Central America kit in due course.

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This section of the blog is really for people who are thinking about or doing Tour d'Afrique and gives a bit of feedback on the kit that we took – TDA provide a pretty comprehensive kit list which is worth paying attention too (especially the bit about thermals – who knew Africa could be so cold!) so this is more about the brands and style of the equipment we used as well as a bit of what else we would take if we were to do the trip again.

Things we couldn’t have lived without:

-          Computer – this made storing our photos, writing our blogs, making our videos and accessing the internet all much more straight forward.  There was a wide range in the different models that riders took, but robust and lightweight seemed to go well.  We took a Dell Inspiron. 

-          Schwable Marathon Plus tyres.  These are the best tyres known to man.  Not to say that they are completely fool proof – some people did have problems, but we cycled the full road distance on these with not a single puncture between us.

Luxuries that made it all more enjoyable:

-          Therma-rest ultralite camp beds – for three key reasons –it’s more comfortable than an inflatable mattress; keeps you off the hot/cold ground; and can’t be punctured by thorns.  Slight draw back in the boringness of having to assemble nightly, but in our view, well worth the cost and hassle

-          Therma-rest pillow – Lizzie was scornful of this excessive luxury before the trip, but when you are pedalling yourself into the ground day after day, the things that aid a good night’s sleep are the things worth having.

-          Go-pro – we loved having our go-pro which enabled us to make all our videos; to share the trip with people at home as we went, but also as a great momento for us.  It was hard work logging all the footage and making the videos as we went, but we think worth it. [It also helped that one of the other riders was a professional photographer, so we could rely on him to take good stills: www.jamesinafrica.tumblr.com]

Personal preference:

-          Ciprofloxacin – this is the antibiotic you take when you get the runs.  Food is the fuel that keeps you running, after a few days of not being able to keep it in it becomes very hard to keep cycling 125km per day.  This stuff is great, put it in your medical kit.

-          Tent – we had an MSR Mutha Hubba – we liked it because you don’t have to erect the flysheet (when it’s hot) and you can put it up without pegs (when the ground is harder than concrete, or in fact is concrete).

-          Merino wool socks – we’d never used these before but they are amazing – when you are on tour a lot of things are a bit smelly, but stopping your socks being really smelly makes life more pleasant.  Shame the moody lady in Yabello hung them on the barbed wire to dry.

-          Bowl – take a big one, that is going to be your helping size for the next four months and you will not believe how big your appetite is going to get.

Suggested spares – on TDA absolutely anything can break and you can’t take spares of everything, but a few we found useful to have

-          Jockey wheels – these are not on the spares list which TDA provides, but both of our jockey wheels were destroyed in the mud in Tanzania.  We highly recommend that you take spares.

-          Bike computer – we had Heart Rate and Cadence on our bike computers which we really liked.  Bike computers are the sorts of things that can be easily broken/ripped off on the off road/stolen so a spare one, even if it just does basic speed and distance is worth slipping in the bag – around half our group needed replacements.  Some people also had altitude on their computers – they were good people to bump into at lunch so that you knew how much of the days climbing you had done.   

-          Glasses – these are the sort of things that get sat on/break/get left behind.

Bearing in mind that everything you take has to fit in your locker and so there are definite limitations on what you can take, we were pretty happy with our kit.  There was nothing that we really regretted not taking – however, some minor tweaks we might have made:

-          Plastic bottle cages – top tip of Mr Mike Lantz when all of our aluminium cages snapped as apparently they are much more durable – although this was more of an issue for us than others as we each carried 4 bottles on our bikes and no camelback.

-          Patches – for some reason we focused on tubes and didn’t take very many patches.  Even though we didn’t have that many flats, patches in your pocket eases the mind on the off road.

-          Cable ties – would have been good to help fashion fix jobs.  Duct tape is good but it can’t solve quite everything.

-          Rehydration sachets – on hot days you need to be taking these at the end of a ride – nicer to buy the right size and with some flavour that the stuff you pick up in the pharmacies in Sudan.

-          Warm clothing – we envied the snug looking down jackets on the cold mornings/nights on the bookends of the trip

-          We took an old Nokia and bought sim cards in each country so that we could text home, this was also good for photographing the directions for the day.  However, in hindsight a smart phone and solar charger would have been useful for getting online more easily to do things like tweet.

-          Better off road tyres – we didn’t really think about these and just took the tyres that came with the bike, a set of Continentals which were largely fine but not amazingly robust.  Avoiding flats makes life a lot more enjoyable so we bought some better tyres off a departing sectional (whilst the widest off-road Schwalbes are not enormously wide, we would probably recommend them)

-          Pannier – we took one pannier between us in order to be able to carry the SLR out on the road.  Again, not something that we had really thought about but this was a side mount – a central mount would have been more sensible.

If there was ever any doubt about our love of lycra! 
Training in the cold means layering up - even though you're working hard on the bike, the fingers and toes freeze.

This is the sturdy thing that will get us down there - the Salsa Fargo. 
A very big thankyou to Derek and his team at Harlequin Design who made a significant contribution to our ability to aford them: http://www.harlequin-design.com/