Bike Blog

Somerville, Mass - January is officially over, and so is the first leg of the Tour d'Afrique, also known as Pharaoh's Delight. The good news is that my Lonely Planet team members, Sharif Rashedi and Scott Kennedy, completed their African odysseys without dying. Not only that, they seemed to have a pretty good time of it. Now, over the next two weeks, David Else and Quentin Fraye will ride from Khartoum, Sudan to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Good luck, boys!

I have been following the progress of these riders pretty closely, on the official Tour d'Afrique blog, and on One Cog Mind (Sharif's blog) and Adventureskope (Scott's blog).

I have to admit that reading these first-hand "live" accounts intimidates me. It makes this adventure seem all the more real, all the more imminent. The first blog posts were all about average speeds and wind direction and whatnot. I can talk the talk, but the truth is that I'd rather not think about average speeds. I'm really just concerned with reaching my destination, no matter how long it takes.

I expressed these concerns to Jerry, who reassured me. "You'll be fine," he said. "You're not going to die. You're probably not going to win, but you're not going to die."

So that's where I'm at right now: somewhere between dying and winning.

The other good news is that I am riding outside again. I am very grateful that I have the option to ride indoors on the trainer in front of the television. But the fact is that an outside ride is a better workout and a better diversion, especially when I am supposed to be logging 50 miles and up (that's three-plus hours, if anyone is counting).

So my neighbors (and my husband) think I'm crazy when they see me loading my bike on the back of the car in sub-freezing temperatures… but (I assure them) it is a joy to be riding through the snowy landscape, feeling the cold air against my warm body and racking up the miles. And thank goodness for my riding buddies, who know more riding routes than Lance Armstrong, and who are kind of like mailmen in their devotion to the cause.

I won't ride in a snow storm, though, which means that I still ride indoors at least once a week (nice winter we are having here in Massachusetts).  So I am still expanding my movie library at a rapid rate, with films from A to B (Africa to bikes).

Last week I watched the Italian realist film, The Bicycle Thief. I thought this Academy Award-winning classic would be inspiring, but as it turns out it was one of the most devastating movies I have ever seen. Not that it wasn't excellent, just heartbreaking. This is not Hollywood, ladies and gentlemen.

I did appreciate the bicycle theme, however. Here is the story of a guy who depends on his bike for his livelihood. He is offered a job - a rarity in post-WWII Italy - but he can't do it without a bicycle. His wife hawks her wedding linens to reclaim the bike from the pawn shop. You can see where this is going… the first day on the job and the biciclette gets stolen.

We are a long way from the depression of post-WWII Italy (I hope). So I appreciated this example of somebody who relies on a bike for access to basic necessities. We tend to think of bikes as a form of recreation. In our society, some people use them for transportation, but those people are a little wacky, aren't they? And rarely are they actually dependent on the bikes as their sole means of getting to work.

In rural Namibia, many people have no way to get to work (or to school, or to the hospital) unless they happen to have a bike. Healthcare workers walk many miles a day in order to visit their patients. Some kids can't even go to school because they have no way to get there. I am supporting the Bicycle Empowerment Network (BEN) in hopes of providing more bikes to more people in Namibia. The bicycle is a clean, affordable, healthy and environmentally-friendly means of transportation. More importantly, it is an accessible means of transportation.

Thank you so much to everyone who has already donated to BEN. If you have not yet done so, please click here to make your donation. And if you're not sure, watch The Bicycle Thief. Your donation could get somebody a job. Or allow somebody to go to school. Or even save a life.