The long overdue Argus Cycle Tour ...

Hey good readers,

Stand still Sabre, you master needs to fall on you again (twice).

I am only now keeping a promise made about 4 posts ago, that of telling you about the Argus Cycle Tour if the pages vs postings thing does not work out. Another promise about a 39plus-hour trip from Bali is also still outstanding.

It did not work out but my head was in Paris. Now, by bringing you this long promised post, I'm breaking another i.e. to bring you Paris 4 but that one will come too!!! Note, I did not say: "I promise" :-). Sure Paris 4 is full of trials and tribulations but it represents a conclusion with the bitter-sweet tang of saying goodbye to a friend.

Back to matters at hand.

The 2009 Argus Cycle Tour is widely acknowledged to have been the windiest Argus ever. I rode the Argus in 2010 and I wish to disagree. I take issue with the 2009 description on the basis of the winning time of the women's race. The winning time of the womens race in 2010 was slower than that of 2009 over the same route and distance and, in my opinion, this can only be because the wind was worse in 2010. Now I am not an Argus expert, so don't take my word for it!!!

I only partook in only one Argus Tour (in 2010) and the run-up to the race is rather extensive and I hope not to bore you with all the happenings. Some however must be told to give you a clear picture of my other form of travel, cycling.

Off toTraining

I started cycling to work mainly to establish control over my petrol budget while I was at my previous place of employ. I then ended up with work place friends who were staunch cyclists, one of them was about o complete his 20th Argus Tour. You get a special shirt for each deca you complete I think, so after 10 you receive a privilege of keeping your number and a special colour shirt. After 20 completions, there are more privileges and colour shirts and so on. Now this special gentleman clearly saw either some cycling potential in me or thought me an easily influenced sucker! Either way, like most people, I did not mind the encouragement, tips and attention.

I trained for a period and entered a pre-qualifying event called Die Burger. You need to pre-qualify to get a good Argus seeding and earlier start time and group. This will mean you do not get bogged down amongst the slow crowds but rather cycle with people of your own ability - THAT'S THE THEORY ANYWAY!!!

I did a reasonable time in "Die Burger" race, something in the order of 3 hours and a bit minutes. This got me a seeding that started before 08:00 in the morning. The "Burger" was also my first organised cycle race ever, not counting the 'races' we had going home in primary school. This, a few months before my 51 birthday, sounded rather ambitious. Unlike Willie Wikkelspier (for non-South Africans, that is William Shakespeare)'s Marc Anthony, I did not plan to pontificate on "ambition".

Starting Training Downhill on the yellow 'downhill demon' =Great!Returning home = Not So!

I had bought myself this weird cheap road bike a few months before. For some reason, the bike felt super-quick going downhill while it had serious issues going uphill. The Argus, being a hilly race, therefore caused me some trepidation! I have a hill called the Helshoogte (Height of Hell or Hellish Heights if you prefer) next to where I live but its profile was not ideal for the Argus or so I was told, so I hardly cycled up there. I preferred to drive to Somerset West and trained up a hill called Spook (Ghost) hill in the instilled belief that it had a better Argus profile. The other reason for training there is that there I found some mates to train with whereas in Stellenbosch, I did not have those privileges!

Training long distances or hard sectors by oneself is not to be recommended!!

The longest distance I put in in training for the 109 km Argus was 70 km a pop for a few weekend mornings. This in contrast to what I heard some Capetonians were doing, six easy hours in the saddle on one weekend morning followed by a hard hour the same afternoon. According to seasoned cyclists they were doing real training. With the dubious benefit of my lack of experience, I thought they were seriously over-training.

Sometimes we would have a longer training run from Somerset West to Rooi-Els, a favourite cyclist training route. It was here that I had a rear- wheel puncture while flying downhill on the downhill demon. I nearly came to grief because the control required on those skinny road wheels is something to behold. Luckily, I was in the Somerset West training group, experienced cyclists, who fixed the puncture in record time and with no fuss!

At the time I was chasing one of two lasses who had smoked me going up the same hill earlier. Being smoked going uphill is embarrasing enough but downhill??? I noticed they were wearing national colours but thought it was fake at the time, NdiIndoda mna!! (IsiXhosa for "I'm a man!!").

Once I went up and down Helshoogte in training and, while going up, I made a mental note of big manhole cover on the opposite side of the road. On the way back I was again flying downhill on my super downhill cycle when I neared the position of the previously noted manhole cover. I became very alert and managed to see and miss the manhole cover but I hit a cat's eye in the road and had an immediate blowout on my front wheel. I forgot to mention that while my cycle was really fast downhill it was also very twitchy!!. When the blowout happened, I learned the true meaning of twitchiness. The front wheel wobbled and threatened my immediate acquaintance with Mr McAdam's legacy. This was no fun at a speed close to 85 km/h. I managed to stay on the bucking bronco for long enough to shake hands with the road on my own terms and at a more civilised speed of about 3 km/h. After repairing the puncture using my onroad repair kit, I resolved to buy a cycle with more front-end stability. That is why you'll see pics of me training on a bright yellow cycle while I competed in a more stable purple piper in the Argus. The yellow blighter was the unstable downhill demon!!  
My Good Wife (she was good then already), probably thought I had gone off my rocker what with all the training and special diet and stuff. Having been married to me for a good number of years already (32 years on the 1st of the 5th Month this year), I suspected that she probably knew I've been off my rocker for considerably long time.

You see, she's a social work professional and they are trained to pick up these things as a matter of course.

She said nothing seriously contrary however and I was further encouraged in my ways by this because she can get rather serious with sanctions should she become convinced of untimely contrary behaviour on my part! Here I mean stuff that can dislocate my favorite right wrist (I'm reasonably ambidextrous but it does not pay to have both wrists out of action, does it?) and that, for a squash player, is serious stuff!!!

When I rode in Die Burger, I had serious trouble with the downhill demon getting up a hill with a rather stiff gradient, but I made it without getting off the cycle. I then noticed on the other side of the hill the gradient was as steep going down towards Malmesbury. Before the race I was told by experienced cyclists that a single cyclist cannot catch a bunch going downhill. I saw there was a bunch a hundred or so metres ahead of me when I decided to test this assumption.

Now previously, I mentioned that my bike was strangely fast downhill and not so uphill. I think most cyclists simply thought that I'm too lazy to put in enough effort. Not so. I always felt I was putting in more effort than my training partners on the uphills and far less on the downhills.

I decided not to pedal going down that hill and simply assumed what I presumed was an aerodynamic position. So I just sat there, flew downhill, gained on and passed the bunch. This was apparently unnatural and many in the bunch assumed I pedalled hard to latch on and then simply used their wind breaking formation to pass them but that was not true. I did not pedal at all, my super cycle was simply too fast downhill!. I think it had to do with my physique and the fact that the cycle was probably a bit small for my frame, so most of my weight settled itself ahead of the centre of gravity of the cycle.  That, to my mind would easily and scientifically explain the uphill struggles as well.

I visited the race exhibition show the day before the race, got my number and all my goodies sorted out. So we were ready for battle on the morning of the race. My whole family came to enjoy themselves at my expense. I could see in their eyes they thought the old man was going to make a fool of himself and they, under embarassing glares of strangers, were then to be called upon to 'rescue' the old monkey - my deliverers! The evnt would probably have been announced over the public address system and I could already see the shame in their eyes as they had to publicly identify themselves as family of the unfortunate, silly old monkey. These thoughts may not have been in my family's minds but they served to keep me motivated as I pedalled up the Suikerbossie (Sugar bush) hill, supposedly the final bone breaker.

Going over the top of Suikerbossie with Hout Bay in the background

I was about 20km from the end of the race but before me was the sweet downhill past Llandudno. Oh and before I get there, let me go back to Suikerbossie. Some roadside wag cat-called me as I swayed up the hill asking mockingly if someone should give me a push. I was never short on words, so I shouted back that if he had the cajones, perhaps he should show others how it is done. To my surprise, the little twerp was an action hero and my words were still carried on the Hout Bay wind when he was pushing me uphill, hard!. Other competitors were miffed and called: "No fair". Me I was happy to have this advantage and it was their loss for opening their mouths only to breath.

So I got to the top of Suikerbossie 'slightly' fresher than my fellow competitors.

So I tucked into my trusted aerodynamic position and flew down the Llandudno hill. When I turned a corner near the bottom, I was going at about 80km/h when a serious gust of wind stopped me almost dead in my tracks. The sudden deceleration was unexpected and from that point I had to pedal hard to get my cycle further down the hill. Since the wind generally blew from a South Easterly direction and should have been between my shoulder blades at that point, this sudden change had me fluxomed.

I consoled myself that after passing the Twelve Apostles Hotel, I would only have Bakoven, Camps Bay, Clifton and Bantry Bay to conquer (all relatively flat roads) before entering Sea Point and the Beach Road Boulevard wherein I would find the finishing line. There was the little hill from Camps Bay to Bantry Bay but it was short and not too steep comparatively speaking.It was at this point that I was caught by a lady cyclist dressed in all pink, including her cycle. She actually passed and ended Die Burger ahead of moi. So my red blood cells staged a mutiny and kicked up such a ruckus that I had no option but to compete with the Pink Lady and beat her to the finish line. It felt great to gain control of a fullblown red bloodcell mutiny. They were worse than COSATU mixed with RED ANTS but they peacefully retreated to their normal job stations once I was safely ahead of and beating Pink Lady.

So it was that I finished the really windy 2010 Cape Argus in 4:25 plus some odd seconds. This is not a time to be overly proud of but in such Windy conditions many backmarkers like myself finished 30min to 1 hour off their PBs.

Oh I forgot about the portaloos that were blown over at the start of the race, apparently with an unfortunate person sitting on the throne. I was not anywhere close to those portaloos either at the start or the finish line. That was what the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront was there for.

Many other smaller incident happened to me along the 109 km race but we'll peruse them at another time and perhaps in another post. The 2010 Cape Argus was my last competitive cycling race. Reason? Cape drivers have great trouble to respect any vehicle smaller than theirs on the road and winters in the Cape are dark and wet, so outdoors training became impossible.


Indoors training became difficult as well when I chaffed all the skin off my inner thighs on one of the gym cycles. Raw chaffed meat between one's legs does not make for pleasant walking never mind cycling of any sort.

Cycling is indeed a different form of transport and one feels it by the seat of your pants. I felt like Kamau after his supposed circumcision operation. I'll re-tell the story of Kamau another time. Just remember a formerly sprightly Kenyan chap.

Schlaf gut meine Freunde,

Guten tage,

I noticed an uptick in readership from der Kaizer's home state ;-)!

Taking SUNSAT model to Abuja, Nigeria ...

Hi faithful readers,

I like to make positive or at least funny remarks about people on my travels. I like to comment favourably on countries I travel in or to as well. My experiences are however are genuine and I refuse to hide or lie about them. I only name places and organisations for the sake of context and people I will seldom, if ever, refer to by name.

At this stage, United States of America readership for the week outstrips South Africa a factor of 2. Come-on locals! I know we are only less than 70 milllion souls in our country but that should not be an excuse. For now we are still ahead in the overall readership stakes but the #USA is catching up rapidly!

Before I tell of my flight from Cape Town to Abuja via #Johannesburg and #Lagos, allow me give a bit of background. We made the decision to attend a small #satellite conference in #Abuja and considered a request from the organisors to bring a model small satellite representing #SUNSAT with us.

After checking with export and clearing agents, it became clear that we needed two weeks more than we had at our disposal. Someone came up with the brilliant idea to dismantle the model, so we could take it as hold luggage on the airplane with us. At the time I enthusiastically supported the idea and we promised the organisers we'll bring the model.

When the day of departure arrived, we encountered our first problem at check-in for the flight to Johannesburg from Cape Town International!!

The dismantled model sections were too large to fit on the automatic baggage handling system and the baggage handlers refused to take the offending sections on-board. After a long discussion with the baggage handling supervisor centering on the risks of denting national pride if we were to arrive in Abuja without the model, the officials relented and accommodated our unusual baggage request. So we successfully passed the first stage of our journey.

At OR Tambo International airport, we received our luggage in good time and did not think that there would be further problems.

This opptimism evaporated when we tried to check in for the flight to Lagos, Nigeria.Again, size of the items were in question. I pointed out that the items travelled with us from CapeTown on a flight of the same carrier, so there should essentially not be further issues, but the baggage handlers became deaf! Same story as at Cape Town International - if the items do not fit on the automatic baggage loading system, they will not be allowed on-board!

Eventually, I found someone in the coomand chain who was willing to make a decision. The decision was: If I was willing to pay a few baggage handlers to physically move the offending pieces of luggage to the plane, the goods will be loaded. I was pointed to two baggage handlers and instructed to meet them in one of the corridors leading to the baggage section. I amoured myself with sufficient cash and, after informing my fellow travelers of the requirements, marched forth to meet the objects of obstruction and potential resolution. When I reached the two baggage handlers I found them well-informed of the problem and what was required in terms of resolution. I handed over ZAR 50 (the requested amount) to each and shook hands on the deal.

Back at the check-in, we handed the precious pieces of the model satellite to baggage handlers and carried on checking in. Our hope was nested in the baggage handlers' honesty and prayer because we had no other aussurance. The flight to Lagos was therefore rather nervy but we landed safely and waited for our luggage to arrive like others around us. I could see our luggage on the tarmac together with large pieces which I presumed to belong to other passengers.

My fellow travellers were getting impatient with non-arrival of our luggage and prompted me to facilitate the process. I noticed other passengers looking anxiously at luggage on the tarmac at Murtala Muhammad International. I was at a loss of how to proceed when I saw one of the 'anxious ones' speaking to a gentleman and handing him some cash. I immediately went over and asked the 'anxious one' about what she had done and was assured that, because our luggage was too large to fit on the automatic baggage system, it required a further cash injection to get to the luggage collection hall. When I wanted to know about guarantees of success, she simply shrugged her shoulders. I therefore waited to see the outcome of her brave action before approaching the same gentleman. When her trust was rewarded with the delivery of her outsized luggage to the hall, I had no hesitation to accost the same gentleman and striking a deal with him.

The deal involved getting our luggage to us and arranging a minibus taxi to take us and our luggage to our hotel in Lagos, pick-up by taxi the next morning and hassle-free loading of our outsize luggage onto a flight to Abuja (in those days local and international flights all departed from the same terminal). This cost me US$ 50 in total, which I thought was a good bargain.

So when the taxi driver wanted to negotiate further with us for the transport of our luggage, I just called the gentleman with whom I had a deal and, with a few words in one of the local languages between him and the taxi driver, we were on our way without further payment or hassles.

The night's rest in Lagos was peaceful and we were picked up on time by our taxi the next morning. Together with our precious luggage we checked in on a local flight to Abuja and our luggage was taken care of as per my US$ 50 agreement with the gentleman of the previous evening.

The flight to Abuja proceeded without incident and our luggage did not require further smoothing exercises to get to us, courtesy of the conference organisers whom we phoned the previous night to tell of our travails.

Thus we had a successful conference in Abuja and made the organisers proud when we assembled the #SUNSAT model in the conference exhibition hall. The conference organisers offered to arrange the return of the model by normal commercial transit and, with our experiences front of mind, we gladly accepted.

"All's well that ends well" as the saying goes and this post could easily have substituted the post on an eventful international flight   (http://expectmeagain.blogspot.com/2014/03/an-eventful-international-flight.html)
but it escaped my mind at the time and furthermore involved a mix of local and international flights.

The other reason that made me hesitate to post this incident was the possibility that it would add to the suspicion of bribery that is supposed to be endemic in the developing world. In my opinion however the incidents in this post explains only what happens when one expects people to go out of their way to accommodate requests for which their systems do not cater i.e. extra work and therefore extra payment. So, no bribery took place!!

In the next two posts I plan next to talk about our local road travels to the #PanoramaRoute in Eastern Mpumalanga province in the first month of 2014. I also would like to enlighten local and international readership about our (myself, my daughter and the good wife) visit to the Cradle of Humankind in #Gauteng province (Sterkfontein Caves and #Maropeng) around the same time.