Today is the second day of the official TechBikers fundraising ride. I am riding the whole 130km on the Buffalo bike, 20kg, no gears, rack to transport 100kg. These bikes make difference in Africa!
We had wonderful weather, ~25 people all enjoying cycling. Woke up early and spent a day on the bike both on Friday and Saturday. There are some people who like to go at it with full force, so climbing sections were intense, sometimes very intense. This is good for the fitness, they say... Strava tells me it was "historic effort"!
All ready for the real TechBikers ride this coming Friday!
This weekend another bike adventure is coming up. A tour around Tatra mountains, best mountains we have down here in Poland. More climbing and riding down full speed :-) Let's hope for a fair September weather. I am biking, please keep donating :-)
(you can see the profile of this ride from trip we made a year ago)
So where are these Buffalo bikes going to? To Zambia?
Sikaloyza Primary School is in the rural areas of Mazabuka District. There are 13 teachers handling grades 1-9, 374 students total. Classes are of 40 students each. There are many students (girls and boys) commuting over 3km one way to school, 173 in total.
These bicycles will help them commute faster and safer and their they will own them once their contract is fulfilled, they improve attendance and graduate to the next class. It is worth giving a bike to the student!
We finished the race. It was a serious race, more with ourselves than others :-) In case it wasn't the race I don't think I would decide to spend more than 19 hours cycling over 200km on the gravel roads, in the mountains, climbing do many times and over 4400 meters.
It was the longest cycling day in my life, you can see a smile on my face at the end!
What a day, we started at 6am, ride a very long day until darkness around 8pm and I still made a trip to the nearby store for some supplies for the night. We luckily give a place in the youth hostel, 8 people in the room. Wonderful places, great people and discussions with them on the route. Well, some pedaling in between :-)
Time for some sleep, we want to start earlier tomorrow. There are 220km to the finish and lots more climbs.
The race is on, 150km of mostly gravel roads. 3400m elevation gain and shoot equal amount of crazy downhills
Getting ready for the race, packing tonight, driving tomorrow, cycling from Thursday, until we arrive. Here is the map and the elevation profile. This is unsupported race, so we can only use things that are available to all the other participants (i.e. buy coke in the store) and there are long stretches of mountain trails for which we need to be self sufficient :-)
I am racing PGR (mountain gravel race, 550km, 10+km of climbs) with two friends this coming week. We tested our bikes with the full load today!
En fournissant des vélos aux enfants, en particulier aux filles, vous pouvez leur permettre d’accéder à l’éducation et changer le cours de leur vie.