TRAVEL DIARY

Day One, Sunday February 6^th

Drive to Bristol airport, fly Bristol to Paris. Meet all the riders and event crew at the hotel in the evening.

Fly Paris to Praia airport on the island of Santiago in Cabpe Verde. We were a bike down with Hans Rey’s bike still in the States; with only one flight a week from Paris to Cape Verde the team were already working hard behind the scenes to keep things running smoothly.

After dinner, with a local group providing traditional music and dancing, Fred and Fabien gave a talk with the full run down of what was going to happen on the trip and gave us the low down on the medical situation should anyone have an accident – it wasn’t good. We were racing on two different islands, neither of these had a hospital and while they had requested helicopter assistance to evacuate a casualty in the event of an emergency it had been rejected on the grounds that there is not a helicopter in the whole country! Though it later became apparent this was probably not necessary anyway as many sections of the tracks would punish mistakes quite severely, I guess it could have been handy for the recovery of a body though! The riders’ briefing gave clear instructions that hurting ourselves was not an option on this trip and for everyone to ride at 70%. I was later to find that my interpretation of 70% and some of the other guys was quite different!

After breakfast we headed for a walk through the roads and backstreets of Praia as it was just coming to life. We walked to the school where two of the charities are based that the fundraising from the event will be supporting. We were made very welcome by the teachers and the school children, and it was a nice experience to meet the people first hand that our bike auctions will benefit (all of the riders donated a frame or bike to be auctioned to raise money for these charities). Everyone left with a good feeling about some of the reasons we were at the event aside from the bike riding and we were ready and excited to head onto our next stop on the island of Fogo where we were going to be racing down the volcano.

A three hour ferry trip took us across to Fogo on a brand new catamaran. In reality it was over four hours and one of the roughest boat journeys I’ve been on, with plenty of people throwing up. With our sea legs tested we staggered off the boat as our bikes and bags were hurled over the side into the chaotic crowd below. All the bikes and bags were then (as had by now become customary!) loaded into a teetering tower on an old pick up truck; it was a wonder that that much luggage could possibly be squeezed into one little truck. We all wondered what state the bikes would be in by the time we got there.

Fully loaded we travelled the hour’s drive up to Cha das Caldeiras, a small village in caldera of the volcano and in the shadow of the new active cone some 3000 metres above sea level that last erupted in 1995. It was a long and steep road up, we arrived at the hotel under cover of night all wondering just what this place would look like in the light of day.

Day Four, Wednesday

We woke to our first glimpse of the volcano, and the large caldera (a 9km diameter circular cauldron like feature caused by a large volcanic eruption) that we were staying within. There was a lot of mist and cloud looming in the early morning and it made the place feel even more remote and desolate yet strangely eerie and beautiful. We built our bikes as the cloud and mist burnt off and we were left with a scorcher of a day to get to grips with the loose gravelly terrain, it was cool to ride on, a lot like powder with the bike constantly drifting around on the surface.

A highlight of the day was spending time in and around the remote village with all the people who live in the lunar like landscape there, it is baron and isolated yet peaceful. They live a mellow, relaxed life with few material possessions but were so happy to see what we were doing and were walking up the hills to watch, chat and have a go on our bikes. It was a really nice day, but over too quick.