Tour de Soltown

Recently my good friend Ryan and I tried to ride from out district (Mufumbwe) to Solwezi (our province's capital) on our Trek mountain bikes.  It's a distance of about 265 kms or 165 miles. 

The plan was to leave really early in the morning, ride 90 kms to another volunteer's site and then stay there for the night.  The next morning we would leave even earlier, ride all day long, and arrive sometime in the early evening in 

The trip began well enough.  The first day wasn't too bad, really.  We made the 90 kms with only one mishap, which was a flat tire on my bike.  We took our time and 6 hours (this includes the tire repair time) after leaving my house we arrived in Nyansonso Village to stay with our neighboring volunteer.

Ryan and I on the first morning of our ride.

The second day was not so pretty.  About 30 minutes in I realized, even before the sun came up, that my legs were not in shape for this.  The entire month before my ride I was at the Peace Corps training center as a technical trainer for the new group of Peace Corps Volunteers that had just come to Zambia.  This means that I ate a lot of food and did very little in the way of exercise, although I did do a lot of exercising my mind by answering as many of their questions as I could.

Ryan about 2 hours into what would be our 10 hours of riding on the second day.  After this picture was taken we discussed if we could really even make it all of the way to Solwezi.

We rode and rode and rode some more.  Each time we thought we were getting near to a landmark we recognized we'd find out we weren't where we thought we were.  After each turn was a longer straight away than before, and, of course, it seemed like we had a headwind the whole day.  There wasn't any let up from the road either - it was one long, continual incline.

Ten hours later we reached Mumena - about 55 kms from Solwezi.  By this point we were exhausted and with another two to three hours, if not more, of riding remaining we called it quits.  We threw our bikes onto a truck and hitched the rest of the way into Solwezi.  We never made it.

But, we did a good amount of it.  In two days we rode about 210 kms (130 miles).  Even without finishing it I think we did a good, long distance.  

We were both exhausted.  Hitting the physical wall of exhaustion over and over and over again wasn't enjoyable.  In Mumena a man asked me, "Are you doing this for a fundraiser?"  I replied, "We were doing this for fun... it's not fun anymore."  

Maybe people will say, "Yeah that's a lot, but you still didn't do it."  To them I say, "I don't care.  We tried."  

Looking back my ambition to go the whole length in two days (Ryan wanted to do it in three) was far too ambitious, but we went for it, and for that I'm happy we tried.