EPISODE 57
Sweat and Smiles: Side by Side Across Europe and Africa
Jacqui Webster and Joe McNamara are a middle-aged Australian couple who in 2023 paused their sensible careers for one year to hop on heavily laden bicycles and pedal from England to Singapore. Except things didn’t go as planned and they ended up riding across Europe and Africa instead. Prior to this episode, I got a chance to read Jacqui’s entertaining book about the journey, Two Bugs on Bikes. I laughed out loud at Joe’s genius packing strategy, which left them stranded in Rwanda with two right shoes and two right pedals, and his questionable camp-stove paella. I marveled at their accidental, highly discounted “unofficial” gorilla trek in the jungles of Uganda and their encounters with other wild animals. From spontaneously deciding to conquer Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania to surviving swarms of protein-packed lake flies in Malawi to securing a glorious finish-line escort from wild ostriches, the stories that Jacqui and Joe tell contrast the gritty, exhausting physical reality of pedaling across two continents (the “sweat”) with their relentlessly upbeat attitude, generosity, and genuine joy in each other’s company (the “smiles”).
Episode Transcript
Jacqui: There was rarely a day that went past when we didn’t have something to write home about that was incredible, whether it was a person we met or some scenery or different food that we experienced. There was always some opportunity to say, “Wow!”
Gabriel: You just heard Jacqui Webster, who together with her partner, Joe McNamara, decided to take one year off work to travel by bicycle. Joe became a father when he was just 20 years old, so he missed out on traveling while he was young. Jacqui didn’t want to get left behind while Joe went on an epic adventure, so she came along. The original idea had been to pedal from England to Singapore, but in Istanbul, plans changed and the couple set their sights on a new continent, Africa. Jacqui didn’t set off with the idea of writing a book, but the journal that recorded their experiences became a fascinating travel memoir called Two Bugs on Bikes. Jacqui and Joe faced many obstacles, overcoming each with gritty determination (the “sweat”) and a relentlessly positive outlook (the “smiles”). As Jacqui writes after a particularly exhausting stretch in Tanzania, “The toughest challenges always lead to the best stories.”
Sandra: You’re listening to The Accidental Bicycle Tourist. In this podcast, you’ll meet people from all walks of life and learn about their most memorable bike touring experiences. This is your host, Gabriel Aldaz.
Gabriel: Hello bicycle touring enthusiasts! Welcome to another episode of The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast. As some of you know, I own a small collection of books about the topics covered in this podcast. Not surprisingly, therefore, I was delighted when Jacqui Webster offered to send me, all the way from Australia, a copy of her recent book. Jacqui’s debut effort is called Two Bugs on Bikes: our Middle-Aged Gap Year Cycling Across Europe and Africa. I am delighted to have with me today both protagonists of the story, Jacqui and her partner in cycling and in life, Joe McNamara. Jacqui and Joe, thank you so much for being guests on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast.
Jacqui: Thank you, we’re really happy to be here.
Joe: Yeah, thanks.
Gabriel: Reflecting on the book, which was a very enjoyable read, by the way, I came away with the sense that the pivotal moment in your journey takes place in Istanbul, a city at the crossroads of three continents. First we need to set the stage of how you got to this crossroads. So, could you give me some background on who you are and how you temporarily put aside your careers to embark on this one-year bicycle tour?
Jacqui: Yeah, Istanbul was certainly a pivotal moment, but things started long before then and really it was Joe’s idea to take a year off work and travel by bicycle for a year. The initial plan had been to cycle from Selby. I grew up on a farm in Selby. So we were going to cycle from Selby to Singapore, but then plans changed. We ended up starting in March and Morocco, and then we cycled as far as Istanbul and then had to make a change of tack.
Gabriel: Even though you’re in Australia, Selby is in the UK.
Jacqui: That’s right. I grew up in a farm in Yorkshire in the UK. So that was the plan to try and cycle from Selby, near where I grew up, all the way back to Singapore, which is almost as far as we can get back to Australia before we jump on a plane. But just going back a bit before then, I think maybe it’s good to know how we met, where our interest in cycling came from.
Gabriel: So you want to rewind all the way back. Okay, that’s fine. How did you meet?
Joe: Jacqui and I met in 2010. We were both in the same triathlon club. We’d both been doing triathlon for a few years. Jacqui first made an impression on me when we were swimming at the beach and she ran into me head-first. I had a headache for the rest of the day, but she caught my eye and then later that year we got together and yeah, now we’re 16 years later.
Jacqui: We carried on with triathlon for many years, and then probably about five years ago now, we sort of started to diversify our cycling interests into cycle touring. I can’t remember where the initial idea for the year off came from, but it certainly came from you.
Joe: Yeah, I just always had a bit of a passion for adventure. For me, it was all about seeing new things, meeting new people, trying to get out in nature. And I just had this idea to do a really long cycle tour. I knew Jacqui would follow me wherever I went. So we started to make a plan and unfortunately COVID got in the way and slowed our plans down a little. We did other things for a few years and then after COVID we started making a new plan and managed to take off in 2023.
Jacqui: But it wasn’t easy leaving everything behind. Joe had his kids when he was pretty young, when he was 20 years old. When I was 20, I was traveling around the world. The first time in my life I was really settled. I loved my job, I loved my home. We lived near the beach. The idea of giving it all up and going traveling for a year was a little bit frightening and daunting, but at the same time I wasn’t going to be left behind while he went and had an adventure. We set off in March 2023.
Gabriel: Did you have much previous touring experience? You were obviously long-time triathletes, but it’s rather unusual that the first experience is a yearlong trip.
Joe: We didn’t have much experience. The longest tour we’d done was two weeks and that was in New Zealand. We’d done a few 10-day kind of trips in Australia and we knew we enjoyed it. We enjoyed each other’s company and we would just up for some real adventure going somewhere completely different.
Gabriel: That brings us now back to Istanbul. You said you wanted to go somewhere different. When you started in Morocco and then crossed the European continent. You got to Istanbul with a plan. And what was that plan?
Joe: The plan was we were going to keep going east. We were meeting my son and his partner in Istanbul for about a week and then we were going to meet some other friends elsewhere in Turkey and then we were just going to continue east as far as we could go. We really looked forward to going through the Stans, through China, and then into Southeast Asia. We found once we got to Istanbul that we couldn’t get visas to go through China and a lot of the other routes were off-limits. Russia at the time was no-go and we had to reassess. Our options were either take lots of flights to hop in and out of countries and regions or choose somewhere else to go and that was where we pulled out the map of the world and started deciding where else we could go. We had seven or eight months left. That was kind of the crossroads.
Jacqui: Yeah, that was the crossroads, and we were also particularly busted at that stage because we were cycling for weeks in Turkey with 42 degrees and just, it was getting really hard and we were exhausted. So I think the idea of like taking multiple flights and going to the Stans and getting stuck was just too much for us. So we just had a complete change of tack. But the funny thing is we lay all the maps out and we looked to where we wanted to go and we also used Australian Smartraveller to sort of look at where countries were safe to travel and Africa was kind of the only place where we could see a continuous stretch of green.
Joe: So for anyone who doesn’t know, Smartraveller is a government advisory in Australia that tells you where the government recommends you do and don’t go, and it color codes countries in green, yellow and red, basically. We pulled out the map and looked at where we could go and we talked about Africa before we left home as an option. We dismissed it really quickly because we just thought that was way out there. That was…
Jacqui: Too hard.
Joe: Too scary, too everything. And by the time we’d got four or four and a half months in and we were in Istanbul we thought it was actually possible and we talked a lot about what we were scared about and it was interesting because we were scared of very different things. Jacqui was most scared of people and animals and I was most…
Jacqui: And being kidnapped.
Joe: I was most scared of the riding being too difficult and getting sick. So we’re playing the different fears and we just decided to go and all of our friends when we told them tried to talk us out of it.
Jacqui: Yeah, the friends we went sailing with in Greece and Turkey just before we flew to Africa, they were put about saying goodbye. Will we ever see you again?
Gabriel: All right. I mean, you’re not the first people ever to do this.
Jacqui: Exactly. That’s right. And we also had met other cyclists. Remember the lady we met in Turkey who… she’d cycled to Africa on her own? And so that gave us courage and we knew it was possible. And there’s also a fabulous WhatsApp group called Cairo to Cape Town. Everybody cycling through Africa is on that group at the same time and it’s a fabulous source of inspiration and advice.
Gabriel: Yeah, it seems like there are these WhatsApp groups that have just formed with all of the kind of major cycling areas. If you’re cycling in South America, there’s a WhatsApp group. If you’re in Africa, WhatsApp group. And yeah, I think in the Stans, there’s also a WhatsApp group. So this is a really interesting development and people can give each other tips and advice and share experiences. It’s amazing.
Jacqui: No, it’s fantastic. There’s a really good community out there.
Gabriel: Yeah. Even though a lot of people – I don’t know if a lot – but some people have done this kind of tour, I must say that it is a bit unusual that people decide to do it just like you, on the spot. Because usually there’s a lot of preparation which could range from visas to the different countries or vaccinations against some of the different diseases that one does encounter. And so I think while doing it is not so unique, I was really struck by the fact that there you are in Istanbul and you suddenly pivot entirely and say, “Okay, let’s go to Africa!” And I know there’s green from travel advisory, but it’s still quite a big step to take. So I do also see your friends’ concerns for you. But it worked out.
Jacqui: Yeah, it worked out really well. And I think for me, from the second we landed in Kigali in Rwanda, I was just in love with the buzz of the place. It’s so completely different, the people and the culture and the music and the noise. And we had a very amusing start of our trip in Rwanda because we landed and proceeded to get our bike boxes. And Joe discovered that his bike box had split open and he’d lost one of the bags. Obviously, this is a little bit of a nightmare for any cycle tourist. You want to have all your gear. Joe realized which bag he had lost straight away and immediately. I said, “What’s in it? We’ll make do.” And he explained what was in it. And it was one sleeping bag, one inflatable mattress, one pillowcase and two left shoes. He packed my left shoe and his left shoe so that the bags were completely balanced. He was like furious at the time and I was just falling about laughing at the fact that anybody would pack in that way. And the fact that the person who may have picked up the bag thinking they got a pair of shoes, he’d actually got two left shoes.
Gabriel: Joe, it was two left shoes and two left pedals?
Joe: Yeah, I think the left pedals were in there as well. It made me need two pairs of shoes and two pairs of pedals, unfortunately. And most things aren’t so easy to find in Rwanda, it turns out. It took us some time.
Gabriel: I think it’s a good advice to balance your bags, but I’ve never heard of such an extreme. That was a really funny moment in the book.
Jacqui: So we were both without cycling shoes for a while and we were both without other things. But actually, like all adventures, often when something goes wrong, it seems really bad at the time. But looking back, it meant that we had to spend a chunk of time in Kigali, which is a fabulous city, by the way, so much to see there, and got to know Rwanda a little bit before we set off. And I think in hindsight, it was a good thing.
Joe: And given our lack of planning, it was an opportunity to go and get yellow fever injections and to try and find the anti-malarials in some of the places that you mentioned earlier.
Gabriel: Yeah, okay, there we go. That’s a good call. On the podcast, we’ve briefly touched on Rwanda being a fantastic place for cycling in the episode, “The Pedaling Polyglot” with Roger Levy. Can you just tell a little bit about the experience? Because in the book, it comes through that you’re quite charmed with the country, despite, of course, the terrible history and the genocide that is still felt today. And it’s 30 years ago that it happened.
Jacqui: That’s right. It was 30 years, 2024, yeah, just after we’d left. So it’s still very real in the minds of the people, especially the people our age. But in terms of cycling, everybody’s on bikes. So that in itself is a really good thing because everybody chats to you, everybody chases you, everybody races you. You’re never on your own cycling through Rwanda. I guess the other thing is it’s not called the “land of a thousand hills” for nothing. And in fact, we think it’s probably an underestimation of the amount of hills. You’re either going uphill or downhill. And the climb out, I think it’s a category one climb out of the city of Kigali. So like when we set off for real, that first day was just a crazy, crazy climb. But the scenery is spectacular. The people smile and shout “muraho” all of the time and wave and want to chat.
Joe: Muraho is the formal or respectful way of saying hello in Kinyarwanda, which is the national language of Rwanda.
Jacqui: It’s colourful. It’s green. We don’t tend to think of Africa as green, but Rwanda is really green. We were just meeting interesting people and seeing interesting places there today. Just going back to the genocide, because I don’t want to just skip over that, we visited the Genocide Museum and I have to say I don’t think we spoke for about two hours after coming out of there. The history is very traumatic, but the country has managed to put that behind them and build on that positively. I think, yeah, the people have moved on to some extent, although when you speak to people of our generations, their stories come out. People don’t tend to share very openly. It’s only when you spend time with them and get to know them, they share the stories.
Joe: We had a few instances while we were in Rwanda where we spent a day or two with people of our generation and they did open up and the stories are quite impactful. It’s unbelievable. People lost entire families, parents, siblings, uncles, aunties, children within that 100 days.
Jacqui: Spending time with local families and really learning about the culture and their love of nature and the outdoors and the environment. We walked up Mount Bisoke and were at the top with a bunch of geology students. I think you had been taught to dance overlooking the volcano, which was a fantastic experience.
Joe: So we had an interesting experience in Rwanda. Rwanda is pretty well-known around the world for gorillas. And while we were in that part of Rwanda, in the Northwest, we thought, let’s go and do a walk – and this was the Mount Bisoke walk Jacqui just mentioned – to see if we get lucky and see gorillas. So we weren’t doing an official gorilla trek. A gorilla trek in Rwanda two years ago cost a thousand US dollars a person. And we were traveling for a year. So we didn’t want to spend that sort of money. So we did this organized hike. We didn’t see gorillas. We had a great hike. About a week later, we were in Uganda. We’d just crossed the border and we were cycling up into Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, which is one of the other places in the world you can see gorillas, if you’re lucky. We were on this dirt road at about two and a half thousand meters elevation, riding through a jungle. And there was no one else around. And we were just talking about whether the next day we were going to pay to go gorilla trekking in Uganda. And gorilla trekking in Uganda cost about 700 US dollars a person. So it’s cheaper, but still very expensive. We’re having this conversation and then I heard a noise in the jungle. And I said to Jacqui, “Did you hear that?” And she said, “Hear what?” I said, “Listen again. I think I can hear gorillas.” We were riding in the direction of the noise. So we kept riding. And then when we got close enough, we got off our bikes and we’re looking into the jungle. We couldn’t see the gorillas, but we could hear noises.
Jacqui: And we could see men.
Joe: And we could see some men. Yeah, we could see some colorful shirts. We got in our bikes and rode again. And then I think it was the second or third time we did this. Some men came running out of the jungle and said, “What are you doing here? Do you know it’s illegal to trick gorillas in Uganda without a permit?”
Jacqui: To track gorillas.
Joe: We said, “Sorry, we didn’t know that. And we’re not tracking gorillas. We’re just cycling through this national park and be heard noises. And we just wanted to see where it was.” And one of the men said to Jacqui, “Are you planning to see gorillas while you’re here in Uganda?” And we said, “We’re not sure. It’s very expensive. We might.” And they said, “Would you like to see gorillas now?” And Jacqui almost couldn’t contain herself.
Jacqui: I was like, “Yes, absolutely!”
Joe: So the men said, “Well, you’ll have to pay us.” We negotiated a price that was a lot, a lot, a lot less than 700 US dollars each.
Jacqui: It’s still a lot.
Joe: Still a lot of money for people in Uganda. And they said, “OK, quickly.” Let’s get our bikes off the road and we’ll hide them in the jungle. So they helped us carry our bikes off the road. And we hid them behind some bushes. And then they said, “Quick, come with us.” So we just chased after them. We took our phones with us. Jacqui took a passport. I forgot to bring my passport, my wallet, money. I brought nothing. It was all on the bike.
Jacqui: And then after 10 minutes following them, I was suddenly going, this is a really bad idea. What were we thinking? Well, suddenly all my fears of getting kidnapped had come to reality. And I just walked straight into this trap. This is completely crazy. And I was really, my heart was pounding. I was thinking, oh, what have you done? And then suddenly the guy turned around and he’s like, “Stop!” And we stood back and he moved the branch out of the way. And suddenly there was this big female gorilla sitting there, munching leaves. It was just the most amazing thing.
Joe: And he really did step back and move out of the way and say, “Just take your time.” And after five minutes or so, we thought he might try and tell us that that was it. And take us back to our bikes. But he said, “Keep coming.” And we followed him some more. And then he pulled back another branch and asked us to step through. And then there was a silverback, another female, and a couple of babies all just playing. And it was just… looking in their eyes as like nothing else. So yeah, it was an amazing experience. And a great way to see them without a big tour.
Jacqui: A real, real experience. And I think the trackers were really good as well. I did make sure they showed us the way back to the bikes before we gave them any money.
Gabriel: They’re like, “Bikes? What bikes? You didn’t come here on bikes.”
Joe: Exactly.
Jacqui: Obviously those sort of experiences don’t happen every day. But something does happen most days. There was rarely a day went past when we didn’t have something to write home about that was incredible. Whether it was a person we met or some scenery or different food that we experienced. There was always some opportunity to say, “Wow!”
Joe: I was just thinking it was around that time when we’d been discussing a lot whether it was okay to give money to children when they ask you for money. I mean, anyone who’s traveled a lot in Africa or East Africa in particular will know that children are always usually excited to see us and they’ll always yelling out “muzungu, muzungu” when they see you and…
Jacqui: Running after you.
Joe: Running after you.
Jacqui: Muzungu is a Bantu term used to describe white people in Central and Eastern Africa. The word muzungu originates from Kiswahili and roughly translates to “someone who roams around aimlessly,” originally referring to European explorers.
Joe: And we’d just been talking about whether it was okay to give children money and a lot of the advice is that it’s a bad idea. We agreed with that advice, it’s a bad idea, but we made the mistake of thinking that our bikes, which were gravel bikes but even in a more of a traditional cycle touring setup, with panniers and 38-wide tires. So not, certainly not off-road machines. And we made the mistake of thinking we could ride the Congo-Nile Trail on these bikes and it wouldn’t be too hard.
Jacqui: Congo-Nile Trail is in Rwanda but sort of runs alongside the Congo border.
Joe: It was extremely hard. It was a four days or three days, and in the first day we realised that we were going to be just pushing our bikes up mountains all day. With heavy bikes it was really hard and we found ourselves with kids just wanting to help and push our bikes with us. And when we got to the top of one hill then a group of about five or six kids had been pushing our bikes with us for about an hour or two.
Jacqui: We’re very happy to get them money.
Joe: Very happy to give them any money we had.
Jacqui: Yeah, we changed our stance on that.
Gabriel: I don’t know if that’s the exact same place but there’s a picture in the book where kids are trying to help you as porters.
Jacqui: That’s right, that’s right. Or this one time where I was helping a kid and he was helping me. He was helping push his bike but he was carrying water so I put the water can on the back of the bike and then we pushed the bike together. So that was fabulous. There was other times on the Congo-Nile Trail. At one stage we were cycling along and this kid, actually quite a grown up kid, was like just running alongside us and it just seemed really bizarre. He ran for about a kilometer and kept chatting but it was unclear whether he was going to turn around and then all of a sudden we reached the bank of a river where there had been a bridge but it had just collapsed into the water and we just stood there thinking, oh, there’s no way we’re getting across this and the guy just picked up the bike and I think there was another kid as well and they just took our bikes and showed us where to cross and carried our bikes across. And again, we were quite happy to give them a little bit of cash because we wouldn’t have been able to get across on our own.
Gabriel: It definitely shows you’re out there. You know, there’s a high level of uncertainty with everything that’s going on but time and time again it turns out that people are kind and fair and happy and that’s I think one of the great things in your book, that you have so many positive encounters. I’d like to talk about one of those encounters, which was a deeper one that you have and I’m talking about Olivier. This is an amazing place, the Africa Rising Cycling Center, ARCC. This was fascinating. So can you first tell a little bit about the place and then how you met Olivier?
Joe: Sure. We just decided to stay at the Africa Rising Cycling Center after we found out that it was in a really good location just outside Musanze in the northwest of Rwanda, and it was where the professional cycling team has their home base. That’s where they trained, an where they had their mechanics in Rwanda.
Jacqui: Team Rwanda.
Joe: Yeah, and so we stayed there for a few days and that’s where we met Olivier. He was interning there for free in the school holidays while he was studying tourism. In Australia, we’d call it a TVET course. It’s like a…
Jacqui: Diploma of tourism.
Joe: Yeah, so he was studying for that and he was working at the Africa Rising Cycling Center and the staff at the ARCC suggested that Olivier could probably take us around and give us a tour of the local village and the local area if we wanted to. So we took them up on the offer and that’s how we first got to know Olivier. We got to know him over the course of the day. He’s such a lovely young man. He told us about the fact that he hadn’t been able to finish school. Like he was hoping to go on to study tourism at university but he hadn’t been able to do his last year at school because the person who’d been paying for his school fees could no longer pay. Over the course of the day, we sort of found out what the cost would be and I think simultaneously, because we were planning to climb Mount Bisoke the next day and the price that we were going to have to pay to climb Mount Bisoke was the equivalent to one term of his school fees. So I was like, well, I can’t climb Mount Bisoke and not cover the school fees. Yeah, we agreed to cover his school fees for the rest of the year. He was absolutely ecstatic. It seems like a long time ago now. We’re still in touch with Olivier every single week. He finished school. He’s now at university. We’re still helping to support him through university. We’re helping to support two other people at his school and it’s really been such a rewarding experience and Olivier feels a bit like one of the family now. I’m very, very excited. Actually, I’m going to Rwanda again at the end of May so I will be catching up with Olivier.
Gabriel: Okay, what’s taking you to Rwanda?
Jacqui: I’m actually going to Nairobi for a work conference. I’m going to pass by Rwanda on the way back so I can see Olivier. It’s too far to go to not go there.
Gabriel: That’s a cool story and I guess Olivier was lucky that you had that mindset that you can’t pay that money for the tourist attraction and not help him. He’s a fortunate man.
Jacqui: Yeah, when we often look back and we’re like, “Oh, was that set up?”
Gabriel: Was it set up? Really?
Jacqui: Was it set up in that way? Like, did the local people think, “Oh, if he talks to some…” We also think, well, even if it was, then I think it was a good outcome. It was a no-brainer for us. And in Uganda, we met some ladies who had actually set up a school. We’ve been promoting that as well. If other people are interested in supporting children to finish school, it’s a small contribution for somebody from Australia or probably Europe to make. And it can easily change the life of a child in Africa. So certainly worth considering.
Gabriel: Is that the Masaka Kids?
Jacqui: No, that’s another organization we visited. The Masaka Kids was something else. So that was an amazing experience. We were tipped off by an Irish traveler that we met and he said, “Oh, you should go.” That was Paul, wasn’t it? He said, “Go and visit the Masaka Kids.” And he gave us an introduction to the manager there. And that’s an orphanage that was set up by a gentleman who himself was on the street. As a result of a USAID project, actually, he was helped out of that situation and partly through music. And so he set up the Masaka Kids where he gets the children off the street but sort of teaches them to become musicians. They’re absolutely fabulous. They’re quite famous. They’ve got their own YouTube channel. We had a great welcome when we went there. It was my niece’s birthday and they livestreamed, like, “Happy Birthday,” dancing and singing to her. And it was just such a fantastic experience.
Gabriel: They went viral on TikTok.
Joe: Yeah, they’re amazing.
Jacqui: They are amazing, yeah. And again, we left there going, we would love to come back and spend time here and work here. And that’s certainly one of our goals since leaving Africa that we’d like to go back and spend some time working there.
Gabriel: That’s one of the things you mentioned, actually, about Uganda is the vast numbers of children who are out and once they see you, they get very excited and want to participate and interact.
Jacqui: The children were just amazing. You’d be riding past their school playground and one child will see you and they would come running and shouting and then all of the other kids come running up to the fence. And you just can’t help laughing. It’s just gorgeous. Such a lovely feeling. And we did find that when we got into Kenya, the child birth rate is much lower there. Kids are in school, so we missed the children even though some extent the peace was welcome. We did miss all the lively interactions with the children. And they like to try the bikes. We did occasionally let the kids try and ride your bike. Although Joe’s bike weighed 50 kilograms for the children. I think it was a little bit heavy, but they still like to give it a go.
Gabriel: Yeah, Joe, you took one for the team there. You had the bulk of the weight.
Joe: Jacqui’s bike was still about 30, 35 kilos, but cycle touring, you’re not in a hurry, so it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a bit of extra weight. Probably like all cycle tourists who embark on a long trip, we found that we were sending things home throughout the trip. Some of the first things we sent home were table and chairs.
Jacqui: Can you believe we set off with a table and chairs? That was how we changed.
Gabriel: We sent back the table, the chairs, the mini fridge. We sent back the microwave oven.
Jacqui: It only weighed two and a half kilos.
Joe: That wasn’t that heavy. But by the end of the trip, we got so used to not needing many things that we got to Zambia and we were coming into summer. We met a friend for a week or two in Zambia and then we sent home our sleeping bags, thinking it’s going to be December, January, and February. We’re not going to need sleeping bags in southern African summer. And that was okay until we got to the mountains in South Africa. And we had some really cold nights that were down around zero degrees and we regretted that.
Jacqui: We did regret that, yeah.
Gabriel: Yeah, the time of year is one thing, but the altitude is another thing.
Jacqui: It’s another thing. I mean, most of the year was on the bike, but we had a couple of non-cycling adventures. We had a break. We called it a break and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro when we were in Tanzania. We were not planning to climb it. It was just one of those things. The closer we got, we were like, “Oh, we can’t really just cycle past.”
Joe: Jacqui knows I can’t see a hill and not get up it.
Gabriel: You say hill, okay. Mount Kilimanjaro is the highest mountain in Africa. And people spend months training for it.
Jacqui: Yeah.
Gabriel: And you just took it on with no training whatsoever, except you’re triathletes.
Jacqui: Been riding a bike for a while.
Joe: I think anyone who’d been riding a bike for the last eight months almost every day could do it.
Jacqui: And we had been above 2,000 meters for quite a long time. We’d been in the Rift Valley.
Joe: Above the Rift Valley.
Gabriel: Yeah, I guess that’s your training.
Jacqui: I don’t want to make a joke of how hard it was. The last day, the last three or four hours, were really, really challenging. I think it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
Gabriel: Okay. So in that case, yeah.
Jacqui: Yeah. Maybe a little bit more training might have been helpful. But it was only the hardest thing we’d ever done until a couple of weeks later, when we were trying to ride up that hill.
Joe: Oh, Usambara Mountain.
Jacqui: Usambara Mountain.
Joe: That was pretty hard too.
Jacqui: Then Joe was like, “This is harder than climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.”
Gabriel: I haven’t been there myself, but what I’ve heard from people who’ve done it is, like with any high altitude scenario, nobody really knows how their body will react if they haven’t been at high altitude before. And on Kilimanjaro, it’s not even necessarily the fittest people who do the best, in the sense that on that last stretch, you’re getting up early, you have the altitude. And some people’s bodies just don’t cope very well with that, even though they may be very fit. You do describe how every step was a very concerted effort to just keep the legs moving. And that seems hard.
Joe: It is. It gives you some respect for people who trek in even higher mountains in South America and the Himalayas.
Gabriel: Yeah. The other thing that’s very noteworthy from your episode there is that it turns out that you were two people with a crew of 14.
Jacqui: Oh, that was just nuts. And they were a great crew. If anybody’s going to go there, we went with Solo Adventures. They were just fabulous. It was hard. We’re used to just looking after ourselves.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Jacqui: Having so many people looking after us was a little bit challenging.
Joe: And we actually didn’t know until we got there on Day One.
Jacqui: We assumed we’d be going with other people.
Joe: Yeah.
Gabriel: Sure. I’ve just tried to visualize it. It’s a totally crazy scenario.
Jacqui: Completely crazy.
Gabriel: There’s the two of you and 14 people around like, “Oh, I’m the tent setup person.”
Jacqui: Yeah. They’ve got the tent setup. You’ve got your toilet. They’ve got a kitchen tent. They’ve got the tent for all of them to sleep in. And they’re carrying it all up. I did joke, that I hoped they’d carry a bottle of wine up for me. And they said, no, that wasn’t going to happen. It is a phenomenal experience. It’s also a little bit confronting.
Gabriel: In which way?
Jacqui: In the sense of being in such a privileged position that you get to climb a mountain. And these people are all… I mean, it’s good for them in terms of employment. And they love it. They love what they’re doing. But I think it just highlights the differences.
Joe: Yeah, inequality.
Gabriel: Yeah. I think that happens all over the world where you have local people who are just carrying massive amounts of weight up this mountain. Any mountain, it can be in the Andes or it can be in the Himalayas. And yeah, they’re local people. They earn very little money. And they’re just incredible.
Jacqui: No, it is completely incredible. And their energy and their knowledge of the ecosystem was actually incredible as well.
Gabriel: I want to talk to you about another amazing episode in a country we haven’t talked about yet: Malawi. When I bicycle, I sweat a lot. And there’s nothing I hate more than just being attacked by insects. And they get on your body and they’re everywhere. And in the book, you describe what to me is one of the scariest things. I mean, there’s lions, there’s hippos, there’s elephants. They’re all scary. But when you describe this swarm, this cloud of insects coming at you, that was maybe one of the most terrifying moments that I felt. Can you talk about that?
Jacqui: Well, that was Lake Malawi.
Joe: Yeah.
Jacqui: Yeah. That was just incredible. And we had just got off the bike. So we were really hot and sweaty. We’re just starting to put the tent up for the day. And then we saw this, what we thought was like a big plume of smoke over the lake. And we thought something must be on fire, but we couldn’t see the fire. And we watched it for a while. And then gradually the wind changed. And this plume of smoke, or what we thought was smoke, sort of came towards us. And then suddenly we were engulfed in this cloud and then realized it wasn’t smoke at all. It was tiny insects.
Joe: Yeah. And the insects completely covered us. You had to turn away and cover your mouth and eyes because there were millions of them.
Jacqui: As quickly as we were covered in these flies, the wind was blowing and then they disappeared. And I think you fell asleep. And I was just lying there going, what just happened there? So I looked it up and discovered that this phenomenon was the lake flies. And it only happens a couple of times a year when their larvae hatches from the water and these flies all emerge. But what’s really, really cool is that the locals see it as a source of protein. When this happens, they all gather around and they get their pans or buckets or other implements and put water on the bottom so that they can sweep the air to catch the flies. And then they make fly burgers and have a feast, which is just incredible. I mean, it doesn’t seem very appetizing to me, but I know it’s a really important source of protein. Just such a cool phenomenon. I’m really lucky to witness that.
Gabriel: Yeah, an amazing thing. Another time I had to laugh out loud. You crossed Lake Malawi on this MV Ilala, which has been slowly making its way up and down the lake since 1951.
Joe: The same boat, yeah.
Gabriel: Based on your other choices, I’m a little surprised that you chose to do that. What made you take this – I don’t know, “cruise” seems like a bit of a generous word – but take this boat journey in the first place?
Joe: Early in the trip, because we’d crossed a few stretches of water, we’d crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, we’d crossed between islands in Croatia, for example. We decided in our minds that the trip was a bikes-and-boats trip. So when there’s an opportunity to go from the top to the bottom of Lake Malawi on the MV Ilala, we thought that was a fantastic idea because we’d get a different experience.
Gabriel: Yes, yes, it was.
Jacqui: We’d read that it was an experience, but I don’t think we were quite ready for how challenging and interesting it was.
Joe: Yeah, you wouldn’t believe you could fit that many people on a boat and that much produce. Three nights, three nights, four days, we were on the boat, and there were only six cabins on the boat, so we had a cabin for the first night and the last night, but there was no available cabins in the middle might. We said, that’s fine. They told us you can just sleep on the top deck in first class, which we thought sounds fancy.
Gabriel: Sounds good.
Joe: Yeah. The cabins we had for the first and last night were extremely basic. Like extremely, extremely basic. I think there were three toilets on the boat for what must have been, I don’t know, a thousand people.
Jacqui: Yeah.
Joe: And in the middle night, when we didn’t have a cabin, the ship’s captain advised us that we should just pitch our tent on the top deck.
Jacqui: To make sure we had enough space.
Joe: Yeah, so we did. We took the advice and then a few hours later, we regretted it because there were so many people. It was almost like you couldn’t walk along the top deck because there were just bodies everywhere. And then we felt like, you know, we were taking more than our fair share of the space because we had this tent. The good thing was by the time we woke up in the morning, there were people in both of the vestibules asleep as well. We didn’t steal too much of the space. But we met a lot of people on that ship and had an amazing time. At one point when we had the cabin, there was a lady, young lady who was spending a lot of time sort of lying down just outside the door to our cabin on the ground. And she had a baby with her. And I gave her a bit of food at one stage and had a bit of a conversation. I asked about her baby and how old the baby was. And she said the baby was three days old.
Jacqui: Coming home from hospital.
Joe: Yeah. And this was two or three days on the boat sleeping on the ground with the baby. And she didn’t really have any food from what I could tell.
Jacqui: No. I mean, for us, it was an adventure and something we chose to do. And it was really tough. But for the people who lived there, it’s their only way of getting from one place to another. And the only way of carrying their cargo and selling the food.
Gabriel: I would picture that the boat would then get into a harbor or a pier of some kind. But that turned out not to even be the case at times.
Joe: That’s right. I think out of the 12 or 14 stops it makes from the top to the bottom of the lake, only three of them have a working port or pier. For all the other ones, they stop 300 or 400 meters offshore. And there are really small boats that ferry people and produce to and from the boat. The loading and unloading at every one of these stops can take hours.
Gabriel: If I got the notes right, it was during this boat ride that the name for the book, Two Bugs on Bikes, arose.
Jacqui: Yeah. That was Harold. He was the second captain of the ship. We ended up chatting and I was writing my journal. I didn’t know it was going to be a book at that time. But he was just super interested in reading what I was writing. We stayed in touch. I sent him the summary of the chapter on Tanzania and that was where he came up with the title Two Bugs. You’ll have read the story about that in the book. I won’t share that now because it’s something that readers can find out when they read the book.
Gabriel: Okay. Yeah, it’s interesting. The second captain of the MV Ilala.
Jacqui: He’s now the captain of the ship.
Gabriel: Oh, okay.
Jacqui: Yeah. We write to each other.
Gabriel: He got promoted.
Jacqui: And it’s incredible to have so many friends that we’ve kept in touch with from our travels through Africa.
Joe: You know something else that always strikes me? When we spoke to people back home, they thought it was insane that you could just ride a bicycle through a national park in Africa. Before we’d gone there, we wouldn’t have even considered that that was the thing that anyone could do. Like that would just be crazy because there’s big animals in African national parks. But it turns out when you get there, not everywhere, but in a lot of places, you can just ride your bike through a national park. The first time we did it outside of Bwindi Impenetrable Forest and some other ones that have just got primates, the first time we decided to ride through a national park. And it was Queen Elizabeth in Uganda.
Jacqui: In Uganda, yep.
Joe: Jacqui and I had quite a bit of a debate about it beforehand because I was of the opinion that if we were allowed to do it, it must mean it was safe. And Jacqui was of the opinion that there are a lot of things that you’re allowed to do in Africa that aren’t safe, like have three people on a motorbike without helmets. In hindsight, Jacqui was probably right. But nevertheless, it really is an unusual feeling riding into a national park on a dirt road in Africa. And you’re on bicycles.
Jacqui: It’s fabulous. But I was always quite relieved when I got to the other side. I was always like, okay, we’ve done that now. We don’t need to do that again. But then invariably, we ended up doing something similar. But our first encounter with an elephant was actually quite scary. It felt like we’d seen all of the other animals. We’d been off the main road in Queen Elizabeth National Park and cycled down to this fantastic little fishing village and sat watching all the fishermen while we had our sandwiches, then rode back through the village. And I remember that a DJ sort of playing music and then he was like, “This is Africa!” And I was cycling along and going, this is amazing. And then we came out off that side road onto the main road. And then all of a sudden, there was just like an elephant. It was just there in front of us way too close as we’d come around a corner. And it was looking at us and it was flapping his ears. And it was the most terrifying thing ever. And it wasn’t even a big elephant. I think it was an angry juvenile elephant. But we were like backing up going, oh, this is not where we need to be. You’re not supposed to get in that danger zone. And we’re clearly in this danger zone. But then three men on a motorbike rocked up and they’re like, “Come on. Follow us.” We couldn’t get going quick enough to follow them at time. And then the elephant, they actually ran up there and all we were like watching go, oh, and then they just jumped off their bike and they all just ran towards the elephant waving sticks and the elephant trotted off and we cycled off. I think it was about an hour later, Joe went to me, “Can you slow down?” And I was still running trying to escape from the elephant. Took me a while to sort of remind myself that it was better to just like cycle slowly through the national park. That I wasn’t going to outrun the elephant or anything else anyway. So I should just calm down.
Joe: I know in one of your other podcasts, you’ve interviewed someone and talked about the Elephant Highway in Botswana. And that was certainly our experience. We spent a couple of weeks on the Elephant Highway. You see elephants all the time. And Jacqui had this funny thing where she could spot an elephant from kilometers away. And as soon as she spotted the elephant, she would just start freewheeling. And I’d say, “What’s going on?” And she’d say, “Yeah, there’s an elephant up ahead.” And I said, “We’re not going to get there for 10 minutes.”
Gabriel: So the episode you’re referring to is the “Tour d’ Afrique” with Henry Gold, where he actually mentions the Elephant Highway, and this person had not seen any elephants on the Elephant Highway. But then they were in India. And there’s an elephant. The elephant actually attacks Henry. Henry is very, very lucky to survive that elephant attack. So it’s real.
Jacqui: It is We laugh about it now, but we were very, very careful in terms of how you approach elephants. We would always try and make sure if they were near the road that we were cycling past at the same time as there was a truck coming the other way. So we were far enough away, or we would hang back. But the reality is they were scared of us. Like the trucks and cars would be flying past and the elephants would just sort of stand there and then they’d see us and they’d turn around and run into the bushes. And I don’t know whether it was because we wore orange.
Gabriel: And you were shooting flares.
Joe: If we had them we would have. I think to the point in your other podcast, the most dangerous situation is when you surprise them.
Jacqui: Yeah, right.
Joe: That’s what we did the first time. And we met other travelers in Africa who had surprised elephants and came off second best trying to get away from them.
Jacqui: Yeah. But going back to the Elephant Highway, that’s where we ran into the Tour d’ Afrique vans. And that was at a place called Elephant Sands in Botswana.
Gabriel: When I was reading the book, I of course was surprised that you met an old friend of the podcast in TDA Global Cycling. But it was actually just the bus that you met as they were driving from Cape Town to Kigali to meet the cyclists. So that was interesting. You got to see the staff off duty.
Jacqui: That’s right. We didn’t meet the cyclists, but we did meet the chef.
Gabriel: That’s important.
Jacqui: And we met Chantal, who was the manager. And I mean, a really great conversation with her and she was telling me about when she’d cycled from Cairo to Cape Town. And I think it was 2003 and she’d done it solo. So not with the group that Henry was talking about. So that must have been an incredible ordeal. I think a lot of the roads that we were cycling on wouldn’t have been there at all then. So it would have been mainly off road. And it was when you could get through through Egypt and Sudan.
Joe: Sudan and Ethiopia, yeah.
Jacqui: Because there are a few people still doing it, but most people are not trying to cycle through that at the moment. A lot of people seem to be doing what we did and starting from Kigali. Kigali to Cape Town’s become the new Cairo to Cape Town.
Gabriel: Right. Yeah. Sudan is a deep, deep red on your Australian app.
Jacqui: Absolutely. Yeah. And I don’t do the reds. Reds and oranges are off limits for me.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Jacqui: It’s such a shame. I hope we’ll live to see a day when those couches are open again.
Gabriel: Yeah. Just thinking about the comparison. And of course, the people who’ve done the ride, it’s an achievement for them as well. But so different to do it in an organized setting with a chef, a medic, Chantal, compared to you, just doing it on your own, which is incredible. So you probably thought about that when you saw the bus and the differences in the experiences.
Jacqui: Yeah. We thought about it then. And we’ve spoken about it since. And I think there’s different ways of travelling for different people.
Gabriel: Sure.
Jacqui: I think for Joe, you love doing all the planning.
Joe: Some people are into the detail and the planning and like the idea of being able to change direction. If you get a tip that there’s something really great to see if you turn left here, that’s what I like doing. I think going on an organized tour is awesome if you want the comfort of having someone make sure that your visas are going to be OK and that you’re going to have a place to sleep every night.
Gabriel: Well, and having the medic is huge.
Joe: It is huge. And I think something we talked a lot about the fact that a lot of cycle tourists can really go for the wild camping all the time. And whilst we love wild camping, we’re not that great at it.
Jacqui: We think we love it. But we haven’t had that many good experiences. I think it’s just got to be the right environment. Some people can wild camp anywhere. Do you want to mention Clive, who we met?
Joe: Oh, yeah. We met a friend of a friend from Australia. We were in Turkey and Jacqui had been in touch with one of our good friends back in Australia. And he’d said, “I’ve got a mate named Clive who’s cycling out of Turkey. He’s going the opposite direction to you guys. I wonder if you’ll run into him. Here’s his details.” And then one day randomly Clive messages Jacqui and says, “Hey, you guys must be in Turkey by now. Where are you?” We were in a small town called Vize. And he said, “No way! I’m just rode into Vize.” Anyway, we met him that night.
Jacqui: He was camping out in a service station and we were staying in an ecolodge. And he was like, I’m not going there. I’m not cycling down that hill. He’ll have to come up the hill.
Joe: So Clive cycled up this big hill and he camped outside our ecolodge for the night. But the interesting thing about Clive is that Clive…
Jacqui: He welcomed the shower.
Joe: Yeah, he had a great shower. Clive talked a lot about all the places he camped and he really relished camping in crazy places. Like he talked about the previous week he’d camped on the island in the middle of three motorways. And he talked about camping in like the drainage ditch underneath a motorway. And there’s no way I could get Jacqui to do that, let alone wanting to do that myself. So a lot of respect for people who are up for that.
Jacqui: And we did try the next night after meeting Clive. We were like, oh, we’re going to give it another go. And we found this park and we were thinking we’d wild camp there and then we got there and we couldn’t find any water. And there was stray dogs and there were no views. So we both just looked at each other and we were like, oh, can we just keep going? And the other thing is, like if you’re going to wild camp, I mean, people make it sound so glamorous. But really, like if you’re going to wild camp somewhere where you don’t want crowds of people to come and hang out and watch you, then you kind of have to wait till it’s nearly dark. We didn’t always want to keep cycling till it was nearly dark. We often wanted to back up before that. But we gave it a go. But then for the rest of the trip, every time we saw a drainage pipe or something, we tucked down and we go, hey, Clive. You in there, Clive?
Gabriel: Come out of there, Clive.
Jacqui: Our hat’s off to Clive. He’s awesome. And we stayed in touch and he came to my book launch and he’s an absolutely great guy. But he did provide some amusement for us.
Gabriel: He slept under the desk after the book launch. My experience with wild camping, it’s like anything else. If you do it often enough, you’re going to have pretty much the full range of experiences. There are nights that are just magical. And these are the ones that Instagram makes you believe will happen every night. But…
Joe: Doesn’t happen every day?
Gabriel: No, the truth is, if you’re camping, wild camping, there could be so many things that go wrong. There could be a place that seems totally secluded and suddenly a bunch of people show up and you realize there’s not a good place suddenly for you to camp there.
Joe: I remember when we were lying in bed on our tent one night and we were looking at the Cairo to Cape Town WhatsApp group and another traveler who was in Uganda at the same time was recounting a story of what had happened to him just that night. He’d ridden through a village and into a game reserve and pitched his tent and…
Jacqui: I think they offered for him to stay.
Joe: They offered him to stay in the village. And he said, “I prefer nature. So I kept riding through the village and I found a nice open area with no trees and I pitched my tent.” And it wasn’t till dusk that he realized he’d pitched next to a waterhole and all of the big animals were coming to drink at the waterhole. And then after dark, there was an animal walking around his tent and he realized when he saw the silhouette there was a lion. And it came back to multiple times during the night. He told the story and then said, I’m writing this message on the group to warn all you other travelers not to make that mistake. Wild camping can be awesome but it can also be a little bit…
Jacqui: A little bit nerve wracking. We did have some amazing wild camping experiences as well but they were few and far between.
Gabriel: I also noticed in the book that you enjoy describing the different places where you stayed. You’ve really researched a lot because you seem to find some very nice places. And when I say nice, I don’t mean necessarily fancy, but with very friendly hosts and in nice locations. Compared to other books, I feel like you very carefully describe your accommodations and you give some names and it makes me want to go to these places. And also food. You tell sometimes quite in detail about the food that you ate. So I found that to be very enticing.
Jacqui: Well, we love food.
Gabriel: It comes through.
Jacqui: I work on food policies. So I love finding about food in different places. Starting with the accommodation, we did research a lot and we found fabulous places. I mean, we camped a hundred nights out of the year. So we camped a lot. But we also found that especially in Morocco and Africa and Turkey, like actually staying in guest houses with families was for us a really good way of getting to know the local people and having a richer experience. Often if you stay in the local villages or you do wild camping, the people that you meet are less likely to be able to speak English. So yeah, staying in the guest houses was fabulous. And there’s some amazing places, especially in Africa. We learned that actually it was possible to stay with community projects and that by staying with the community projects, which are often food projects or about health and education, we could learn a lot more about the local culture and also give back a little bit and support those projects too. And many of them we’ve stayed in touch with since we left and still have connections with. And in terms of food, oh, it was fabulous. It was just an ongoing, like a traveling feast. Whichever country we’re in, we’re trying to cook the local cuisine on the camping stove as well. So we were doing paella in Spain and soups.
Gabriel: OK, OK.
Jacqui: In Bulgaria.
Gabriel: Now I gotta interrupt you right there. You know, my father was Spanish and he took paella – let’s say the Spanish way.
Jacqui: Paella, paella.
Gabriel: Paella.
Joe: Jacqui should know that.
Jacqui: I did live in Spain.
Joe: Jacqui lived in Spain and she speaks Spanish, so she should know that.
Gabriel: Okay, well then paella. Yes, he takes it very seriously, or he took it very seriously. He’s passed now. And so when I saw the descriptions and I think even a photo….
Jacqui: It’s an excellent paella. That was your chorizo paella.
Gabriel: Oh, the chorizo paella. Joe with the chorizo paella on the camp stove. There it is. You know, I think it is theoretically possible to make paella on a cooking stove, but you know, I’m a little skeptical. I have to admit it.
Joe: It’s potentially more like a risotto, if I’m honest.
Jacqui: An Italian risotto.
Gabriel: Did you stir?
Jacqui: He did.
Joe: Yeah.
Gabriel: You’re not supposed to stir!
Joe: See, we didn’t read that.
Jacqui: We didn’t have a big enough pan.
Gabriel: That’s then a risotto. You have made risotto. You have not made paella.
Jacqui: We made risotto. I might have to update the book now.
Joe: Print on demand.
Jacqui: Yes, print on demand. But we tried.
Gabriel: You tried.
Jacqui: In Africa, obviously, tying the different local foods there was fantastic. And one of my favorite evenings was when we stayed in this really remote village in Zambia. It took us forever to find the guest house in the first place. It was in the middle of nowhere. And then we found the guest house. But we asked if they had food. The lady basically said she could cook us ncima, which is their mealy pap.
Joe: Ugali.
Jacqui: Ugarli in other countries. It’s this ground maize that is the staple of a lot of East African meals. And it’s great as an accompaniment to other things, but it’s not really a meal on. So I said we just happened to have a few vegetables that were in our bags. So I said, “Could you cook these for me as well?” And she said, “Actually, I don’t know how to cook them. Could you cook those? And I’ll cook the mealy pap and we’ll share.” And I said, “Yeah, that sounds great.” We sat down and she brought the traditional stove over and made the mealy pap. And I set up our camping stove to cook the tomatoes and eggplant. I think I had and something else. As we were sitting there cooking another lady walked past and said, “Would you like some chicken with that meal?” Joe and I looked at each other and we were very protein-starved that day. We’re like, “Chicken, that would be fabulous. Yeah, we’d love some chicken.” We didn’t really think it through. The lady said, “Follow me.” And I went to the other end of the village and she sent somebody off. And they came back about 10 minutes later and they just handed me our live chicken. And I’m a farmer’s daughter, so I should be able to handle this. But it’s so, I just looked at it and I went, “What am I going to do with that? Could you, could you maybe, can you help me out?” So, yeah, for an extra dollar, they took the chicken away and bought it back in a better condition for cooking. Yeah, we cooked the chicken and ended up sharing it with the family who was helping us cook as well. It was just a fabulous, fabulous evening.
Gabriel: What a great experience. Good thing they didn’t say beef.
Jacqui: There’s no fridges.
Joe: No electricity.
Jacqui: Or electricity there. So, it was obviously going to be a live chicken.
Gabriel: Right. Well, it was very, very fresh meat. All that’s left to talk about now, we at least need to cover the last part of your journey, which was Namibia and South Africa. Very different, you said.
Jacqui: Yeah. When people ask me, like, “What were your favorite places to go in Africa?” But I would say Rwanda, number one, and Namibia, number two. They’re both just spectacular for very different reasons. I think we were really nervous about riding in Namibia. We were starting to run out of time. We only had one year off work and we literally flew back the day before we had to start work. We didn’t allow ourselves very long at all. Yeah, we had to sort of set times to get across the Namibian desert and we always said we could always jump in a truck if we needed. We didn’t really see any trucks, we could have jumped in. We definitely had some of the hardest days of our life there. But we also had, I remember at one stage, like three nights in a row, like just sleeping out under the stars. And the skies are just incredible, aren’t they? Really incredible.
Joe: We were there in January. That’s the middle of summer in Namibia. And although I’m Australian and I love the heat, it was too hot for me and it was too hot for Jacqui. I’m not sure that January is the best time for you to cycle through the Namibian desert.
Jacqui: I think it’s always hot.
Joe: Yeah, Namibia has got some spectacular landscapes, really, really spectacular landscapes. And cycling near the Namibian desert, where there’s a whole big section that’s a light conservancy, so there’s no artificial light. Like Jacqui said, sleeping outside the tent just on the ground at night and looking up at the stars is unbelievable.
Jacqui: Yeah, but we had a couple of times when we ran out of water and food and energy. And one particularly funny night was, and this is in the book, was when we got through the desert and we kind of heard that there was this guest house, but there wasn’t really much information about it. And then we got there and there was just nobody there at all. We were sort of hanging out and then this old guy in this battered car drove past and goes, “What do you want?” And we’re like, “We’re looking for somewhere to stay.” And he goes, “We’re closed. You can’t stay here.” And Joe was just, he was so over it. He was getting back on his bike, but it was 30 kilometers to the next town and we had no water and it was really hot and it was off-road. And I just said to the guy, “Look, we’re busted. We’ve got pretty much what we need. We’re self-sufficient. We just need water and some way to hang out for a little while.” He goes, “Where are you guys from?” We said, “We’re Australian.” He went, “Nothing good ever came out of Australia.” And we’re just like, “Look, we’d heard that Namibian farmers were really friendly.” He was like, “I’m going for three hours. And if you’re still here when I come back, we’ll have another conversation.” Yeah, we were still there lying on his porch. He came back and it took a while, but eventually he warmed up. I think it was vodka, wasn’t it? I think he brought out some vodka and we had a few vodka and Cokes. We ended up having the funniest nights. And it turned out that the two of you bonded.
Joe: We did bond. He went back five generations and explained that his ancestor was Scottish and was on a convict ship bound for Australia when the ship got wrecked off the Cape of Good Hope. And his ancestor and one other prisoner escaped from the ship, managed to make it to shore and survived, lived in South Africa for a while and then eventually got chased across the border when they stole from a farmer into Namibia, ended up on the farm that he still owns. So yeah, he was a nearly Australian. Yeah, so we spent 10 days off-road in Namibia, really challenging but really beautiful and then we crossed into South Africa and finished at the Cape of Good Hope. We were on the last few kilometers of our ride to the Cape of Good Hope and a family of ostriches ran onto the road right in between us. So I was in front of them and Jacqui was behind them and they just ran with us for, I don’t know, maybe a kilometer.
Jacqui: I was hanging back, videoing them, thinking this could go wrong at any time. But at the same time thinking, how cool is this? We’ve cycled 18,000 kilometers and this is our last kilometer and we get escorted by a bunch of ostriches. It felt pretty cool because nobody else there thought we were special. Like we were queuing up for photos, nobody else had got off the bus, nobody else realized we’d cycled 18,000 kilometers.
Gabriel: Right, but you knew that you had.
Joe: We knew.
Jacqui: We knew that we had.
Gabriel: Yeah, that’s an amazing finish to an amazing journey to be escorted by ostriches, which is so nicely captured in the book.
Jacqui: Writing the book in itself was just like a continuation of the adventure for me. Other people are riding and have the opportunity to write just in terms of both capturing and paying more attention to what you see but then also like reliving all of the experiences.
Gabriel: The situation that I personally could relate to from my time on the road, you’re on Mallorca and you are able to on some hill catch up with and pass some people on road bikes.
Joe: It’s the best feeling.
Jacqui: It was the best feeling because it was me and it was men on road bikes. So that was good. I guess we haven’t completely lost our competitive spirit from the days of triathlon even though we’re trying to become more placid cycle tourists. Yeah, it’s good to put the pedal down sometimes and give it a go.
Gabriel: Yeah, and afterwards they talk to you and you write, “They explained how far they had cycled that day, making excuses for being beaten on the climb by a girl on a touring bike.” Full disclosure, I also have a road bike and I sometimes get into tight-fitting clothes. I am part of both worlds and I just know that if you’re on a road bike and you see somebody with this heavily laden bicycle catching up to you, you will just summon every ounce of strength to not be overtaken.
Jacqui: Let’s hope we could keep that level of fitness. I’d also just like to mention that anybody buys a book, all of the money that they pay minus the printing cost goes to support health and education projects in Africa. And that was something we decided to do just to keep that story going if you like. And I know at the moment we’re in touch with the Zimba mission that we stayed with in Zambia and we’re about to make a donation of $500 based on money actually that’s from my book sales, and I know that that’s going towards building a house for a family in Zimba and it’s a family that we’ve visited while we were there. It’s great to be able to do that. We hope that eventually this all lead to bigger projects.
Gabriel: Well, that’s an extra motivation to purchase the book. It’s going towards a good cause. You’re giving back so much, which is also amazing.
Jacqui: Thank you.
Gabriel: You were lucky enough to be able to both take a year off of work and come back to your same jobs. Although Jacqui, I read in the epilogue you actually ended up quitting that job after you got back.
Jacqui: Yeah.
Gabriel: I have to say, that’s pretty cool that you were able to come back to those jobs, because many people have to make the choice to quit the job if they want to take a year off.
Jacqui: Yeah, we both decided that we were going to do this and we were prepared to quit if we needed to. But we both fortunately work with very progressive organisations. I like to think we’re valued enough for our work to allow us to take a year off and come back again. And we have this amazing thing in Australia called long service leave. So when you’ve been in a place more than 10 years you get an additional holiday pay and we were able to take advantage of that as well. But yeah, coming back was surprising in many ways. Joe got a promotion while he was away. How does that happen?
Gabriel: Joe, you do your best work when you’re not there.
Joe: That’s what they told me.
Jacqui: And yeah, I got back and just having time away from that work environment realized that I had an identity outside of my work life. Just gave me the strength and the courage to say actually it’s time for something different now. I’d been in my organization for 18 years and when I got back everything wasn’t quite how I wanted it to be. So I was like, it’s time for a change and it’s been a great thing for me. So I’m very happy in my new role and my work.
Gabriel: Oh, good.
Joe: We are looking ahead to the next really, really big trip in a few years time. We’re planning to go to the Americas and do something very long.
Gabriel: Oh, if you’re gone for that long, Joe, by the time you get back you’ll be president of the company where you work.
Joe: I hope so.
Gabriel: You celebrated your 52nd birthday on the road, right, Jacqui?
Jacqui: Yeah.
Gabriel: How do you think that experience was different from if you had done this trip in your earlier years?
Jacqui: It’s a really good question and I did travel a lot when I was younger but in a different way of course. When I was 20 years old I went and worked in India on my own and I went and traveled in El Salvador. When I was younger I was a lot less confident and secure in my sense of who I was. When you’re traveling you’re more likely to sort of go along with the crowd rather than looking for unique experiences that are true to you. So I think that was one big difference. Would you want to add anything?
Joe: Yeah, the only thing I would add is that a lot of people expect that you go on a trip like that and it completely changes who you are. My experience is that that might have happened if I’d been a really young person. I’d have set me on a different path in life but I think the age we were at, I feel like our values were already pretty well set and it was just an amazing experience and it certainly changed the way I interact with people and it changes my worldview just a little bit but I don’t think it’s changed who I am.
Gabriel: Also it seems like Jacqui when you were young you didn’t have somebody like Joe to push you into doing this, which sounds like it was a part of it.
Jacqui: This time, pushing me on the bike, for sure. Traveling by bike is very different. It does mean that you relate to people and the environment in a very different way and I think if I had to say sort of one lesson and one change that is a result of the trip it’s really that realization that we do all just need to slow down and it’s really hard in the world that we live in these days. We’ve come back and we keep having to remind ourselves and put the brakes on and say, whoa, life’s getting too busy again. How can we slow things down, take a bit of time out? Because if you live life too fast you often miss the important things.
Joe: And when I think about what’s my favourite thing about cycle touring it’s that every day is different. When you’re at home days can blend into one a little bit whereas there’s no two days that are ever the same when you bike touring.
Jacqui: It’s always different and the other lesson to remember I think is that the toughest times like the times when you’re really, really struggling and you just can’t imagine why you’re there and there’s also the times that you look back on that result in the most magical or memorable experiences.
Gabriel: The transcript for this episode is available on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist website. I welcome feedback and suggestions for this and other episodes. You’ll find a link to all contact information in the show notes. If you would like to rate or review the show, you can do that on your favorite podcast platform. You can also follow the podcast on Instagram. Thank you to Anna Lindenmeier for the cover artwork and to Timothy Shortell for the original music. This podcast would not be possible without continuous support from my wife, Sandra. And thank you so much for listening. I hope the episode will inspire you to get out and see where the road leads you.
Jacqui: You looked at me and he said, “It’s one sleeping bag, one travel mat, one pillow case, and then one left shoe.”
Joe: Both of our left cycle shoes and both of our left pedals.
Gabriel: Let’s redo that part because that’s the punchline, Jacqui. Two left shoes.
Jacqui: Sorry, I’ll do that again.
Show Notes
Two Bugs on Bikes can be ordered from most bookshops or online from Amazon Australia or Dymocks.
The organization where you can sponsor a teacher or support a child through school in Uganda is called Sheka Africa, a registered Australian charity. Sponsorship fees are fully tax deductible in Australia.
Another organization mentioned was Overflow Mission Zimba, Zambia.