Day 350 / 115

Date: 28 March 2023
Sleeping location: Grant’s house/shop, Lady Grey, South Africa
Distance (km today/total/total Part 2): 0 / 21759 / 6922
Estimated climb (m today/total/total Part 2): 0 / 206000 / 88000
Lovely things: £150
Day in three words: Minor celebrity malaise 

It’s difficult to sleep late in the tent so I woke up with a bit of a hangover - whoops. I’d intended to catch up on emails and blogging but my brain wasn’t feeling tremendously energetic, so most of what I wrote I had to hold back and proofread the next day with a slightly clearer head. I’d initially planned to stay here for two days, but sleeping in a tent isn’t the most restorative and Grant wasn’t the most welcoming of hosts so I decided to cut it to one and get moving again.

The setting was at least lovely, a big lawn with a huge cliff-topped ridge directly behind it and, for reasons I am unable to fathom, four alpacas wandering around. The room that I had access to was also the showroom for all of Grant’s bike touring kit, and his cunning plan worked as being surrounded by all this lovely stuff worked its way into my brain and before I left I bought £150 of kit to replace or repair bags that were damaged and/or no longer waterproof. 

In the morning I had a quick phone call with Cherene, the journalist I’d met at the top of the Sani Pass, so she could write up a story about me. The next day this appeared in three Afrikaans language daily newspapers across the country, which was cool, but frustratingly she didn’t put a donation link in the stories in the physical newspapers, so my plan to raise a load of donations this way was a total failure. Even worse, the picture used in two of the papers was an absolutely terrible one she’d taken herself and the first time I saw it was when it appeared in said papers. As a slight silver lining I got a message on instagram the following day from a children’s hearing charity in Cape Town, asking if I wanted to come visit them. 
 
Grant was very hands off and not particularly social, but we did share a couple of glasses of (a replacement) wine and some bike touring chat for a couple of hours, during which he revealed that he kitted out Keegan Longueira, nephew of Colleen who I met in Underberg, for his Cairo to Cape world record run. The community of South African bike tourers is a small one.


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