Day 369 / 134

Date: 16 April 2023
Sleeping location: Sorgvry* House of Guests, Barrydale, South Africa
Distance (km today/total/total Part 2): 80 / 23137 / 8300
Estimated climb (m today/total/total Part 2): 600 / 221100 / 103100
Stress levels: high
Day in three words: Big ring day

It was another calm, cool, clear day, but forecast to hot up later so we took breakfast (the usual mix of hot things and continental things, but Alex wasn’t the best of chefs: 5/10 with a mark deducted for more minor racism) early and tried to get away quickly. The landscape and riding was fairly similar all day, gently rolling road, big and empty, through big and empty scrubland. There were rocky peaks in the distance and small ones here and there, plus occasional herds of impala/springbok in the distance, one of which ran sort of alongside us for a few hundred metres. With no headwind, major hills or bad road surface some fast riding was both possible and fun so I kept Maggie in the big ring quite a lot, a rarity on this trip. 

We rode pretty hard for the first couple of hours and took our first proper break after 50km at…wait for it…Ronnie's Sex Shop. This was a fairly standard cafe/bar made famous by the name and a sort of "anything goes" attitude. There were loads of signed bras and bits of clothing hanging in bar, and stickers and graffiti everywhere (so I added one of my own to the collection). In one room I found an Old Legs Tour sticker and excitedly texted Al Watermeyer a picture of it, which he loved.** Ronnie’s was a sort of spiritual counterpoint to the Poltimore Arms on Exmoor which I visited four days into the trip***. 

By the afternoon it was really hotting up and final section wasn't as easy. On the approach into Barrydale I looked at the small climb ahead and said confidently to my dad "one more summit". Several summits later we finally reached the short, fast descent into the cute little town of Barrydale, lots of nice buildings nestled under big mountains. At the guesthouse we were first greeted by a Dalmatian investigating us through the gate, then shown to our room, which like the rest of the guesthouse was absolutely festooned with interesting and beautiful furniture and ornaments. It felt almost wrong to despoil it by sleeping there and disgorging a load of cycling stuff everywhere, especially when we did a wash in the sink and put a load of boxers and socks out to dry on some Art.

As we’d arrived relatively early I set to doing some admin and some blogging, and was delighted to find that the seemingly useless Avios points I’d been harvesting for years could be used to get a flight to Ibiza for 50p and car hire out of Cape Town for four weeks for £10. We then went out to a place called Karoo Daisy for dinner, but it was weirdly closed and playing some kind of disaster movie on the TVs inside and loudly over the speakers outside, even though absolutely nobody was there. This turned out to be serendipitous as our second choice, the Barrydale Karoo Hotel, was actually really good. We had the best beer I’d had in Africa, a bottle fermented Weiss, plus some tasty food including a great gazpacho, plus there was cool jazz and blues paraphernalia everywhere (it’s also a live music venue). 

In here we got talking to Chris, originally a Brit who’s lived in SA for decades. He had a lot of interesting stuff to say and was the sort of non racist counterpoint to Alex (although like with Alex it was mostly him talking). This was all going swimmingly until we revealed our planed route through Cape Town, at which point he put the fear of god into us by essentially saying that we would be murdered if we went that way. He then consulted a couple of other people in the bar who agreed that we would definitely be murdered. This was quite alarming and back at the hotel I spent some time on my phone before bed trying to figure out how to not get murdered. Loss of possessions is one thing, physical injury another, but to get so close to the end and have it all go wrong would be unbearable. Lots to ponder. We both went to bed with nerves jangling.

*It means “carefree” in Afrikaans - ie Sans Souci like the palace 

**Old Legs Tour is the organisation he co-runs, doing big bike rides across Africa to raise money for Zimbabwean pensioners

***To recap - I went into a pub late morning to see if I could get a coffee. The place was totally off grid but the owner Steve fired up the generator and made me one, then I chatted with him for about an hour and he was an absolute character. When I left I offered to pay he said he wouldn’t charge me for a coffee, gave me a postcard of the pub and said “pay it forward, and when you do, tell them it’s from Steve at the Poltimore Arms”. Two and a half months later, arriving in Egypt on the boat from Jordan, a Canadian woman became separated from her Egyptian husband as they got put into different passport checks. She didn’t have enough USD for the visa so I gave her $5 and the postcard and said “this is from Steve at the Poltimore Arms”. Obviously she didn’t have a clue what I meant but she was very grateful. 

A further addition to this story came when I was riding the GB Divide route with Toni in 2022 and we stopped at the Poltimore on a Saturday night. Steve initially said we could camp in the garden for free, then after we’d got pissed with him for a bit said that actually we could sleep inside the pub (as I’d predicted). He absolutely LOVED IT when I told him the story about the lady in Egypt.