27 months

Last week I received a text message from a friend in Mamfé that an Irishman cycling through Africa was on his way to Buea. They indicated that he might arrive tomorrow. I made a mental note of this and dusted-off my bike for a long overdue ride. It was not twenty minutes later, topping-out in Buea Town, that I noticed a tall, lanky white man strolling in my direction. “Are you Bill?” he asked. I’d found the wandering Irishman, or rather he’d found me.

Colin, I soon learned, had traveled from Mamfé to Kumba with his bike atop a jeep. The stretch of road leading out of Mamfé, he said, was all but impassible to anything but the stoutest vehicles and travel by bicycle was impossible. So it was on the comparatively better (by Cameroon standards, anyway) dirt/mud road from Kumba that he’d arrived in Buea. When I asked about his trip, Colin began humbly relating his story of cycling thousand of miles across Europe and Africa the way someone else might describe a trip to the corner store. I was immediately intrigued by his uncommon tales of adventure, self-effacing demeanor, and shared love of cycling. So, with darkness upon us, I invited him to check out of his hostel the following afternoon and move his bike and gear to my house.

Originally from Ireland, Colin’s lived most of his life in Wembley, London. He worked at the Guinness brewery for the two years prior to leaving on his trip, so chances are that if you’ve had a pint in England, Scotland or Wales during 2003-05, Colin had a hand in getting it to you. Since leaving London in late September 2005, he’s spent the last two years on two wheels, cycling Europe first, then following a broad, counterclockwise arc through North, West and now Central West Africa. His ultimate destination? Ethiopia, or possibly Egypt where he can get a boat back to Europe, “if the money holds out and the madness persists.”

I was perhaps most surprised to hear that Colin, at 25, was crossing Africa by bicycle entirely self-supported. He has no product endorsements, corporate sponsors, donated parts, website, press kits, nothing. Before leaving home, he scraped up enough cash from working in the brewery to buy his bike and gear and has since funded his travel through sixteen countries (and counting!). The stories he’s accumulated on his journey and his philosophy on life and travel are just too interesting not to share with a broader audience, so I persuaded him (in truth, he didn’t take much convincing) to let me post this interview. Colin has also agreed to share some photos from his trip, so you’ll find a gallery of selected highlights at the end.

On planning his trip:
“I try to plan as little as possible,” he admits. “I kind of do it in stretches—leave one big town, stop every three or four days, wash my clothes and have a rest before moving on.” But he confesses to becoming “lazy” over the last year. “I used to do five or six days of cycling straight. Now four is my maximum.” When he discovers a place he likes, Colin will put down stakes for awhile. “I stayed in Ghana for six months, because I loved it, and I could live there quite cheaply as well. I felt good there, it’s a very relaxed country.” Typically, he visits the consulate or embassy of the next country he plans to cycle through to obtain the necessary visas, official letters and so on.

To enter the Ivory Coast, Colin had to cross through the rebel-controlled north of the country. In anticipation of the crossing, Colin grew a beard to “purposely make myself look as scruffy as possible.” At the border, the rebels searched through all his things and he felt that they could have easily confiscated his bike, gear, money and possibly even thrown him in jail. He was absolutely alone, with no one to turn to for help. “But they were good people,” he says. “They just asked me some questions and I told them about my trip. They seemed genuinely interested.” After he’d cleared customs, at the first town he arrived in, Danane, the rebels brought him to a police station where they gave him dinner. Afterward, a policeman made Colin a letter of passage to get him past the roadblocks throughout the north. “When I was traveling there, the rebels were the town officials, the police, the government—everything.” When asked about the differences he perceived traveling from north to south, Colin said, “There was a greater sense of hope in the north, because the people were doing something to change their future, whereas in the south people were unhappy with the government and felt powerless to change things.”

On maintaining his bike:
“I’m lazy, so I just wait until something breaks on the bike, then I’ll fix it,” says Colin. Occasional wheel truing after riding a bad stretch of road is the most common form of regular maintenance he does. “So far I’ve been lucky.” Still, he’s managed to wear-out two cranksets, a rear cassette, numerous chains, two sets of pedals and has patched, repaired and mended nearly everything else at least once. The gel in his saddle “sort of migrated all to the sides” so Colin kept the original one and had a homemade, cushioned vinyl cover made for it in Ghana. In Guinea, he wrapped his bike frame with old inner tubes after discovering that it was beginning to rust in places, lending his bike a post-apocalyptic “Road Warrior” look.

While in Ghana, Colin discovered that his rear rim had developed cracks due to the heavy load he’d been bearing on it over the last couple thousand miles. Another touring cyclist might have discarded it and waited for a new one to be shipped. Not Colin. Over the course of a week while staying in a YMCA in Accra, he rebuilt his wheels, swapping the relatively solid front rim for the damaged rear one. “It was the first time I’d done anything like that with wheels, and I was stupid—I unlaced both of them and didn’t know how to put them back together.” So he walked around Accra until he found another bike with 36-hole wheels, studied the lacing pattern, went back to his room at the YMCA and successfully reassembled his wheels. Colin built, trued and tensioned them on the bike using a clunky Chinese spoke wrench designed for motorcycle wheels. After he was satisfied, he was back on the road with his “new” wheelset.

On cycling’s best days:
“Some of the best days of cycling were in the deserts of Morocco and Mauritania, because it’s just you and the bicycle,” recalls Colin. “You can just sort of let your mind wander off while you ride. It becomes a form of meditation.” Towards the end, however, after the third week of riding in the desert, “the heat, the dryness, everything starts to wear you down.” But at the same time, Colin says, “I’d probably do it again because deep down I enjoyed it.” He especially enjoyed cycling in southern Morocco, with the desert stretching off to one side and tall cliffs bordering the sea on the other. Despite the heat and occasional monotony of the landscape, Colin says, “it’s beautiful waking up in the morning in the desert while it’s still nice and cool.”

Colin also fondly remembers the transition from the desert to the rain forest on the boat from Mauritania to Senegal. “Suddenly there were all these colors again—the fruits and the trees and the birds. It was enjoyable to be in a new environment after seeing only sand and sky for weeks.”

On being a reluctant celebrity:
Colin was interviewed once for television, in Ghana. “I never saw the broadcast, but [the studio] gave me a copy of it on DVD. I had no way of watching it, so I mailed it to my family. I still haven’t seen it. Maybe when I get back.” He said after his interview aired he would often go somewhere in town and strangers would approach him, saying, “I saw you on TV—you’re the bicycle guy!” At first, Colin would deny that it was him. He’d say, “It wasn’t me, that man is crazy!” and pretend that it was someone else. “But eventually I’d give in and have a laugh with them.”

On his scariest moment on the bike:
Colin suffered his first and only serious accident in southeast Nigeria, about half way between Lagos and Calabar. “All the road signs had been pasted-over with political posters for a local man running for election,” Colin recollects, “so I wasn’t sure where I was going.” He stopped at the side of the road, in a downpour, to check his map and was just starting back onto the road when a fast-approaching van sounded its horn. He gritted his teeth and took a vicious rear-end impact. The bike went flying out from under him and Colin found himself on the ground. Fortunately, his injuries were minor. A woman who witnessed the collision came running up to him shouting, “Thank God, you’re a lucky man!” But, thought Colin at the moment, “how is this lucky, sitting on my backside on a wet road with my bike broken up in front of me?”

The bike was totally unrideable after the accident, as the rear triangle of the frame was twisted up and the rack had been forced into the seat stays, bending them. Miraculously, the wheel was OK but the frame needed to be straightened before he could continue on his trip. Colin got a ride into the nearest town where a welder was eventually able to muscle the rear rack and frame back into shape. Looking at the bike today, it’s possible to discern that the back end has undergone some, ah…adjustments, but if you ask Colin he’ll say the bike continues to perform just fine.

On the most commonly heard question regarding his trip:
The question he hears most often from people along his journey is, “Why do you come to Africa to suffer on a bicycle?” Colin’s answer is, “I don’t suffer, it’s something I enjoy doing. I enjoy it, and that’s all.”

On unfounded fears:
Colin says he’d received plenty of warnings from other Africans about Nigeria, and the capital city of Lagos, in particular. “I’d heard stories about Lagos the same way you hear stories about New York or some other big city—someone who knew someone who’d been robbed, attacked or killed.” Instead, on the whole he found Nigerians to be very welcoming and straightforward people. “After I’d been hit by the van, the owner of the guesthouse I was brought to reduced the price for me and made me dinner for a few nights.”

Colin didn’t experience any of the hazards rumored to be in Lagos, which run the gamut from a brisk black market trade in human organs to murderous, armed gangs roaming the streets after dark. “I love Lagos. It’s a mad city though—it’s not the sort of place you’d go to relax. There’s a lot of pushing and shoving, things just work differently, everything is taken to the extreme.” When asked if he’d go back to Nigeria, Colin said he would. Would he cycle there again? He laughed, then said “Sure, I think I still would—for cycling it’s quite a good country.”

On Cameroon and his next destination:
“People are very welcoming and helpful [here]. When I first crossed over the border, a chief in a small village let me stay the night in his house.” Colin’s been in Cameroon for just over two weeks, yet still feels like he’s just arrived. From Buea, he’ll cycle to Douala, then Yaoundé where he’ll get a visa for either the Congo or Equatorial Guinea, “but probably Congo,” says Colin, thinking. “When I imagine what the Congo will be like, it seems more attractive. The image in my head is of rivers and dense rain forest—an untouched wild place.” From there, he hopes to pass through the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), but confesses, “I don’t know of anyone who’s ever cycled through the DRC, either because the roads are so bad or there’s war there. I know one cycling couple that flew over it instead.”

From there, it’s on through Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya and, finally—Ethiopia. “But you never know what can happen.”

On his most memorable moment:
It took Colin awhile to choose just one, but toward the end of our conversation he settled on having his life saved by a local man in the seaside Moroccan town of Sidi Ifni. A strong swimmer accustomed to the ocean, Colin found himself pulled out to sea by a powerful riptide. “It showed me how small I am,” reflects Colin. “Here I was thinking I was a big man who’d cycled so far. Then Nature or God put me in my place. In the space of a second I became a small boy in a huge ocean. It was the first time in my life that I really felt like I could’ve died.” A young man named Rashid braved the current on a paddle board and pulled him in. Colin is still in contact with Rashid via email. “He’s a lifeguard now at the beach.”

On advice to would-be adventure cyclists:
For other cyclists contemplating a long bike tour, Colin advises, “Don’t plan too much. Just start with a good bike with good parts and be prepared to deal with the unexpected.” He believes that one of the best things to cultivate for a long journey is an ability to find solutions to the myriad unforeseen problems that inevitably occur. Also, Colin feels it’s important to have a certain tenacity that enables one to keep pushing on in the face of difficulties and adversity. “Don’t rush,” says Colin, “if you’re going to tour on a bicycle, don’t try to do it too fast or it won’t be enjoyable. Break it up, don’t just ride continuously otherwise it will become like a job.”

On self-discovery:
When I concluded our interview by asking Colin about the personal changes he’d undergone over the last two years, he became wistful, then broke into a smile. “I’ve learned how to grit my teeth and get on with things rather than moaning. I think I’ve learned that from Africans as well. If you sit down and moan, you’re going to still be there moaning a week later.”

He went on, saying, “I’ve learned how fortunate I am, a lot more than I realized. Also how grateful I should be for the simplest things—I’m healthy, I’m fit and I’m able to do this trip.” Colin says that his experience cycling through developing countries in Africa has taught him how small his problems are compared to those of people he’s encountered along the way. “I’ve seen people without wheelchairs pulling themselves across the ground,” recollects Colin. “It puts your problems into perspective.”

Colin feels that his experience has reinforced the importance of family to him in ways he didn’t anticipate. A moment of silence passed between us then, glancing at his bike propped up against my salon wall and his gear in a corner (everything he owns, in effect), he added, “Also, how little it’s possible to get by on.”

Colin welcomes your emails. He checks his email periodically while on the road and can be reached at naturalmysticlife [at] hotmail [dot] com.