Cycling Namibian deserts and the last push to Cape Town

It’s been nearly two weeks since we left Walvis Bay and set out into the Namibian desert, and we are now just 142km from the South African border, which we should cross tomorrow. The Namib Desert has been challenging but beautiful to cross. Despite some terrible sandy roads, we have actually been reasonably lucky with our route. We even managed to fit in a side trip to the stunning sand dunes at Sossusvlei.

My gears had broken, so I had been riding single speed and had a broken bottom bracket for over a week (let me assure you, it was not fun!), so we took a 75km detour to get my bike fixed.
We are now on beautiful tarmac, with two working bikes, ready to take on the South African mountains.

There is so much to share about the past week. But we are two very weary cyclists. After two weeks of mainly wild camping and cycling on desert roads, we have been given a bed at the Grünau Country Hotel, so we are looking forward to actually sleeping instead of shivering in the tent all night. Someone has turned down the thermostat at night over here!

So, for now, please excuse this brief update and enjoy some photos which should give you a flavour of what we have been up to.

Please follow our progress over the last week on our Trident Sensors GPS Tracker and do please consider making a donation to World Bicycle Relief and help us change the lives of some more people – we would love to raise as much as we can during this final stretch.

We’ll be in touch from CAPE TOWN where we will hopefully arrive on the afternoon of the 3rd June.

Long, sandy roads!

Beautiful stripy mountains

Emily’s lost in the dust of the grading machine. Seriously, a graded road makes all the difference!

Emily takes full advantage of the ‘triangle of shade’!

Emily takes to dune running

Admiring the view from one of the biggest dunes at Sossusvlei

Cycling Namibia desert London to Cape Town by bike-7306

Striking landscape of the huge dunes at Sossusvlei, Namibia

Sunset at Sossusvlei

We’ve been on the road before sunrise on most days in order to get the Kilometers done.

And we’ve been lucky enough to see some spectacular moonrises!

Some of the hills have been just too steep to cycle…especially for Emily and her broken gears!

We found a novel wild camping spot by a little-used railway track…only for the only train of the day to pass us just as we’d settled in for the night

Thanks to the efforts of JP at the UCI, the Namibia Cycling Federation and Mannie’s Bike Mecca in Windhoek for sending parts, Louis at LTL Motors in Keetmanshoop helps with the fitting of a new bottom bracket and fixes the gears!

Wild camping under the main B1 road in Namibia. Nights are now FREEZING cold and we can barely hold onto our handlebars for the first couple of hours each morning because it’s so cold!