Apologies for the delay in posting this. I have no real excuse, being currently unemployed and not having much else to do!

I will add to and amend this post if I think of anything further.

Equipment Recommendations
Although the packing space you have is limited, it is worth bringing spares of just about everything. Even if you don't need it over the course of the trip, there is a good chance another rider will.
Besides the spares listed on the Equipment page, the following bike items failed and I had not brought spares of:
- GPS unit (failed when I landed on it by accident - preventable and also not entirely necessary.)

- Cycle computer (failed in the rain. Vital item, bring two! Cheap ones are fine.)

- Jockey wheels (several riders had worn out their previously new jockey wheels by the end of the trip. Bring spares for sure.)

- Pedals (either bring new ones from the start or bring spares.)

- Bottle cages + bottles (I went through 5 bottle cages! Bring a couple of spares. A spare set of bottles is useful too - they tend to fall out.)

- Worth bringing two spare chains and a spare cassette. Also bring a few Powerlinks (or equivalent) - useful for repairing your chain on the road.

- I wouldn't bother bringing more than two sets of spare brake pads (for v-brakes; riders with disc brakes wore through their pads quicker) - I used the same set of Kool Stops for the whole trip.

- Bring a tonne of tubes and enough for all sizes of tyre that you have. Don't bring Schwalbe tubes - all of mine failed at the valve and were unrepairable. (Be wary of using the 'bad' TDA pump - probably replaced by now but the bad pump killed all of my early tubes.)

- Bring a decent pump for use on the road. Don't bother bringing a tiny pump for the sake of saving weight - if you're trying to race then spending an hour pumping up your tyre will outweight any time gain from saving a hundred grams!

Tent-
Bring a tent that has two doors. My tent had one door and it was a pain when that one door's zip failed. If buying a tent in England, I would recommend against a Terra Nova tent - their customer service charged me to repair my under warranty tent on return. It's also worth bringing a roomier tent if you can manage it - you'll appreciate the extra room a three man tent offers after a few months on the road!

Sleeping Mat-
Several riders had UltraLite Cots. I borrowed one for a night and it was quite comfortable but unless you have back problems or absolutely can't sleep on a normal sleeping mat, I don't think it's worth the space lost in both your tent and your locker. A normal Thermarest mat is adequate. Some people punctured their Thermarests but if you use a decent quality tarp or groundsheet, you should survive. (You could also bring a foam sleeping roll but again it takes extra space.)

Sleeping Bag-
This was the largest single item in my bag. Worth bringing a smaller bag - you don't need the warmest bag ever - a two season bag should be fine. (On colder nights you might need to layer up.)

Recovery Drink-
As I posted before in my blog about being vegetarian on the Tour, it's worth bringing recovery drink. This probably applies to non-vegetarians too.

Bicycle
A lot of thought went into the bike that I rode but there are still a few things worth changing.

Bike Fit
Get fitted to your bike before you buy it. It's worth the expense. Most bike fitters will be able to suggest suitable frames / bikes when being fitted. I had no knee or back problems on the trip.

Suspension
BRING SUSPENSION! It'll help you a lot on the unpaved sections and you almost certainly won't regret it. I was unaware that you could buy suspension forks for cyclocross type bikes (with 700c wheels). Find one and fit it. Enough said.

I took a Thudbuster Long Travel seatpost with me but took it off after Sudan. I found it heavy (it made bike handling less agile) and sometimes caused knee pain. The Short Travel version may be preferable. If you have front suspension then it's probably not worth bothering with it at all.

Tyres
I was unaware that the size of my rims dictated the size of tyre I could fit. Bear this in mind - you'll need specific touring rims to fit larger tyres. 29er rims may be preferable. Bring as fat tyres as you can. If you're ordering your own frame, ensure that the rear stay has enough clearance. Generally a larger range is preferable. I think the perfect combination would be:
27c tyres for smooth pavement
35-40c tyres for smooth unpaved
2.0" tyres for rough unpaved or sandy sections

The Schwalbe Marathon Extremes were superb tyres for the unpaved sections and the Marathon Racers excellent for the paved sections (some riders also used and liked the Durano tyres). I didn't have anything bigger than a 35c and just about survived.

Saddle
As readers of this blog will be aware, I had severe saddle issues right from the early part of the tour which continued until the end of the trip. Most other riders had issues too but generally these were only in passing.

I've heard good things about the Brooks saddle I took but ONLY if broken in first. (You need to ride on it for 1,000 kilometres or so to get it fitting nicely. You can also soak it in oil to expedite this process.) The Specialized body geometry saddles work nicely too. Bring a DECENT spare saddle too, which fits well (my spare was the wrong size because I didn't think I'd need to use it.) It's worth having a fair amount of padding too - especially on the rougher roads. Whatever you think about how race worthy a saddle is, it's worth the extra bulk to have a bit of comfort.

Handlebars
If you're bringing drop bars, it's worth having top bar brake levers such as these. You'll enjoy it much more on rough downhills!
STi shifters seemed to be slightly problematic - it's worth steering clear and getting bar end shifters.

Pannier rack/Handlebar bags
Don't bother. You should be able to fit everything you need for the day in your Camelbak. Most riders ditched their pannier racks throughout the trip.

Lastly, regarding your bike- it's worth spending time and money (unfortunately) to make sure you get a steed that fits well, is reliable and has been well thought through.

Preparation Before The Trip
I didn't personally train much before the trip. Training on the bike was impossible so I did some light cardio indoors for a few months. This is not a problem if you are young - and in general the younger riders seemed to recover much quicker. If you're a bit older, it's worth making sure you're fit enough before you start - it'll make the trip much easier on your body.

It's worth getting to grips with your bike. Most maintenance tasks you'll have to perform yourself. Practice patching a few tubes - once you get to Africa, they'll be in limited supply!

On The Trip
Some camping tips which you might find useful:
- Use your laptop/netbook at night. You'll save battery life that way! (Lower screen brightness).

- Put your groundsheet / tarp inside your tent. This will stop water pooling on top of it (as it would if it was underneath your tent). Added bonus of preventing Thermarest puncture.

- Fill up bottles / Camelbak the night before. The morning is always a bit of a rush.

- Put items that you don't need in the morning away in your locker before bed.

- Don't change shoes while loading your locker in the morning. Massive faux-pas.

- Take your dish kit to Rider Meeting. You'll get to the dinner queue quicker :-).

Achieving E.F.I.
Every F**king Inch is an arbitrary status based largely upon luck. The riders who achieved it were fairly fit and incredibly determined. However, a bad crash, extenuating circumstances or any number of things can halt your conquest of Africa in a heartbeat. If you're intent on achieving it, be aware that you need to be a decent cyclist, consistent and cautious. The oldest rider who achieved EFI this year was 45 years old.

On (Those All Important) Electronics
Lastly, a word on electronics. I was quite apprehensive about the charging capabilities available before leaving. While there are periods where there is no electricity for days on end, you'll largely survive as long as you accept you won't be able to use all your gadgets every minute of being awake.

My charging situation was such:
- Netbook, charged whenever there was power. It lasted about 10 hours more or less which was good enough to spend 30 minutes to an hour writing up the day's events and sorting photos each day.
- Mobile phone, you really don't have many people to call - I brought an old Sony Ericsson K750i and any old GSM mobile will suit you fine. A smartphone lacks utility without a data connection which you'll be hardpressed to find. I charged this from my PowerMonkey (a useful rechargeable charger - definitely worth getting. Alternatively, they also do a PowerGorilla, a larger rechargeable charger capable of charging laptops).
- Sansa Fuze, topped up daily from my netbook. This worked superbly and I only ran out of power when I forgot to recharge it the night previous.
- Cameras, battery life was good enough to charge these once weekly on rest days.
- GPS, used borrowed rechargeable AA batteries. Worth bringing several good quality batteries.

I found the solar charger I brought to be useless and many riders struggled to achieve decent charge from their solar charges. I don't think it's worth the expense - I managed on rest day power alone. As you get further south, you start visiting more campsites where it becomes easier to find power sockets to charge from.

It's worth bringing a fair complement of power adaptors - up north they use the round two-pin adaptors, from Kenya onwards they use square three-pin and then from Botswana a strange gigantic round three-pin. (Bringing a four-way is also useful - these can be cheaply picked up in Egypt too. Get one which has multiple types of sockets so you can share / daisy chain with other riders' appliances.)

My netbook worked superbly for the trip - get one with decent battery life. It's worth bringing a flash disk with a Live version of Linux (e.g. Ubuntu Netbook Remix) just in case your hard drive dies. Also worth bringing a decent external hard drive to back up photos (and to share photos at the end of the trip).

If you insist on bringing an iPod, either bring a cheap one (a Shuffle or similar) or bring two. A lot of people had problems with iPods dying or battery life.

Bring a couple of pairs of cheap headphones for use while riding. I went through four pairs of headphones. Possibly bring another decent pair for use in camp (if you're anything of an audiophile).

Bring plenty of Ziploc bags - useful for sealing electronics you carry on your bike!

Bring two cameras - a cheap one to take on the bike and a nicer one for rest days. Alternatively, bring a shockproof camera - these worked very well (they didn't break) but the picture quality isn't so great.

A Word On Safety
Africa is unreasonably regarded as a dangerous place. I felt in no harm at all on the trip. The biggest threat to cyclists is, as always, from passing motor vehicles. In areas with heavy traffic, the Tour organisers made excellent provisions for our safety and organised convoys. Theft is always a concern but being a prudent traveller and generally vigilent will keep your possessions safe. Campsites were fine in general - in areas where locals took elevated interest in us, boundary ropes and local watchmen kept us safe.


If any other Tour riders have any advice please contact me to have this post updated or drop a comment down below. Likewise for anyone with a question!

I sporadically took a variety of short clips while cycling. Coverage isn't complete (I miss a lot of Northern Kenya because of a broken camera and South Africa because of apathy).

Apologies for the sketchy soundtrack.

Just a quick note to say that I'll be on Nairobi's East FM tomorrow morning (Thursday 3rd June) between 8am and 10am local time, talking to presenter Aleem Manji about the trip. If you're in Nairobi, tune into 106.0 FM. If not, you can stream the channel over the internet here.

Update:
A good quality MP3 version of the second part (and majority) of the interview is now up here (4.79MB). An OGG Vorbis version is available here (3.27MB).

When I first planned my year of travel (commonly colloquialised as a gap year), I tried as much as possible to stay clear of any clichéd travel experiences. You know the sort - backpacking in South East Asia, volunteering to build a toilet block whilst teaching English at a local school, travelling in an overland truck, etc. However, the subject of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro came up several times over the last year - we tried to compare it to the trek we had previously done to Everest Base Camp (a similar altitude but longer). When one of my good friends said it was the hardest thing his Dad had ever done, I knew I had to give it a go. Announcing my travel intentions to my father, he decided to come along to - Kilimanjaro being a long time goal of his.

Foolishly, despite travelling the previous four months heavily loaded with electronics, I thought this would be a good, brief, break from my gadget addiction before plunging headlong into a summer of connectivity back home. (In addition, several sources had mentioned that the cold temperature at altitude would rapidly deplete batteries.) I soon realised my error when on the first day of the trek we were sitting around with hours to kill while our guides and tour organiser (at Marangu Hotel in Tanzania) sorted their equipment out. After a painful wait in which we did nothing (my only book was packed deep inside my duffel bag), Desmond, owner and operator of Marangue Hotel, called us for our briefing.

To compound this excursion's cliché factor was our choice of route: the Marangu route. The most luxurious (pre-built huts with 'beds' instead of tents) and shortest way to climb Kilimanjaro, it's often derided as the most touristy of the routes. Both of these factors appealed to us when choosing a route - we lacked sufficient time to do the longer Machame route and were hiking at the end of the rainy season - staying in wet tents was not an appealing thought. Desmond assured us though that the popular attitude to the Marangu route is flawed - perpetrated by a group of tour operators who lack the capability to book the Marangu route (which entails a complicated system of deposits for each hut). The elevation graphs show that while the first few days aren't as steep as other routes, we climb more at higher altitude each day - the hike to the summit is over a kilometre vertically, versus less than half this on the Machame route.

We eventually were driven to the park gate and after a quick lunch, started our first hike up to the first hut: Mandara. It was drizzling lightly as we passed through the muggy rainforest. Ants of all sizes (the largest were over a centimetre in length) crawled the surface of the trail and on several occasions we stopped to slap at our gaiters - having been bitten by freeriding ants. The route was steeper already than most of what we had hiked on the Everest Base Camp trek. We quickly reached the first hut (just a three hour hike, we did this in two and a half hours) - Mandara Hut, at 2700m.

The huts are fairly based but having lived in a waist high tent for four months, I appreciated the option to stand up fully without ripping your domicile to pieces. The huts are 'A-frames', shaped like the letter A so the only place to stand up is in the middle. Throughout the night there was a steady stream of sound as we and the other hikers adjacent to us knocked into the slanted wooden walls of the hut. The lavatories were basic but positively luxurious to what we found at most places on the TDA - they flushed and were relatively clean.

The next day we hiked up to Horombo. This was supposedly a six hour hike but thanks to my father's blistering pace (a misnomer, this pace caused him almost no blisters), we reached in less than five hours. I struggled, walking behind him most of the way. Four months of cycling have not developed my hiking muscles well at all. In addition, compounded fatigue left me wanting more energy. I realised here that I was glad that the route is only five days. Almost certainly this contributes to the notion that the Marangu route is purely for tourists but lacking electronics and with a quickly diminishing amount of material to read - boredom was an everlooming spectre.

After eating dinner in the fine company of some stripey rodents (they made for an entertaining dinner, if adding little else to the atmosphere), we took the opportunity to rest well that night since the summit climb the next day wouldn't provide us with a good night's sleep. The next morning the cloud that we had been climbing in had lowered a few hundred metres and the view was of a gorgeous plateau that almost seemed walkable.

From Horombo to Kibo, another 1000 metre climb, there are two routes available - a lower route and an upper route. The upper route is a few kilometres longer than the lower route and takes you closer to Mawenzi before swinging back along the saddle to join the lower route. A bit steeper, we again machined up the route and overtook the cloud (which had overtaken us just as we left Horombo) to be the first trekking group to reach Kibo. My Dad, ignoring the advice to walk 'pole pole' (slowly), had walked at his usual London pace.

Kibo was COLD. The (single) hut there was as close to a concrete bunker as, I supposed, huts built for tourists could get. Inside the huts was cooler than outside - the sun didn't seem able to penetrate through the miniscule square single-glazed glass windows that lined the top of the wall on each side. Worse still was the schedule for the summit hike. Kibo is the last hut which you can sleep at (on the Marangu route) but is still a fair distance from the summit. This means that it is necessary to leave at midnight in order to reach the (official) summit at sunrise. Conditions as the day heats up usually worsen and the weather is best in the early morning. Once you reach the summit, you can either choose to hike on to Uhuru, the actual summit, or descend all the way back to Horombo via Kibo.

That afternoon we tried hard to rest before the summit climb and failed as expected. The complete disalignment of our attempt to sleep with our usual sleeping patterns and the cold (we were wearing all of our clothes for the summit hike inside our sleeping bags) made it difficult. Personally, I napped for about 45 minutes before dinner and slept for maybe 1.5 housr continuously before we were woken at 11pm.

Waking up, I felt bad from the outset. Sleep deprivation aside, my stomach felt like the scene from Star Wars where the Rebel Alliance is fighting the Death Star. This was most probably caused by the altitude and not sleeping properly. Regardless, we had to push on and we began trudging up the mildly loose scree that composed the majority of the climb up to Gilman's Point. We took our guide's pace - slow but steady and made it up to half way with only one toilet stop (Star Wars induced). As the midnight tea wore off, I found it harder and harder to stay awake and began to doze off each time we stopped.

As we entered the rocky section before the climb, my Camelbak froze solid and crunched everytime I shifted the weight of my backpack. The rocks blocked the light of the full moon from illuminating our path and soon we all switched on our headtorches. The rocks were larged and required, at some points, both hands and feet to climb over. I had to stop a few more times to use the toilet - at temperatures below freezing this became a miserable but necessary act.

After what seemed like eternity of being within a few minutes of the ridge at the top of the climb, we finally reached it at 5:15. Out of seemingly nowhere was a crooked wood sign 'Gilman's Point'. A relief but we stopped only for a few minutes to get a caffeine topup (the tea seemed to breath new life into the war in my stomach) and continued onto Uhuru.

It seemed that the trek to Uhuru took as long as it did to get to Gilman's - a false feeling induced by the sudden availability of daylight. We stopped several times, mainly to catch our breath and to take some photos. The view from the top of the crater was stunning and has made it into my list of favourite places in the world (now a total of 3). As we plodded onto Uhuru through snow and ice, we saw several trekkers leaping down towards us. This seemingly continued forever but an hour and a half from reaching Gilman's Point we reached Uhuru - a circle of clear earth amidst thick snow.

Mission accomplished and after the mandatory photos, we quickly began our descent - my Dad had begun to feel a little queasy from the altitude too (and unlike me, decided to say something about it)). The descent to Kibo was great fun - on the loose scree this was more akin to skiing than walking. The last time I did this down Mount Snowdon in Wales, I had no gaiters and my shoes quickly filled with rocks - this time though, it was smooth sailing.

From Kibo down, the descent was much harder work - my legs hurt more than the way up (different muscles again) and I could quickly feel the burn. The difference descending is that you are no longer limited by your cardiovascular performance - merely by your muscles. A few hours descending, another night at Horombo and then finally a 4.5 hour descent all the way to the gate - it was over.

What did I gain from this? It was hard climbing Kilimanjaro, no doubt, but our pace was set quite high. We could have taken it much slower and probably summited just the same. Is it the hardest thing I've ever done? No, but then I was subjected to the Dinder ordeal on the Tour D'Afrique (12 hours of pain versus the 9 hours from Kibo to the summit and back).

Finally, trekking isn't as fun as cycling (in my honest opinion), nor as exhausting. I can't wait to get back on my bike!

Besides the usual Cape Town touring (Table Mountain, Robben Island, Cape of Good Hope), I decided to commemorate the end of the Tour D'Afrique by getting a tattoo. It was something I was contemplating from Arusha and was definitely influenced by the numerous people around me on the Tour who had one (or more). Various ideas came to mind (a hippo riding a bicycle - my nickname at school was 'hippo') but the one I finally settled on was something both geeky and unique and unashamedly inspired by the CUCC logo.

The CUCC logo (see any photo of my jersey or look at the website) is a motif consisting of a curvy stick figure riding the letters CUCC like a bicycle. Instead of the letters CUCC, I envisioned a stick figure riding the infinity sign like a bicycle. Jason Becker, a phenomenal artist and fellow EFIer on the Tour, sketched the design and improved it significantly to the point where we could send it to off to Metal Machine, a well established tattoo parlour in Cape Town.

The process itself was brief and reasonably priced (I'm told, compared to Western parlours). A quick double check of the design, a choice of font (I had the distance and the letters EFI added to the bottom of the design) and I was ready to go sit in the chair. The artist who tattooed the design was a man called Milo, outwardly scary (in the way that being covered by tattoos could be) but totally friendly (and once a keen cyclist too).

The actual act took about twenty minutes and hurt in the same way that getting injections at the dentist hurts. Not overly painful but you can definitely feel it. My tattoo was placed on the outside of my right arm which I'm told is less painful than getting it anywhere on the inside. Places where skin touches skin are quite painful because they are very soft and resultingly tender.

After it was done, some basic aftercare instructions were given (no submerging in water, put lotion on it a few times a day, wash with warm water and soap only, don't scratch) and a week later, it's looking good. The only annoying instruction is not being able to expose it to the sun (it'll fade quickly otherwise) for a month.

I'm quite happy with it and most people I've shown it to like the design. Photos in the usual place.