09.04.2014
From Cairo to Cape Town: A hope filled safari through Africa by bike
A six month cycle through Africa undertaken by four young professionals, who all attend Holy Trinity, Rathmines, is entering its final days. Kyle Petrie, Sadhbh McKenna, Niamh Allen and Antonio Isidro Carrion Martin are cycling from Cairo to Cape Town, a distance of over 11,000 kilometres, to raise funds for Medicine Sans Frontiers and Room to Read.
Their journey is nearly complete. They have travelled through 11 countries and have only six days left before they reach their ?nal destination, Cape Town.
The group, three from Ireland and one from Spain, left Dublin on September 18 last year and their journey has taken them through sand storms in the Western Desert of Egypt; down the Nile Valley where, in the wrong place at the wrong time, they were beaten from their bikes with wooden sticks; to the tea houses of Sudan where they were forbidden from paying for their tea by the warm and generous Sudanese; up into the highlands of Ethiopia where the feral mountain children battered them with stones; to Nairobi where they celebrated Christmas morning with a thousand singing and dancing Kenyans; pushing their bikes south through days of sand on ‘The Great Road North’ in Tanzania; to relax on the untouched shores of lake Malawi; 150km and 2,000 meters up on their toughest cycling day in Zambia; to the thundering Victoria Falls where they were soaked by the sky high spray; to experience a cycle safari in Botswana, with elephants on the roadside and lions calling at night; to the wilderness of the Kalahari desert in Namibia where they were back to the desert challenge of calculating water logistics; to their final stretch, anticipating Table Mountain appearing on the horizon; the end in sight.
The theme of their journey has been the overwhelming hospitality that they have received. The people that they met took them in, gave them tea, put them up, semi adopted them, passed them cold drinks out of car windows, offered them water and enabled them to reach this final stretch of their journey.
On a continent of bad news stories these four young professionals from their post recession countries experienced a new narrative of hopefulness. Cycling through Africa they received incredible hospitality from people with so little who are content with what they have and are happy to give whatever they can to help strangers on their journey. They are coming home with a message relevant to a post Celtic Tiger Ireland – that giving and hospitality can exist no matter what the circumstance and that bad news stories can be countered by hope filled people. That is their journey, their hope–filled *safari. (*safari means journey in Swahili).
Follow them as they count down the final days to Cape Town at www.rotharafrica.org, @rotharafrica, fb: rothar africa or rothar–africa.tumblr.com.