A pickle in the desert.
I can now openly admit to having betrayed by own beliefs, ignored my moral compass, and deceived my sense of taste.
I have not only eaten half a pickle; I’ve also gulped down that disgusting mixture of vinegar, brine and other unspeakable elements in which said pickle was swimming in, a concoction known with the misnomer of pickle juice. And there’s something worse than eating what, in a stroke of brilliance, I once named “Shrek’s turd”: that this whole ordeal was well worth it.
Now, explaining how my life got to this critical point will require some backtracking.
It’s ten in the morning, and I’m roughly halfway between Nouga and Lettas Kraal farms. Zooming out a little bit, this is in the Klein Karoo desert, Cape province, South Africa.
It’s ten in the morning, as we said, and I’m a smudge under 100 kilometres in a bike race that is 172 km overall. There’s a silhouette on the horizon that looks like a bull. It could be the actual animal, a billboard, or Satan wearing a backpack, but I’ve got something else on my mind than to check it. I’m cramping, and nothing else matters when you cramp.
I ask my left leg why it’s turning into an annoying piece of wood at every downstroke, but I get no answer. Just shards of physical pain from the glute down all the way to the calf. Kenan, my new friend and riding mate, comes to the rescue. He’s got a pickle, he says, and he’s happy to go halfsies. He doesn’t need to give me the subtext, I read those articles too; for some reason, as soon as the wretched pickle juice hits the back of the throat, it triggers a reaction that stops the neurons misfiring in the whole of your body and, voilà, gone are the cramps. My hunch is that the body is instantaneously disgusted by something worse than what’s happening to it prior to that moment.
I ignore the effect that the pickle and the acid battery liquid it came with will have on my stomach, but down it goes to join the three coffees, three guava cubes, two bananas, bunch of grapes, two cheese and onion sandwiches, a fruit bar and one Clif I’ve so far ingurgitated. A little later we’re back on the road, pain gone. Twenty, twenty-five, thirty km/h. Powered by pickles.
There’s a voice, inside my head, which seems to exaggerate my capabilities and downplay the difficulty of any adventure coming across my path. It’s because of this voice, and some careful enablement from my Other Half, that I found myself some 200 kms inland from Cape Town one beautiful April day. It was in the town of Montagu, where idyllic vineyards and fruit orchards came to meet the stark desert scrubland, that some 150 people had gathered to participate in the South African edition of the Eroica bike event, and I was one of them.
What started as a group ride for antique bicycle lovers in the village of Gaiole in Chianti, Tuscany, had by 2024 become a global force spreading the Gospel of gravel cycling to the four corners of the globe. From Japan to Cuba, from Switzerland to South Africa everywhere there is potential for heroism and even miscreants like yours truly, with their modern bikes, were allowed to join. Gravel cycling is a broad church.
I arrived in Montagu almost on tiptoe, feeling the onset of a very strong case of impostor syndrome. First time in South Africa; first time riding with people I didn’t know; first time riding in a large group; first time riding 172 km; and first time doing any of the above without the comfort blanket of a mate.
Still, as Friday progressed and the beers followed, some of my jitters started melting away. The community was incredibly welcoming and curious about the few foreigners who’d made it that far (a couple of Irish and two fellow Italians) and, on top of that, those convening under the big marquee at De Bos backpackers was surprisingly diverse. Unlike in London, where events like these would attract a crowd mostly made of white straight males, most of whom are either lawyers or work in the City, here there were not only representatives of all ethnic groups of this incredible nation; there were members of communities who, normally, would stay well away from one another. There were young fixieheads, older gentlemen who’d gotten into vintage bikes when they were cutting edge, gravel animals and peloton pros. The image of an older gentleman, impeccable in his Molteni woollen jersey, uncorking a bottle with a young lady decked in tattoos and holding a sleek Rook fixie was a joy to see.
Night fell rapidly on this merry gang of pushbike lovers. I polished the last glass of Sauvignon and went back to my cheap bunk bed; tomorrow, the wake-up time was going to be well before dawn.
Start > Montagu Local rest stop (24km, +420mt)
The alarm rings at 04:30 AM. I slip in the shammy, don an extra layer, dial in the cleat shoes, grab my backpack and I’m out. Guy, one of the other Nova riders, is already out there, eating spoonfuls of oats next to his mean Cannondale speed machine. We exchange a few chats, fist-bump and head over to the marquee, where the old Conti machine is already dishing out espressos.
There’s about forty of us who are going to do the long circuit, while the remaining hundred or so will “just” ride for 70km. Coffees drank, pastries eaten, there’s time for a briefing and then we do a group start behind the van driven by Johan the medic. We roll out of De Bos together, fording the torrent and then heading into the quiet roads of Montagu. It’s a chilled-out start, but already I can see Guy and some of the top guys plastered to the rear bumper of the van; as soon as the signal is given, once we’re out of the paved roads and onto gravel, they’re off like a cork from a champagne bottle. Blink, and I’m dropped.
My chain drops too, and when I fix it – plus a generous dose of lubricant – I’m alone, somewhere halfway down the pack. It’s the onset of the blue hour and, as I climb up and up, I can start making out things beyond the limits of my headlamp: the silhouette of the hills, a bend in the road, an electricity pole. Somewhere I can hear a dog calling and another one responding.
The first stop appears almost by surprise. A canvas tent, a few bales of hay, two vans and an inviting spread are laid on the table by the group of cheerful volunteers. Some of the guys ahead of me are still there, and we munch on banana and grapes together.
“Did you see the baboons?” asks one of the volunteers. My puzzled looks do the trick, it seems, because he goes on to explain: “The animals you heard earlier, there was a whole troop of baboons on the road, sitting. The photographer’s van scared them”.
And I thought they were dogs! Sometimes, ignorance really is bliss.
Montagu Local > Hoek-om farm (34km, +630mt)
Oubergpas, our little Stelvio in the desert. The altitude chart on the Garmin turns amber, then red, and then stays like that for quite a bit. Not much to do but to buckle down and go with the flow. Put in an easy gear and stay steady. Some hate climbs; me, I actually enjoy them. And I’m almost disappointed when it all ends.
The views, the golden spectacle of sunrise, are intoxicating. Mal d’Afrique, they called it, and the sight of the sun emerging over these timeless hills is enough to infect me. It’s inebriating to think that these are amongst the oldest parts of our planet’s crust and my passage here – my whole lifetime, even – is nothing but a blip in the arc of their history. Strange how plonking one’s arse on a saddle is enough to turn said guy into a philosopher.
If there ever was a need to prove that we’re no longer in genteel wine country, then Hoek-om is it. This stop is manned by the family managing the nearby farm and these guys aren’t the kind of people who spend time smelling corks: they’re broad-shouldered, sun-leathered, big-muscled Boers who speak Afrikaans and, when they switch to English, do so with an accent that is a blend of Dutch, Norwegian and Glasgow’s East End. Even the dog is impressive, a black colossus so large that kids are riding it.
And yet, everyone claps and cheers us. A couple of black riders arrive shortly after me, and the whole family is on their feet applauding them, offering tin mugs of coffee and food. Even the hellhound joins in with a couple of blood-curling howls.
Hoek-om > Nouga Farm (77km, +750mt)
The next leg of the ride is, for me, the highlight of the event. I catch up with Kenan, an absolute hero who is riding the whole hog on a steel bike with downtube shifting and 25mm skinny tires. He’s been riding on it since Cape Town two days prior, and now he’s doing another 172km for the fun of it. Ahead of us are two other riders, Adam from Cape Town and Joseph from Johannesburg, and together we were to enjoy an amazing feast.
Ahead of us were 40 kilometres of the sweetest champagne gravel I’ve ever seen: wide roads with fast turns and long straights, amazing vistas and a light tailwind. We rode on in a state of never-ending happiness, doing 30km/h without even breaking a sweat. If paradise for gravel cyclists is a thing, it must be something like this.
Nouga Farm > Lettas Kraal (113km, +930mt)
The peloton of pros that dropped me right at the start, the cheerful ladies at Nouga told us, had just arrived at the next stop, Lettas Kraal, 30 kilometres away. It’d taken them one hour.
Thirty an hour, we think, high on the experience we just had. Easy. And so it is that, once we filled up with fruit bars and coffees and that the bikes were taken care of, we roll out of Nouga in high spirits, laughter booming under the vast, cloudless Karoo skies.
And then… the cold shower.
The wind, which thus far had blown benignly behind our backs, shifts first to an odd angle and then into a full-frontal headwind. Laughter stops. Adam and Joseph slowly fall back and Kenan, well, he put up the kind of performance that is worthy of the great annals of cycling.
Bent over the handlebars of his steel steed, uncaring of the wind, he starts laying down a steady 25 km/h cadence as if driven by an unseen metronome. The wind was blowing, the road started developing some small ruts and one of his spokes broke down; despite all that Kenan keeps on going. His back wheel is wobbling like a penguin on the march but that doesn’t matter; much like the Spaceball One, he brakes for nobody.
The best I can do is to hold to his wheel and ignore the cramps. At some point on this eternally long straight, with the wind in our face, we stop for the pickle bathwater gurgle. Despite – or perhaps thanks to – that, we arrive at Lettas Kraal in about one hour and ten. Not a bad going.
Lettas Kraal > De Bos (172km, +1978mt)
The farm appears through a thicket of eucalyptus like a well-deserved prize. A grove of neat olive trees and, straight ahead, here is a handsome house with a wide, shady portico and a neat metal roof.
Inside, in the cool penumbra, are old leather sofas, plush carpets, a fireplace, starched bedspreads and a vast kitchen with a delightfully démodé wood cooker. My cleats click on the stone floor as I look for the bathroom, and windows open on an inner courtyard where children’s toys lay scattered in the soft grass.
The family managing the farm have put up a great feast. Pancakes, soft drinks, fruit and possibly the best thing for a man craving salty foods: vetkoek. Fat cake, as it’s translated to, is a fried dough bread which one can – and I do – stuff with a delightful mincemeat curry. I honestly don’t know why the pros bother with gels and powders.
I offer to buy a couple of bottles of the local oil but the patriarch, looking quite like Anthony Hopkins’ South African cousin, refuses. “You will not pay anything”, he says as he passes two bottles to a volunteer, so she can carry them for me to Montagu. “Come again instead”.
True to his style, and with his back wheel fixed, Kenan is back at it again, hammering down the road, but I decide to hang back. I slow down to 20 km/h, put my headphones on, and enjoy the flow. Rob Mehl, America, Svømmebasseng: I’m alone, but again I don’t feel lonely. The weather is perfect, pedalling is effortless to the point that I feel like I’m being chauffeured in a car, hands dancing out the window in the warm breeze. Soon I reach the junction that signals the end of the long loop, and the start of the last 40-or-so kms. Hoek-om is not far and, when I get there, the party is still in full swing. The coffee is gone, replaced by beers and vodka coolers. I accept a couple of watermelon slices and the recommendation to go easy down the pass.
The last stretch is over in a blur. The Ouberg descent is a white-knuckle ride – “Mad hectic!” yells one of the fixie ladies as she navigates the downslopes perched atop her single speeder. At the last stop I hear that Craig, an absolute madman from Paarl who’s been riding on a fixie with no brakes, has made it up and down the hill. I meet more Classica riders, helping a few who needed a multi-tool or a tube, and then it’s the tarmac where I’m overtaken by trucks – no, they call them bakkies over here – with people riding on the cargo bed. Everyone waves back.
And so it is that, after 172.49km, 1,978 metres of elevation gain and 8h45 minutes of moving time, the magic words – Traguardo – appear into view. Everyone is still here: Stan and Donnet, the incredible organisers of this feast; Kenan has a beer in hand, Craig a glass of white and his fixie not far. There’s Kai, Nik, Russ, Maya and Jane, Lourens, Luca and Matteo, the fine people from Khaltsha Cycles in Khayelitsha: they, too, are at their first participation and they get a standing ovation. Black, white and – don’t get antsy, here in South Africa it’s different – coloured, gay and straight, fast and slow, narrow tire and 45mm: that night on the edge of the Klein Karoo we were all a big family, united by our love for two wheels, pedals and a seat post, enjoying – as is the Eroica motto – la bellezza della fatica e il gusto dell’impresa.
If you’d like to see more - and better - photos from this amazing event, feel free to click here for a portfolio by Jess Meniere or click here for another by Stan Engelbrecht, the organiser of the Eroica South Africa. I’m even in a couple of them!
