When does a mere trip, simply making your way from place A to place B, turn into a journey, something altogether grander and more impressive? It is probably a combination of factors, a blend of distance and time and, hardest to define, intent. We can set out on a trip anytime, but a journey is a bigger operation. Fortunately, the world provides plenty of opportunities for journeys, and I have been lucky enough to have made a few journeys over the years, and have crossed paths or joined in for a spell with others.
A couple of years ago I jumped on my bicycle and pedalled off for two weeks on an African journey. My two weeks, the 1100 km stage from Iringa (Tanzania) to Lilongwe (Malawi), was only a small taste of a two-wheel journey that, in total, takes four months and stretches for 12,000 km from Cairo to Cape Town. The time, the distance, the mode of transport and the route all qualified this as a true journey, but to my mind the spirit of this adventure doubly qualified it for the journey tag. Ride a bicycle through 10 different African countries and, even with a support truck tagging along to carry equipment and, most important, a bike mechanic or two, there is no way this could be anything less than a journey.
My stage featured good roads, none of the jarring potholes or long sandy stretches that test riders as they traverse Kenya or Sudan. Nor did I have to cope with the endless descent down to the Nile River in Ethiopia and then the long, long climb up the other side. Nevertheless there did seem to be an awful lot of ups and downs, although the longest altitude change was, fortunately, a downhill one, as the route plunged through a seemingly endless series of hairpins from the Tanzanian-Malawi border down to the shores of Lake Malawi.
Of course, the terrain and the natural features are, as any Himalayan trekker can confirm, only a small part of the story. Most often, it is the people you encounter along the trail that makes the experience. Along my stage of the Tour d'Afrique, it seemed that almost every child in every village we passed through would turn out on the roadside to wave at us as we passed by. Our contingent of cyclists was clearly the most exciting thing to have happened in months, and it was generally a stretched out, repeat performance. And again like trekkers in the mountains, we were soon spread out for kilometres along the route, each going at his or her own pace.