Cecil has posted more of his cycling diary

Reading this guy’s stories still kills me. He is having some incredible experiences and I was glad to see another update on his site.

He is out of the desert now and is continuing to experience the real Africa. On a rest day they rented a little scooter to do some sight seeing:

“Two guys on a tiny scooter; here it is the norm, but it was a bit uncomfortable. We drove 90km to Banfour. On our way there the police stopped us. This big guy said we had to pay for two infringements. We didn’t have our passports and we didn’t have papers for the bike. We asked him to take us to the place we have to pay, because we don’t want to pay him. He said he is not going to, but we are not allowed to continue like this, so we have to pay him. We told him that we didn’t mind not continuing and we sat with him. After a few minutes he got fed up and told us that if we could get his photo on the background of his phone he would let us go. We took his phone, captured a picture of the proud man in uniform and set it as his background. We were set free!”

At another point they cycled into an unfenced game reserve and encountered some not so gentle giants:

After our rest we cycled out on the same road we came in on. We were joking about how funny it would be to see the elephants in the road. I told Philip I could smell them… I really could. Sure enough, around the next corner they were standing in the middle of the road. If we were not aware of them, we might have cycled straight into them. We slammed on brakes and stood dead still. They just looked at us for a while, the bull then decided that we were too close for comfort and he came for us. Lance Armstrong would have had a hard time keeping up. We cleared some distance, stopped and checked out the situation. There was no other road. At that time guy on a scooter came in the same direction that we wanted to go. He first laughed at our situation and then he took us through the bush to another road that would lead us back to the main road. It was an amazing experience, but it could have been dangerous.”