Recently I wrote about Cecil who is riding through Africa from Morocco to South Africa. He has just posted an update to his adventure diary – and it makes interesting reading.

They are now 2800 km into the trip and have passed through Morocco, Mauritania and into Senegal. It sounds like he isn’t going to miss the heat, sand and unbearable flies of Mauritania, but as usual the stories and pictures are great. Great reading for desk-jockeys like me.

Some of the highlights:

• Staying with Mauritanian camel herders and drinking fresh camel milk
• Cycling through the desert at midnight under a full moon. (It’s too hot to cycle through the day so they have been cycling quite a lot at night)
• Cecil has developed a 6 step method for dealing with the regular sand-blastings they get from trucks screaming past at “a pace just under the speed of sound”. It includes several steps for swearing and some quick moving to minimize the impacts.

A great part of the story has Cecil resting under a tree when his family pull up in a car! He wasn’t hallucinating – they came out to surprise him.