I'm a bit worried that I'm in the wrong place - this is supposed to be the gate for the British Airways flight from Bologna to London Gatewick but there is no one else here. The Aerobus broke down on the way to airport and there were some amusing acts of Italian rage as fellow passengers saw the next Aerobus drive straight past us. Arriving at the airport, I rushed to the very busy checkin counter and managed to bypass the queue because I had checked in online. When going through security, lady looked at my boarding pass and said 'London this way, directing me to an empty queue - the only empty queue out of many full queues.

The only difference appeared to be the addition of an explosives scanner which, predictably, found nothing. Wandering around duty free, I struggled to find any genuine Italian coffee to gift my mother - a lifelong coffee addict (and hence coffee snob). Whether this Segafredo brand raw coffee from Costa Rica will be up to her taste, I am not sure. Quite whether it will even work in her fancy coffee machine is another matter.

My brief visit to Bologna was spurred by both growing boredom and restlessness at home (four years of summer jobs have rendered my ability to enjoy largely vacant periods of time null) and a desire to meet up with a TDA rider who I became good friends with before he unfortunately crashed out of the Tour on our second day in Ethiopia.

This was my second visit to Italy - my first being a school trip to the Lake Guardia region. Bologna is considerably older than much of what I recall of the last trip and I enjoyed the architecture. A student filled city, there was graffiti covering a lot of the area. While the vast majority of this was crass and unimaginative, there were some witty legitimate attempts at making a pictorial statement.

The city itself varies from being clean to dirty (although any traveller who has visited India will rejoice at the cleanliness). Walking the covered arcades that line the streets is fraught with danger from weaving cyclists. I was amused to see a girl on a bicycle trying to navigate a narrow gap between a row of tables and a shop front while eating a gelato with one hand and steering cum balancing with the other. Another danger is produced by the city's large dog populations and their careless owners - you can be as diligent as possible but will still dirty your shoes.

Moving onto more gastronomical and delicious matters, most people of the world are familiar with Italian food. Whatever you thought was good Italian food outside of Italy is easily matched by the cheapest street level pizzeria and for a meager €3, a margharita worth of happiness can be yours. Pasta is similarly wonderful although Vegetarians should be sure to question their assumptions when ordering about what most filled pasta actually contains.

The gelato is also a favourite of mine and, in the baking summer temperatures nearing 40° C, was the perfect treat (to be offset by about 12 hours of heavy cardio-although I wondered how all the patrons of
the parlour were so skinny). A final mention of the food, my host was insistent that I try the coffee. Apparently it is in another league to what is normally served as an espresso. Indeed it is that jolt of caffeine which is fuelling this literary burst and I can confirm that while most coffee irks me tremendously, this was at least drinkable (with a reasonable addition of sugar). The accompanying 'pasta', known to English speakers as a pastry, was much more palatable - imagine a croissant filled with Nutella in one half and custard on the other.

As a tourist, there is a fair amount to see. We followed one of the excellently presented walking tours courtesy of Tourist Information. The museum of modern art (mambo) was quite interesting, as were several churches. Most museums are usually free to visit but you may need to pay for special
exhibitions.

On Saturday evening, we saw an Italian-subtitled American movie in a giant open air cinema in the main piazza of the city. While the movie itself (a 35 year old film called Nashville) seemed to lack a story line, the atmosphere was quite amazing - the piazza was packed full of thousands of people. Confused by the movie's lack of plot and aching from the brittle and unsympathetic chairs, we left early. Hopefully Google will be able to help us figure out the true intent of the movie.

On Sunday we took a state bus on a whim and travelled some distance out of the city to experience the rolling countryside hills. My host, a big road cyclist, related his stories of climbing the hills at just over 6kmph. He is a superb climber too so I imagine that I would most likely be walking.

That evening we watched the first half of the World Cup final in a packed Irish pub just off the main piazza. An overwhelming bias towards the Spanish side was obvious, for reasons I am unaware of. This was the first football match my host was watching and as he tried to work out the offside rule, he was quite amused at the ridiculous showboating of the world class soccer players. After play paused for half time, we went home to rehydrate ourselves via the local gelateria.

Despite trying our hardest to stream the football via the neighbour's wireless connection, we failed and thus I can maintain my achievement of not having watched the entire of a single world cup 2010 match.
Once I land back home, I will thankfully be reconnected to the world (my new mobile phone contract was annoyingly not enabled for roaming, leading to an interesting experience trying to contact my friend on arrival by first trying and failing to use a public payphone and then asking strangers nearby to use their mobile phones).

(The above post was written entirely on a touch screen keyboard. Intense.)

(View in high res)

The last three days of riding have been quite tough, so tough in fact that I've been putting off writing an update each evening. Tonight though, I wrote a piece for the TDA blog so I'll fulfil my journalistic obligations while I have my writing hat on.

We've had two days of roughly 160km each and then 135km today, of which 85km was off-road (our first encounter with the unpaved). The first day started out slowly, as they usually do after a rest day. Having 30 riders load their kit onto a truck at 6am is never going to be the smoothest operation, especially when it's *all* their bags. I'll probably go into the locker situation more later but they're a necessary pain.

After waiting for ages to load my bags, eating breakfast and then realising I was late, I signed out and rushed to the toilet before I actually left.Not even 30 metres after I turned out of camp, the cable came off my front derailleur (also known as the thing that changes gears at the front) and I spent 10 minutes wrestling with it so that I could use my big chainring. Soon after this, my poor navigational sense led me to take a wrong turn (out of the four turns we had that day, this was the third and barely a kilometre out of camp). Double checking the directions, I turned back and was very relieved when the dinner truck drove past about 15 minutes later.

Eager to make up time, and as part of my new found speed (having almost recovered from my cold and saddle sores), I spent most of the morning cycling as fast as I could with the tailwind and caught up to the bulk of the group just as they reached lunch. I left lunch pretty quickly and caught up with an even faster group. It didn't seem like they were going fast enough though and I thought it'd be possible to overtake them. The law of the universe soon kicked in though (karma dontcha know) and within a minute of overtaking, my front gear shifter fell off my handlebars and I had to pull over.

Luckily no real damage was done but in order to tighten it and the cable up properly, it was necessary to replace the cable. Chris, the trip's bike mechanic sorted this out and it now shifts beautifully. He needed to adjust quite a few parts of the derailleur, something which I wish the mechanics at Cycleopedia in Watford had picked up - I'll be looking for a new bike shop when I get back home.

The traffic was really quite fierce that day and unfortunately there were a few accidents amongst the riders. I won't go into full detail but several helmets were cracked! The heavy traffic also caused several riders to actually cycle past camp and a couple of guys (both British in fact) cycled an extra 30-40km.

That evening, whilst being wary of the scorpions that supposedly shared our campsite with us, the staff awarded plates to the winners of the first section. I was happy to receive a special 'Bad Ass' award plate because of my efforts to continue cycling! It'll be going with the rest of my race plate collection at home.

The second 160km day was tiring too, although the road condition improved later in the day. In the morning I was overtaken by the lunch truck and managed to keep pace with it for some time as it slowed down for potholes. In my eagerness to keep up, I rode straight into a pothole and survived - my bottle decided to jump out of it's cage and explode on the road, leaving a mess of red energy drink.

I was caught in the afternoon by the second fastest group of riders, just as I was about to pull over and take a leak. I decided that this was too much of an efficiency advantage to let pass so I joined them for some time. Unfortunately there was no opportunity for relieving myself for the next hour - we picked up a police escort which took us through a crowded roundabout and town where people were out cheering, clapping and waving to us as we cycled through.

This was amazing and for the first time in my life, I felt like some kind of celebrity. Kids were going crazy and at one point ran into the road, almost closing off the way through. Most were fairly pleasant but they treated some of the later riders quite badly, throwing stones and trying to touch them as they cycled past - not amusing at all.

After the crowds had settled down, I left the group and pulled over - there are no words to describe the feeling of relief that ensued. The rest of the ride was fairly sedate, the only notable sight being some kind of airstrip where there were two wrecked aircraft strewn across the field.

Today was quite different indeed but I'll post the article I wrote for the TDA blog.

P.S. Full Mono since my one of my earphones broke.

We're on the eve of our rest day now and I've finally had a chance to glance at myself in a mirror. Shockingly, my appearance remains fairly decent, aside from a fairly haggard beard and fairly messy hair. Neither are a problem though, given the lack of reason to look respectable and having to constantly wear some form of hat (either a helmet or a baseball cap to keep the sun at bay).

This next week of riding is going to be tough - it is one of the two longests contiguous riding weeks we have, seven days of back to back riding. We begin the week with two 160km days of road riding followed by our first (beautiful, hopefully) taste of off-road as we head through Dinder National Park. This park has been shut to the public for nearly a decade and we are quite privileged indeed (we were invited by the minister of that state). We're camping one night in the park, in the fine company of lions (we're told).

After this, we head to the border with Ethiopia, where in addition to kids throwing rocks at us (more on this later), we can eagerly anticipate our first mando-day. Mando (or mandatory) days are race stages which racers must compete in and cannot use their grace days (we are given three grace days to use for our worst three stage times) to cancel. They are mandatory because they are known to be difficult and this first mando day is no exception. The entire day involves 2500m of climbing. I'm hoping that there will be some nice downhill sections but I fear being struck with rocks whilst freewheeling could potentially be catastrophic, if not for the rider but for the bike.

Khartoum has been an interesting rest day. Woken up by the usual prayers at 5am, I was unable to sleep and ventured out to the intersection with the main road near the campsite where several kiosks and stalls have been set up. Walking on the street with my 'Africa-tan' was great for blending in with the locals (if not Sudanese, I at least looked Arabic) and I ate a sugary fried breakfast similar to that in of Dongola - the bread is sometimes called mandazi elsewhere in Africa and is usually topped with sugar.

After laundering our clothes (back to 80% of being completely clean, I'm beginning to think 100% cleanliness is impossible for a non-professional launderer like myself), Adrian and I began our hunt for a post office from which to send postcards back home. At first we flagged down a rickshaw and tried to make the concept of post (Adrian showed him a letter, then made some flying motions and tried miming a stamp) clear. When this appeared not to work, my Lonely Planet African Phrasebook came to the rescue with the Arabic spelling of post office and our rickshaw driver, having asked many other people for further direction, took us to the DHL office relatively nearby.

Once we were there, I queued to ask the DHL receptions where we could post a letter and they gave us the address of their DHL head office in the centre of Khartoum. Another taxi ride later, and we walked into the office to find out that it would cost 210 Sudanese pounds (approximately £50) to post a letter to Australia. Resigned to failure and not wanting to spend much more on the overall act of posting items back home, we were about to leave but asked if they knew of an actual post office - the answer, 'yes but it's far away'. Determined to finish the task we had started, we asked a taxi driver to take us there and to our surprise we arrived at an actual post office in Sudan.

At this point we didn't actually have any postcards with us, having not managed to find any shops that sold them (Sudan is really quite far from the popular tourist track) and it was yet another surprise when we saw stalls in front of the post office selling postcards. It became really obvious that tourists rarely come to Sudan (or at least don't send postcards) because the majority of postcards on sale looked like they had been printed ten or twenty years ago. They also had a variety of tourist guides on offer, 'Sudan - 1999 Tourist Guide'. Anyway, if my parents actually receive my postcard, I'll be satisfied.

Onwards now, Eastwards out of Sudan.

P.S. If you would like a postcard from any particular country that I have yet to visit, drop me a message via the contact page with your postal address and the country you'd like a postcard from. I'll try my best!

Tonight we're at a 'Canal Camp' although some of the TDA staff have
given this camp an alter-name of the 'dead Camel Camp' because of the
three carcasses of camels surrounding the campsite. We're still fairly
near the Nile but tomorrow will steer away from it and further into the
deep of the desert.

The heat here is like nothing I've ever experienced before. The day
usually starts off fairly cool (in fact, trying to leave my sleeping bag
every morning has become harder and harder. At about 9am, it starts to
heat up (we normally leave camp at 8am) and gets steadily warmer. I'd
hazard a guess of around 10 degrees Celsius in the morning, reaching at
about 40-45 degrees at the warmest, about 2pm in the afternoon. The last
few days I was getting in quite late in the afternoon because of various
'challneges' (not sitting down / punctures) but tried today to reach
sooner to avoid the heat.

Water consumption is a big issue here - we need to drink many litres
worth in order to stay hydrated. Today whilst riding I drank about 6
litres of various beverages (occasional 'Coke stops' are one of the
luxuries en route to camp daily) and was still heavily dehydrated when I
arrived at camp. There are clay pots by the side of the road which
contain water for anybody to drink - I didn't try any of this today but
will to tomorrow. Something about the pots' construction causes the
water to stay surprisingly cool.

The other beautiful aspect of being a touring cyclist is that your
calorie burn is sky high - effectively meaning that you can eat as much
as you like and not gain weight. The sweets in Dongola were amazing, a
pastry similar to blaclava but available in a variety of different
forms. I bought snacks for the week of riding since eating only savoury
food quickly gets weary - 64 custard creams and 20 'Caramelo' chocolate
bars. The custard creams are holding up perfectly except that the fat
person inside me finds it hard to resist them (I've been through about
20 biscuits today already...).The chocolate bars lost their solidity and
are now delicious liquid chocolate.

It's strange that having been a vegetarian all my life (intially beause
my parents were vegetarian and then later because I didn't see the point
in switching), I've been seriously contemplating eating meat. Some of
the dishes that I see my fellow riders consuming look incredibly
appetising, made worse by my insatiable cyclists' hunger. I've resisted
so far and probably will do until the end of the trip but I do wonder if
I'm missing out on something good now. In addition, it's physically hard
to consume enough calories to balance the deficit and despite eating a
huge amount at dinner, I always wake up with a rumbling stomach.