São Paulo – His profession, his bicycle and Africa are the three passions of journalist Alexandre Costa Nascimento. Four years ago, he decided to join all three into a challenge: travelling 12,000 km in Africa on a bike and then telling his adventures. The outcome is the book Mais que um leão por dia (More than a lion a day), available from bookstores beginning this month. Nascimento recounts the most exciting, dangerous and challenging moments of his travels.
“I am a journalist, I have a blog called ‘Ir e Vir de Bike’ (Coming and Going by Bike), which is what I write about. I always do lots of research on cycling, and that is how I found the website of ‘Tour d’Afrique,’ which is a bike tour through Africa organized by a Canadian company since 2003. I have always nurtured a strong interest in Africa as well, and the moment I found that site, I wanted to put my three passions together,” he says.
He found out about the website in 2011. In August 2012 he started planning the trip, went looking for sponsors and for funding online, from people interested in his project, in addition to investing his own money. Once he had the R$ 55,000 he needed, Nascimento left to Africa and became the first Brazilian to participate in the project.
From January 11th to May 11th, 2013, he covered 12,000 km on a bike. The departure point was Cairo, Egypt, and the finishing line was in Cape Town, South Africa. From Northern to Southern Africa, Nascimento went through Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Botswana, Zambia and Namibia. He was also in Zimbabwe, although the country was not a part of the Tour d’Afrique route.
Some days he travelled more than 200 km. On others, Nascimento and the other 54 bikers stumbled upon elephants, slept in savannahs where lions dwell, and experienced extreme temperatures ranging from zero to 43 degrees Celsius. They pedaled through mud, water and sandstorms, and struggled with insolation, sprains, wounds and damaged equipment.
“The secret to this challenge is to not face unexpected events as problems because they will always come up. It could be a flat tire, the head, a steep uphill climb. Confronting the unexpected is part of the experience. Hence the book’s title (‘More than a lion a day’),” he says.
Some of the trip’s most memorable moments took place in Sudan and Egypt, the two Arab countries in the trip. “I was riding my bike towards Luxor, Egypt, sharing the road with a truck carrying sugarcane and people. The truck came near me at high speed and one of them threw a stick of cane at me. I ducked to avoid being hit, but ended up in the middle of the road and almost got hit by a van,” he recalls.
The recollection from Sudan is a better one altogether. “I and a woman biker from New Zealand stopped to rest at a village. It was really hot and we didn’t have water. I believe she had a flat tire. A woman who was passing by approached us and gave us the only bottle of water she had. It was dirty water from the river. It was all she had and she shared it with us. This showed us that despite having next to nothing, the people are still willing to help. On other occasions, people did all sorts of things to help. Africans are very hospitable.”
The idea of writing the book to tell these and several other stories came up even before Nascimento left for Africa. “The [book’] publisher found out about my plans and became interested. By the time I left, the contract was all but signed,” he said. Mais que um leão por dia combines pictures from the trip, the writer’s stories, and socioeconomic data from the countries into a nonfiction novel. Part of the revenues will be donated for Tour d’Afrique organizer TDA Fundation to purchase bicycles. These, in turn, will be donated to the Africans.
Nascimento continues to write his blog, discussing myriad aspects of bicycle usage as transportation, ranging from problems experienced in big cities, such as signaling and traffic, to global issues such as the environmental benefits of bikes. The blog, however, needs to share space with another of the journalist’s dreams. He wants to travel through Asia. On a bike.
“There’s the Silk Route, between Beijing (China) and Istanbul (Turkey). It goes through Russia, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Iran, before ending in Turkey. The route is travelled every two years and the next one will be in 2016,” he announces.
Data sheet
Book: Mais que um leão por dia
Author: Alexandre Costa Nascimento
Publisher: Nossa Cultura
Pages: 448
Price: US$ 25
Further information: http://irevirdebike.com.br/book-mais-que-um-leao-por-dia-more-than-a-lion-by-day/
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
