Dawn

Day 1

When you open your eyes to the unpleasant alarm, and you know you're at the beginning of something, something that is not routine, you may feel it is too difficult to start after all. That's how I felt on the morning of the first day of a 10 journey. It wasn't that I woke up, I hardly even slept. I felt sickness clutching my throat, sinking into me thr whole night, and by 5am my head was pounding, my flesh already erupting in chilly fields full of sensitive pinpricked skin.

We'd be cycling away from the sea, from Hartenbos to Oudsthoorn, and that meant climbing. Fortunately my partner for the day, Chantal, forced me to focus not on my own sickly dilemmas, but on her untrained legs.

A blue snake, the 60 of us soon broke into fragments, as the road twisted piece by piece up the mountains. I found out that my partner for the day was studying law. I informed her, semi-tongue in cheek that I had been conjuring up an article recently titled: Why Lawyers Are Sharks. And so we made conversation while the dark green hills filled with dollops, then more generous scoops of light and heat.

Chantal's knee pulled painfully more than once on especially steep climbs, and once she nearly yanked me into a deep concrete culvert - a convenient roadside tomb for a cyclist intended (no doubt) for more chronic sickness.

Having had one hours sleep, and not much more the day before, and still carrying all the burdens of a house on my back (I'd evacuated my home on Brebner Road virtually unassisted), the climb away from the great ocean felt like a dream.

We made modest progress, finding half of our flock gathered halfway up the first difficult 9km pass. When this group departed, we went with but were called back - we were number 31 and 32, so we had to wait, patiently, in the biting wind, and under paper thin torn gray clouds, for the laggards.

Finally all of our number had accumulated (several had already quit), and we were finally allowed to continue to pedal or walk our way up the cold mountain, away from the forests, to the desert on the other side. It turned out to be 6 hours in the saddle, with some views and oocassionally the awful smell, of ostriches.

From Oudshoorn we faced the teeth and felt the breath of a monster driving against us. I felt waves of sick-weakness washing over me, but I was dtermined to get the second stage finished. Andre and I broke away. I gritted my teeth as he played a tactical game of pulling ahead, waiting for me to catch up, and then letting me work. At the end we sprinted together, neck and neck, him pulling just ahead and then diving left to cut me off, then punching the air.

We sat in the sun for a long time, waiting for the others to arrive, while the sun burnt into my calves, and my throat cracked as poisonous green ooze wormed and sludged unseen.

But my condition was just a prelude to a collective conundrum. We went over another pass in the bus, and after several grinding ascents, the engine finally hissed and died. We waited on a sandbank beside the matted fur of a halfburied dog, or desert fox. The bus was filled with oil, but it didn't go much further.

We walked in the cold of the night, an icecream van trailing some of us, offering charity - a free ride into Ladismith - while bakkieloads were ferried to a nearby farmhouse where carpets, paintings, TV and coffee waited. From there we were ferried, by the bakkieload, to the church in Ladysmith, where the Epic was stationed, in their thousand tents. Meanwhile my throat, and my veins, were choking in green poison.