Nedbank Sani2C 1: this time it’s about bicycles

The cycling gods have not been smiling upon me. And it turns out my teammate has a knife.

I’ll leave the knife bit until last and kick off with my tragic loss of my quality Italian lycra. Right. So up until last week, my training for my inaugural multi-stage mountainbike race was going rather well. I was, as they say, well chuffed. Things have changed…

For the preceeding 3 months I had mastered what’s regarded in mountainbiking circles as an utterly daft bicycle. My Cotic Simple… here it is…

… is the anti-thesis of the what the modern mountainbike is supposed to be. It’s mostly defined by what it is not. It is not, for example, made of carbon-fibre. It’s made of steel. It doesn’t have 21 gears. It has one. It doesn’t have a rear suspension – hell, it doesn’t even have a front suspension. Nope it’s a rigid-forked bastion of all things old skool. Interestingly, just like me .

All in all it’s a very cool bike in a niched and, dare I say it, hipster kind of way. It’s the kind of bike that requires one to wear cycling clothing made of merino wool and one of those little cycling caps with the small peaks that flip upwards. All of which I have.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a thoroughly modern machine – a 10.5kg wonder of modern geometry, 29er wheels, and disc brakes all held together by the kind of bespoke mastercraftsman welding we barista-brewed, coffee-quaffing cyclo-snobs worship.

There’s an added benefit too. The satisfaction. There’s nothing quite like dropping your training partners and their R50 000 carbon-fibre dual-sussers on the way up the steepest climb.  Like this...

But enough smugness.  As I said it was all going well until the Sunday before last. Then I crashed.

Within the last 5 km of our weekly 85km training ride, on the scenic ocean-side road between Llandudno and Camps Bay, our little peloton managed to trip over itself. Three of us went down pretty hard. Ricky was the most serious. His wrist looked like it was broken and his stomach pain turned out to be some concerning internal bleeding. Mike’s fall looked the most serious – as I hit the ground I remember him cartwheeling over all of us – but he was relatively unscathed. I was somewhere in the middle. Once the initial shock of seeing the very expensive Italian lycra I had purchased only days earlier flapping in the wind, I began to feel my knee.  Okay, first I felt this…

… and then this…

…and then the bit on my arse which you don’t want to see, trust me.

For the next few days I suspected serious knee tendon damage. It looked like my Nedbank Sani2C aspirations were finished. All the months of training, the help from our sponsors, Oakley, Isostar and African Nature Company, would all come to nought.

But no.

Thanks to the outright wizadry of my physio/doctor Lawrence Van Lingen, what was just a badly bruised tendon was nursed back to health. I had my last treatment yesterday afternoon. Looked like I was good to go...

Then my Sabi2C race partner and teammate Matthew do Jongh slashed my tyre. It’s a long story. “Unpacking your bike… something something… bubble wrap something something… Stanley knife… something… cut the sidewall ‘by mistake’ something something”.

During Sani I’ll be spending two nights in a small tent with Matt. It’s going to be  long race. And it starts on Thursday. I'll keep you posted. Hopefully.

THE UNEXPECTED LUNCHBOX

On test... Range Rover Evoque Coupé SD4 Prestige

Southeast Asia can be full of surprises. Delicious street food found in back-alley markets, ancient temple ruins hidden among thick jungle vines and, of course…. girly boys. Which, on the list of surprise packages, has to be right up there.

Girly boys (listen up all single males catching a connecting flight to Bangkok) are … how does one put this politely … Thai “women” with a little more occupying their g-strings than one would anticipate. Yes. Basically they are males with breast implants and skillfully applied make-up that for all intents and purposes – especially after a few bottles of strong Thai beer – appear to be rather attractive young women.

Unfortunately there are no statistics to support the high number of young British men currently in therapy thanks to an evening full of surprises with one such girly boy, but I suspect one of these patients may well have designed the Range Rover Evoque. And before the Range Rover marketing team chokes on their lattes, can I just say that this is a good thing.

Let’s start with the girly bit. There can be no doubt the Evoque is one of the prettiest cars on the road – especially the incarnation I spent the week sashaying around in. The two-door Coupé, sparkling in its metallic “Colima Lime” gown, perfectly accessorized in gleaming “Polished Alloy” 20-inch wheels and “Botanical” filigreed aluminium interior trim was a catwalk show-stopper. In its presence, women were unable to hide the envy in their eyes, and men would sneak the kind of covert glances they usually reserve for cleavage. This is indeed one very beautiful car.

Now for the surprise-in-the-trouser department bit... turns out the Evoque has a lot more lead in its pencil than that red-carpet dress would have one believe, especially the turbo-diesel version tested here. Shared with the Land Rover Freelander, its 2.2-litre diesel puts out a healthy 140kW. Granted, this isn’t as much as its 177kW 2.0-litre petrol sibling, but crucially the diesel offers more hairy-chested torque. Lots of power available at low revs is what one wants for everyday driving and with 420Nm of testosterone at its disposal, the SD4 Evoque will raise almost as many surprised eyebrows as Bangkok’s finest.

The driving dynamics are also hugely impressive – especially with the Jaguar-esque selector knob dialed all the way right to Sport mode. It sharpens the throttle response and gearshifts through the 6-speed auto, and with 20-inch rubber on each corner, it grips the asphalt like… **cough** yes… it grips really well.

And that, in a nutshell is the Range Rover Evoque Coupé. It’s like a holiday in Thailand – a country full of delightful, and sometimes unexpected, surprises. Except, of course, with the Range Rover Evoque there are no great tour package-like discounts. The base-price of the Range Rover Evoque SD4 Coupé Prestige is R613 800.

As appeared in the April 2013 issue of Khuluma, the Kulula in-flight magazine.

Top Five Funniest Road Signs

Road signs are supposed to be informative things that give you vital pieces of information, right…?

Lost in translation

place: Wales

This is one of the all-time classics courtesy of the Swansea town council. As a non-Welsh speaker one would assume that bottom part says the same as the top part, right. Not exactly. What it actually says is “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated" and was obviously part of the would-be translator’s automated out-of-office email reply.

No officer, it’s where I live…

place: Weed, California

The question isn’t so much “how did the this town get to be called Weed” (that’s easy – the town’s founder was pioneer Abner Weed) but more “why the hell have the town’s elders not changed the name”?”. One can only but imagine the jokes it’s 2 967 townsfolk have had to endure and the sheer number of road signs stolen by those habitual stealers of road signs… college kids.

You are not here

place: Palm Springs

If you were on your way to Tahquitz Canyon, near Palm Springs in the US and home to a spectacular 20 metre waterfall, rock art, ancient irrigation systems and artifacts… well… you would be going in the wrong direction. This land owner is clearly so over answering the inevitable question posed by his confused countrymen, he has been moved to make a sign.

Boom. There it is.

place: Falkland Islands

Courtesy of the English/Argentinian spat over who owned this little archipelago in the South Atlantic ocean, the islands’ 200 humans and 500 000 sheep have the threat of unexploded mines to worry about. They also have to worry about what this sign actually means. Should one slow down, as this will somehow minimize the chances being blown up? Or should you speed up, because the mines explode quite slowly and you could actually out run a mine should you trigger it. 

Yes I know, but where are you from?

place: Twatt, Shetland Islands

What is it with chilly little archipelagos and funny road signs? This one is on the Shetland Islands, those small and very chilly pieces of rock north east of mainland Britain. Twatt is a small settlement on the largest of the Islands and gets its name, not from the type of people of who live there, but the old Norse word meaning “small parcel of land”. Makes for a great photo opp though. Not.