Close encounter of the teddy kind

[il padrone]

The chrome dome on top is an aerodynamic advancement 

[John Saxby]

The jokes get more desperate the longer Spring and good riding weather takes to arrive

Too true, Andre. Jus' couldn't stand it any longer, so I up & betook myself to the Land of Prawns, & am writing from Maputo, in Mozambique.  Will return to the Great White North only when I am reliably informed that the snow is well & truly gone, say late April.

[Andre Jute]

Too true, Andre. Jus' couldn't stand it any longer, so I up & betook myself to the Land of Prawns, & am writing from Maputo, in Mozambique.  Will return to the Great White North only when I am reliably informed that the snow is well & truly gone, say late April.

In Johannesburg at one stage I owned a smart restaurant, to give employment to a hotel manager and his wife who lost their jobs when I fell out rather explosively (it was Guy Fawkes night) with the owner of the hotel where he worked before. Every morning I would send the company plane to Lourenco Marques, as it was then, to fly in langoustines, a shellfish somewhere between a very large prawn and a lobster; mine was the only restaurant in Johannesburg to serve them, and of course I dined there often. Now I have to cycle to get rid of the cholesterol. Not a bad trade-off.

My executive assistant went to LM for her honeymoon, so we made up a party of raucous friends, and turned up too. LM was a wonderful place back then, much more fun than going to the Great Barrier Reef or Miami, and I daresay now. (In between there was a dull, humorless civil war.) Forever sunshine. Lucky you.

[John Saxby]

There's still a regular flyisng-fish (as it were) service between Mozambique and the Rand, Andre -- updated version of Kruger's lifeline, so to speak.  When we lived in Pretoria 10 years ago, we used to go to a place in the SE area, not far from Groenveld, called Crawdaddy's, which specialized in All That. Splendid noisy joint, and good value.

You may have seen Nando's in the UK (& Ireland too?), a much-to-be-preferred alternative to the wretched take-out stuff sold by McDonald's, etc.--Nando's does Portuguese flatties, peri-peri, and a range of sauces.  I'm not sure how well it travels beyond Southern Africa.  Nando's is good at one-liners: their small Ford delivery trucks were adorned with slogans like "Poultry in motion".  They ran into problems in an election a few years ago with this one: "We don't just make promises -- we deliver!"

To keep this slightly linked to cycling -- it's to be avoided in Maputo, I'd say, partly 'cos of the dreadfully potholed streets (humungous private-sector investment, no evident counterpart in public infrastructure), partly 'cos of the congested traffic (4 x 4 plague).

J.

[Andre Jute]

I'll tell you an African ride I'd still like to do. From Cape Town via Sea Point and Hout Bay around the back of Table Mountain and back into the city via Muizenberg. I used to do that in a Porsche with the tail hanging out but I'm more mature now... Or down the mountain towards George or Mossel Bay, leaving aside the small problem of first cycling up a 3500ft elevation. There's also a road down Kilimandjaro, but I never saw that in a good condition, so it might not be as much fun as those South African passes with their superb Italian-engineered surfaces. (Many of them were designed by Italian prisoners of war who elected to stay when offered the opportunity.)

[John Saxby]

A friend from Zambia days half a lifetime ago now lives in CT (near Muizenberg), and though he's in his late 70's, rides the Argus each year and others of the "Timed Events" in SA. (It was our ride together from Pretoria to Durban to mark his 70th b'day that really nudged me into longer-distance cycling.) Your ride from Sea Point eastwards & round the back would be similar, and well worth it, for sure. There are some splendid rides through the Kleine Draakensberg as well. Trevor, my friend in CT, tells me that the possibility of returning home sans bike is unfortunately all too possible (if not yet likely).

[Andre Jute]

Pietermaritzburg to Durban I remember as 50 miles downhill...