But the best cycling was that long, long descent from Pietermaritzburg to Durban.
Andre,
Anyway we camped at a Caravan Park at Umhlanga Rocks for a couple of days and rode into the Durban beachfront each day where all the action for twenty year olds could be found.
The return to PMB took considerably longer than the down hill run!
My girlfriend was a champion ice skater, so we were often in Durban because they had the best ice rink in the country, almost on the beach, as it happens. We divided the work. I coasted downhill on the bike while she drove behind me, then she cycled uphill to PMB while I drove behind her.
You have an amazing memory, Mike. The only other place I remember in Durban is the Royal Hotel where I took long lunches to stop myself throttling several of the actors in the premiere of one of my plays, but I can't remember the name of the theatre, or even which play it was -- I want to say the Star, but that's in Johannesburg, where Spike Milligan never let me forget I fell into the orchestra pit with the Irish juvenile lead in another play that premiered there, poncing around for an encore before an opening night crowd singing along with our version of a Gilbert and Sullivan song, the only line now remaining with me is "I never thought of taking a tickey for myself at all." Well, actually, after Mr Milligan on a later occasion himself fell into the same orchestra pit, he never brought it up first. I was not so sensitive.
From a cyclist's perspective, I never thought much of South Africa's absolutely wonderful main national roads, built after the war by Italian engineers who had been prisoners of war and decided to stay. (Of course, as a sporting motorist in the habit of setting records on public roads, I loved those Italian engineers -- and their daughters too.) Too tempting for motorists to speed and endanger a cyclist. And when you went off the main roads, a lot of the lesser roads were newly graded earth, treacherous loose stuff for bi-wheelers, and generally hard work. The surfaces on the smaller Irish roads and lanes, all blacktop, I ride may be nasty in spots and at times, but they keep the speed of motorists down in best cases (for a cyclist) to a crawl.
Amazing how many people with South African experience come on this Thorn forum. I suppose it's a sign of our bicycling sophistication...
The riders in the Isle of Man TT are practising this week, in case you forgot, and presumably racing next week. In Northern Ireland motorbike road racing is a national sport, so I'm about to investigate which of the NI channels will carry the IoM racing; we live in the far south of Ireland but we get all the NI channels by satellite: it's just a matter of sorting them out from about 500 other channels.