Kenya cycle challenge Day One and Two...

I am writing this from a cybercafe in a very wet town called Nakuru on the way to the Rift Valley. We have been in country for three days now and its been a lot harder of a challenge than we expected. Today was a mostly easy day though - just 60kms - mostly downhill as we head down into the Rift Valley. Yesterday - the first proper day of cycling was much, much harder - 105kms through very mountainous country which few of us had experienced during our training - outside of the hard setting on the gym bike machines! It's raining today but yesterday was seriously hot - so a lot of people are sporting some lovely sunburn - mostly the backs of their calves. The whole adventure has been made much harder by the bikes we have been given - nothing like the 21 speed, new models we were expecting but locally sourced junkers most of which were barely working on the first morning so we were delayed by hours as the Kenyan mechanics tried to get the 10 year old machines into some kind of order. On new bikes this would have been hard - on the ones we have it's going to be hard to say if all of us will finish - some people are already riding in the vans. Right - better go as van full of people waiting for me for a three hour transfer - we can't cycle the whole way to Lake Victoria - in the time we have allotted so a transfer was always part of the plan.