The Trip of a Lifetime: Joe Louchheim Cycles the Tour D'Afrique

For three and a half months, Joe Louchheim’s wake-up call came at 4:45 a.m.

He pulled on his clothes and broke down his tent in the dark, under a canopy of stars that once felt foreign to him — a hemisphere away from the familiar constellations of the East End. As dawn broke, he ate breakfast. As the sun cleared the horizon, he hopped on his bicycle, settling into the saddle.

It was time to ride.

Over the course of 98 days, including strategically placed respites, Louchheim cycled 5,400 miles down the length of Africa — from the scorching, flat roads of Egypt and Sudan, to the lush landscapes of Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi and Zambia, to dodging wildlife encounters in Botswana and navigating relentless, deep desert sands in Namibia, to, finally, finishing along the wild coastline of South Africa.

While cycling through nine countries, he contemplated dramatic, awe-inspiring scenery — riding on road, dirt, gravel and sand — and camped in some of the most remote reaches of the world. He was both social and quiet, dropping into a meditative silence during the monotonous stretches, digging deep during the grueling ones. He learned the true meaning of living moment to moment, of relying on himself and strangers who became friends, of setting a goal and achieving it.

“It was just a trip of a lifetime,” he said.

An International Cyclist Is Born

The idea of cycling first connected with Louchheim as a teenager — when he saw the film “Breaking Away” in 1979 — and resurfaced almost 30 years later, after running his final marathon in 2006 and grappling with knee pain. Outside of providing a gentler form of exercise, he liked the bicycle’s efficiency and ease, its design virtually unchanged since its invention.

“It’s a very simple concept, but it’s a beautiful concept,” explained Louchheim, who is the former publisher of The Press News Group. “I just like the feel of it, moving through space and getting somewhere under your own power. And I’m also very competitive. It gave me a way to continue to have an activity where I could ride hard with other people.”

Fanning his passion, as the legend goes, Summer Louchheim bought her husband “The Cyclist’s Bucket List: A Celebration of 75 Quintessential Cycling Experiences,” a coffee-table style book by Ian Dille. He flipped to the first chapter — the Tour d’Afrique: Egypt to South Africa.

“I looked at that thing and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, that’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard of. What sort of insane moron would do something like that?’” he said with a laugh.

It was Henry Gold who thought of it, in the late 1980s, as a way to market bicycles as a low-cost solution for local transportation needs to Africans by organizing a cycling race across the continent. He called it the Tour d’Afrique.

While the project did not take off, the vision for the race was irresistible for Gold and his friend, cyclist Michael de Jong, who planned the first event for 1994. But when a terrorist attack in Egypt forced them to cancel, they abandoned the event for nearly a decade — until the eve of Gold’s 50th birthday in 2002.

He called De Jong and told him he wanted to resurrect the ride — he was seeking a life-affirming challenge, Dille wrote in his book — and gave him 24 hours to decide. Eleven months later, the duo and 31 other riders saddled up at the Pyramids of Giza and started pedaling south to Cape Town — a journey that, in four months, earned them the Guinness World Record for the fastest human-powered crossing of Africa.

While the ride no longer has a racing component, it is one of TDA Global Cycling’s most popular tours — and it was lodged in Louchheim’s mind. So, the 58-year-old signed up and, last April, got the call that he was off the waitlist.

“And then at that point, you just start planning,” he said. “I’m not a camper — I don’t know any of this crap — but I do know how to spend money on bicycles.”

Louchheim bought himself a Colorado-made Moots Routt YBB gravel bike, designed to carry any width of road or mountain tire, allowing him to switch depending on terrain — a component of the ride that he could not train for.

In fact, much of it, he couldn’t.

So he stuck to his typical routine — cycling about 100 miles a week, split between indoors, outdoors and his gym classes — and, on January 10, he arrived in Cairo, Egypt. Over the next four days, he met his fellow riders, learned the rules of the road and ironed out logistics, his anticipation mounting.

“I was just ready to get going, and I think everyone else was ready to get going,” he said, “because you really don’t know what you’re doing until you start doing it.”

The night before they started, Louchheim oscillated between feeling positive, he said, and a bit anxious.

“I was just really apprehensive and worried. I’m always a worrier about these things,” he said. “But once we started, everything sort of clears out and then you just have your goal — your mini, daily goals of getting through the ride and then those all piece together to the ultimate goal of getting to Cape Town in one piece.”

Into the Heartland

On the morning of Saturday, January 14, Louchheim and his 33 fellow cyclists gathered at the foot of the Pyramids of Giza — but it turned out to be more of a ceremonial start. After a few photos, they promptly loaded their bikes, and themselves, on buses and drove about 12 miles outside of Cairo, where they officially began.

“These aren’t cities that are built for cycling,” he said. “A one-lane road has four lanes of traffic and it’s just f-----g dangerous in Cairo. There’s no shoulder and the cars don’t stop for anything. It’s physically impossible. Now, we rode through some dangerous cities, don’t get me wrong, but Cairo was impossible.”

The Tour d’Afrique itself is pretty straightforward, Louchheim explained. Here’s how it works: The assisted ride is broken into segments, which last between about 10 days and three weeks, and while many cyclists complete the whole trip, others join for one or multiple segments. On this particular ride, some were there to complete their 2020 expedition, which was cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic — just as they crossed the border of Tanzania, the halfway point.

Participants cover the daily mileage at their own pace, stopping at villages and roadside cafés to rest at one of the tour’s massive overland vehicles for lunch on their way to the next camp. The vehicle also stowed the riders’ weekly bags, which held items like spare parts, extra clothes and medicine.

The second vehicle, fondly called the “Mother Ship,” served breakfast every morning before heading to that night’s camp with the cyclists’ daily bags — stuffed with each rider’s camping supplies and other necessities — and dinner. Other trucks would stop at the quarter marks for water refreshes.

“The only thing you really needed to carry was just spare tires and tubes and a pump and those sorts of things, so that was the beauty of the ride,” Louchheim said. “You weren’t laden down with all your gear, so you could move pretty quickly.”

Though the longest daily stretch was 112 miles, the cyclists rode between 70 and 90 miles per day and, on average, Louchheim clocked 17 miles per hour — sometimes faster, sometimes much slower, depending on the terrain, he said. Every morning, he left at dawn and aimed to arrive at camp by 2 p.m. in order to beat the sweltering afternoon heat.

“The distances were not that long for the first week or two, and the terrain was flat and we mostly had a tailwind,” he said. “So you kind of rode yourself into shape.”

By the time they reached their first long climb from the moonscape desert over the mountains — about 156 miles between days five and six of riding from Safaga to Luxor — they dropped into lush green and had their first rest day. Louchheim treated himself to a $30 hotel room with a warm shower, toured temples and tombs, and sailed and danced aboard a cruise down the Nile River.

Then, it was back to work.

On day 11 of riding, the team crossed into Sudan — and, in the desert, he finally got a “breathtaking” display of stars, he said.

“The Southern Cross I’d never seen; it’s really neat to see a different array of stars at night,” he said. “I know my sky pretty well here, so it was disorienting to see that sky there and you can see so much more of it because there are no lights anywhere. And in the desert, there were nights where you could just pull your sleeping bag out and sleep outside of the tent because it’s so dry. That was pretty special to do that.”

On day 13 of riding, the group continued to make its way south through unrelenting, blistering heat, he said, his bike’s computer measuring 102°F. At least six cyclists were picked off the road by the sweep van, he said, all suffering from heat exhaustion. But the next day, a tailwind brought in cooler temperatures — and a sandstorm, covering Louchheim in dust and dirt — before the group rested in Dongola ahead of their four-day ride to Khartoum.

There, a few of the cyclists went out in search of food when a man named Yassar, an English teacher at a local school, invited them into his home to meet his family and drink tea. Unexpectedly, they spent half the day with him — and he was just one of the many people Louchheim met who welcomed him with curiosity, warmth and open arms, he said.

“Now I think, you know, I hope he’s alright and his family’s alright and his kids are OK,” he said, referencing the recent violence nearby in Khartoum. “That part of it is kind of sad because Sudan was just a lovely country. You just got the feeling that a lot of these places that are rising democracies are just one small conflict away from falling into real hardship.

“Khartoum was just a good city. Everybody was just great, and then all of a sudden, it’s not,” he continued, “and I got that feeling in a lot of places.”

From Sudan’s capital city, the group boarded a flight to Nairobi, skipping over South Sudan, Ethiopia and northern Kenya due to unrest. Nearly two weeks later, their support vehicles completed the trek — and while the ride, so far, had its challenges, Louchheim soon learned they were easy compared to what came next.

A Finish Line on the Horizon

After 13 days off, it felt good to be back in the saddle, Louchheim said, at least at first. The exertion caught up to him as the route and temperatures soared. He felt the altitude, the bulk of the ride climbing above 5,000 feet — a view of snowcapped Mt. Kilimanjaro awaiting him the next day at camp.

“It was just very freeing not to have to think about anything and, really, all you had to do was wake up in the morning and ride from point A to point B,” he said. “So the riding wasn’t really the hard part. The hard part was everything else.”

On day 21 of cycling, he crossed into Tanzania and, after three days of dust and grime, finally had a warm shower at camp — the highest rank in the “hierarchy of showers,” he said. The worst was baby wipes, he said, followed by a water bottle shower, a tub shower and a cold shower of varying pressure, before reaching the peak spot.

But the days were growing hotter and stickier, making it impossible for Louchheim to crawl into his tent before 8 p.m., where he’d lie on his sleeping pad in a pool of sweat until about 3 a.m. — when it finally started to cool off — only to awake two hours later. His weariness grew and he still had five countries to go.

A hand-numbing, bone-rattling slog into Malawi came next, followed by a 7-mile climb to 7,100 feet that dropped them down a mountain road toward the border of Zambia. In Botswana, Louchheim and his riding partner had a standoff with a bull elephant, eventually ducking behind a semi-trailer truck to get past him.

But it was Namibia that marked the hardest riding days, he said, his tires digging into the sandy, rocky roads as he crossed from one side to the next trying to find tarmac — the physicality compounded by sleep deprivation.

“Meanwhile you’re going uphill and the wind’s blowing 30 miles an hour in your face,” he said. “Those were soul-sucking days,” he continued. “And, by the way, you’ve got uncontrollable diarrhea.”

There were a handful of days that Louchheim wanted to give up, he said, and every time, he dipped into what he calls his “pain chest” — a collection of his deepest moments of suffering that he has overcome. They showed him that he could overcome this, too.

“I would step out and say, ‘It’s really windy, the terrain’s horrible, but you know what? I’m in Africa, and I’m not working. I’m riding my f-----g bike in Africa, and how lucky am I? How lucky am I to do this?’” he recalled.

On Saturday, April 22, the tour reached Cape Town, South Africa. Of the original 34, nine cycled every inch — including Louchheim — and only two of them camped every night, as well. With a salty breeze blowing off the Atlantic Ocean, they celebrated together, champagne and tears flowing.

“It was really moving, everyone was crying,” he said. “Just thinking back on it, I sort of well up because it was a long trip. To finish that and go through it ­— even though, as I say, it’s really all you had to do — it was a long three and a half months that went by very quickly.”

Returning to the East End nearly 10 pounds lighter, Louchheim balanced out any culture shock with the comfort of his bed, reuniting with his family and friends, and never taking for granted warm showers and toilets that flush again, he said with a lighthearted laugh.

And while the trip did not change his life, he said, it certainly changed his perspective.

“There’s a built-in patience there that I hope I brought home with me,” he said. “I’m usually a little impatient, but that’s taught me to appreciate what I have, that you just don’t need much to be happy, and then you just kind of take things as they come. I hope I’m a little more chill than I was before I left — but you’d have to ask my friends that one.”

He also has a new appreciation for the value of time, he said, and expects his next adventure will come in a year or two — though it will definitely involve less camping, he said.

“It really seems like a long time ago. It seems like I did that trip years ago because emotionally and psychologically and everything else, it’s so removed from where I am now,” he said. “It’s almost like a fever dream, but I guess we did it. I’m pretty sure I did it.”