Photograph: At the Union Buildings

PART ONE

Stage One: Pretoria to Johannesburg, via Soweto

My bicycle’s name is Mellow Yellow. It’s by no means a state of the art model.

It doesn’t have shocks nor any fancy gadgets to tell me how many kilometres I have ridden, but it has gears; twenty-one of them altogether.

My car is also a vehicle of the “no frills” variety: a little Nissan 1400 bakkie called Muscle Cracker which is a tight squash for more than two passengers, but it has the petrol consumption of a motorbike.

The drivers of larger cars are real bullies on the road. They often think I should get out their way simply because they’re bigger. 

The biggest joke is their gas guzzlers must be so much more expensive to run. I wonder where they get the money from. But that’s their problem, not mine.

Mellow Yellow fitted comfortably into Muscle Cracker on the highway to Pretoria.

My destination was the Union Buildings, my starting point on my route that would more-or-less, and I stress more-or-less, follow the route of the upcoming inaugural Tour of South Africa cycling race, for as far as my ordinary living budget would carry me for three weeks in December. 

COMMENT: If you have a bicycle, have you given it a name?