Photograph: Jo’burg youths cycle their way to better lives

I called in on another cycling story that was more-or-less on the route of the inaugural Tour of South Africa, on the eastern fringe of inner city Johannesburg.

Four inner city teenagers had pitched up at the grounds of St James Preparatory School. It’s an old, historic building that stands out among others in the area, which were rather shabby.

The school is connected to the School of Practical Philosophy, as is the Jeppe Phakamisa Ubuntu community initiative, known also as the JPU. The JPU has made it possible to get these fellows off the streets and on to bicycles.

They told me how the streets of the eastern fringes of inner city Johannesburg ooze with temptation for teenagers to slip into the downward spiral: smoking “weed”, other drugs, street gambling, committing theft.

“They’re easy things to do,” sixteen-year-old Noku said.

“You can always be influenced by your friends.”

But he and his three friends and the other members of the team had turned their backs on those temptations.

Every Sunday morning they pedal themselves away from the lure to vice in line with the JPU’s aim to broaden the options of youth in the area by expanding their worlds.

They had even competed in a number of events, including the Argus Cycle Tour, the Crater Cruise Cycle Festival in Parys, the Momentum 94.7 Cycle Challenge and a number of 100 kilometre marathons organised by Audax Randonneurs.

Seventeen-year-old Muzi, who had been cycling the longest among the quartet had completed two Cape Argus Pick n Pay Cycle Tours.

“If it wasn’t for cycling, I’d probably be gambling and smoking,” Noku confessed.

Cycling seemed to have turned them around, giving them new aims.

Sixteen-year-old Thabane said he dreamed of becoming both a disc jockey and an accountant.

“(Being in this cycling programme), you see lots of places, you meet different people and your body is always healthy.”

His school mate Romeo saw himself as a future Lance Armstrong. He had a bumpy introduction to cycling and has a nasty scar on his knee to remember it.

“On one of my first rides I wanted to reach 40 kilometres an hour.

“Eish! The speed counter was going so fast. I looked at it and next minute I was down on the floor.”

He joked: “They say having a crash makes a good start. I’ve had no more since then.”

Richard, one of the facilitators of the youth riding programme, told me that getting teenage boys to do physical exercise regularly sends them home happy, and too tired to do things that could get them into trouble.

“Between the ages of 13 and 18, boys have so much energy. Cycling also acts as a vehicle through which they can achieve personal discipline and learn team work.”

While the teenagers revel in physical fitness they found that cycling also helped them with focusing on school work.

The JPU also pulled younger children from the eastern inner city into cycling. Any Saturday sees between 30 and 50 of them on small bicycles, doing laps around the car park of St James.

“Any number of them could come into the (senior) cycling programmes,” said Richard.

COMMENT: Do you have any programmes like this in your neighbourhood?

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PART TWO

Stage Two: Port Elizabeth to the Addo Elephant National Park

Stage One provided two tips: to improve Mellow Yellow’s number of reflectors so that I would be more visible to passing cars and to “go yuppie” and buy some padded cycling shorts to save my rear end!

The check-in clerk at O R Tambo International Airport would not accept Mellow Yellow as luggage; not unless it was wrapped in plastic. Having that done on the far end of the domestic departures hall led to my being told I was too late to check in for my flight to Port Elizabeth, the start of the next stage of the inaugural Tour of South Africa.

Eventually a phone call from the check-in clerk to some higher authority led to my being allowed to board, first “without your bicycle” and then, after another call she said, “no, the bicycle can go with you.”

Relief!

Sitting next to me in the aircraft was a family headed for Plettenberg Bay, the beach spot of the well-heeled from Johannesburg’s northern suburbs.

“We’ll hire a car in PE and be in Plet in one and a half hours,” said the cheerful dad.

“I should get there after one and a half days’ cycling,” I told him as we went our separate ways.

My first instinct upon leaving PE airport was to find a way into town that would not involve travelling on a freeway, where Mellow Yellow would not be allowed.

Coming from Johannesburg I imagined all roads between international airports and their cities would be freeways.

But this turned out not to be the case in PE.

The road to Humewood, where I had located a backpackers’ lodge, was not a freeway and the suburb was five minutes away by bicycle.

COMMENT: How different do you find Johannesburg to other places in the country?

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Like the backpackers at Magaliesberg, Kings Beach Backpackers two streets away from PE’s beachfront cost me R100 a night for a bunk bed in a dormitory. The holiday season hadn’t yet kicked in so I had the dorm to myself.

A flow of travellers passed through the lodge, which is housed in a single-storey old house wedged between apartment blocks, but they slept in other dormitories.

A French woman who worked for an events company and had come to Cape Town for a job had taken some leave, hired a car and was wandering her way up South Africa’s coastline to Durban. A New Zealand couple near retirement age and living in Malaysia were on a similar wander. Then there was a group of German and Austrian first-year university students who were on their way to do volunteer work at an orphanage in Cape Town.

I took off along the beachfront road on Mellow Yellow. I was pedalling against a bit of a wind. That went with the territory; PE is known as the Windy City. It’s also known as the Friendly City but more about that later.

COMMENT: Have you any stories to tell of ever staying at a backpackers’ lodge?