African Roads

Masoud Riyazati is the Content Creator on the 2026 Tour d’Afrique Cycling Expedition.

“The African roads do not care about your resume. You have two options: either soften your ego before coming to the tour, or let nature do it for you – the hard way.”

Why does someone decide to spend almost three months cycling across remote lands, fully aware of the discomfort, the fatigue, the exhaustion, and the uncertainty that to come? The answer does not arrive at the start line. It unfolds slowly, kilometre by kilometre.

Every rider comes with a different life story. Different reasons. Different expectations. Once the tour begins, however, those stories merge into a shared purpose: crossing Africa by bicycle, living by the rhythm of the road, confronting fears and limits together, and most importantly on this continent, surrendering to nature. It becomes a collective ritual, even if each rider experiences it privately.

Now let’s look at it from a different perspective. If leaving your house for a half-day ride with friends can be a bonding experience, what do we call months of riding together, eating three meals a day (plus all the snacks), and discussing everything from route strategy to the nuances of digestion and the condition of your bum after a long day? Each day holds moments of you at your best and at your worst. Fatigue exposes character and the heat tests your patience.

These trips push the group to communicate, to adapt, to engage. The relationships formed here often resemble siblings more than friends – brimming with intimacy, honesty, and the kind of unguardedness that daily life rarely permits. The bicycles are not the story. They are accelerators. They are tools of discovery, not just of landscapes and cultures, but of the inner self. Of the person who lives inside you.

Until we reach the finish line, we will face physical challenges and unpredictable conditions. Survival on a journey like this is not merely physical. It is mental. It is the ability to find meaning in repetition and joy in small victories. This is not a story about triumph in the conventional sense, nor about a neatly wrapped conclusion. It is an ongoing inquiry.

At the heart of every tour are the riders themselves. The ones who leave their comfortable homes, their families, and their routines to join an expedition of a lifetime. To cross a continent on two wheels. The demographic has its own story. Different professions, different pasts, different cultures, different personalities. Yet once on the road, categories disappear. The road does not care about your résumé. It does not care how much money you have or your level of education. You have two options: either soften your ego before coming to the tour, or let nature do it for you – the hard way.

With every TDA tour comes a team – steady and alert. On this one, Josiah carries the responsibility for more than forty lives. Carolina and Will keep the structure intact. Volker ensures the bikes remain reliable under harsh and uneven roads. Lotte monitors the physical wellbeing of each rider. Our local team members, James and John, feed us as if we were in a five-star restaurant, in a way that sometimes makes you forget you’re in the middle of nowhere. Edwin and Often – it’s hard to describe exactly what their role is. They are everywhere, doing everything.

Just as in Pasolini’s journeys through post-war Italy or in Walter Salles’ The Motorcycle Diaries, the journey does not simply take you across a place; it reshapes the traveler. Not until we are lost – not until we have, in some sense, lost the familiar world – do we begin to know where we stand and how deeply we are connected to everything around us.

The Tour d’Afrique has started and we are cycling across one of the most complex and extraordinary continents on the planet: Africa. And that is a story of a lifetime.

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