Still considering ourselves on “nomadic holidays”—the first encounter of this second leg of the NOMADES2 velocipedal odyssey, with the San hunter-gatherers, who once inhabited all of southern Africa and were eventually forced to take refuge in the Kalahari Desert, is fast approaching...—we’ve treated ourselves since our last blog article (read here), about southern Tanzania, where we had re-entered the Great Rift Valley, the famous continental “scar.”

In fact, we extended the pleasure of pedaling and exploring this mega-sequence of tectonic rift valleys by following it all the way to its southern end, where the Pungue River flows into the Indian Ocean. Along the way, we passed through Malawi, riding along the shores of its namesake lake and then along its outlet, the Shire River, which led us into Mozambique.

We crossed it one final time at the end of a long, remote bush trail—by dugout canoe, a memorable crossing—then crossed the Zambezi River on a disused railway bridge stretching over 3 kilometers above waters frequented by hippos and crocs... memorable as well!

And, as a kind of cherry on top, this ride to the end of the Rift concluded with a non-cycling stop (our Boreal bikes were waiting for us at the park's visitor center) in the game-rich palm jungle of Gorongosa National Park, followed by a crossing of the Pungue River on a bridge along the epic National Road 1—more a rugged access track than a trans-Mozambican highway—running for hundreds of kilometers north of the coastal resorts frequented by South Africans.

We continued riding through the most amazing geological formations by mapping out an especially demanding route that mostly wove through the formations of the Great Escarpment in South Africa and the mountain kingdoms of Eswatini and Lesotho.

Entering South Africa for the first time at the Komatipoort border post, we rode into Eswatini via the Barberton Mountain Range—among the oldest mountains on the planet—then into the spectacular Drakensberg, also known as the Dragon Mountains, from the land of the Zulus to the southern edge of the Sotho kingdom and the end of the range.

Back in South Africa for a third time, we were left breathless patrolling the passes and valleys of the various chains of the Cape Fold Belt—formidable mountains that once rose from the depths of the sea and now separate the lush coastal strip from the semi-desert expanses of the famed Karoo inland, with its many microcosmic valleys.

From pass to pass, and from the Karoo to the coast, we reached the southernmost tip of Africa at Cape Agulhas—thus ticking off one of the many goals of this velocipedal odyssey, some 28,000 kilometers after passing North Cape in Norway, and 9,000 kilometers since the start of this second leg in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Oh yes—and all the encounters that these journeys aboard our Boreal bikes and the Road have granted us…