Gravel bike cycling adventure, South Africa

Planet

This cycling adventure has been carefully designed to minimize environmental impact and maximize benefits to local people in a meaningful way.

CARBON REDUCTION
This is a fully supported cycling adventure meaning that a van is available at any point during the journey to load your bicycle into. Rather than have the van tail the bikes at cycling pace which is inefficient, we instruct the driver to drive ahead of the group and wait at certain intervals with the engine off.

There are no internal flights on this journey other than from Cape Town to George to start the ride. This flight could be avoided by using a rental car or travelling in the support van with the guide and driver or taking a Greyhound bus to Plettenberg Bay from Cape Town.

Most of the accommodation providers on this journey use at least some renewable energy or are entirely off grid for water and power. All providers have made a written commitment to us in terms of their waste reduction and several are members of local nature conservancy organisations.

All food offered during this journey is locally sourced and avoids supermarkets as far as possible. Vegan and vegetarian food is available throughout if requested.

ENVIRONMENT and WILDLIFE

All cycling routes on this trip take place on public roads or on specially allocated off-road cycling tracks on private land (for which a maintenance and conservation fee is paid). In keeping with our conservation policy, we do not cycle on land that isn't maintained for cycling or go off tar on land that forms part of national park land.

All waste created during the journey itself (water bottles, food packaging, bicycle tubes and bombs) are all collected in the van and recycled responsibly)

People

We are a small and highly personalised private travel planning company: as such, we never build or conduct the same journey twice. Thus whilst this cycling adventure comes with an itinerary, this is entirely open to changes. We can include rest days, ethical wildlife encounters, more or less cycling, birding, wine tasting, ethical tours of particular areas of interest (architecture, flora, history, public art) and several other modifications. All our journeys are private and built exclusively for you.

LOCAL ECONOMY

This journey as with all our journeys makes use of only local guides who live and work in South Africa exclusively. Additionally all the accommodation choices on this journey are locally owned (and in many cases managed by their owners) by South Africans and don't form part of international chains.

We are a registered business but we operate as a not-for-profit: this means that once our overheads have been covered for any given year, 100% of the profits for the company are donated to needy organisations that operate in our area.

We support Vrygrond Primary School, a school in the coastal town of Muizenberg that caters for children who live in some of the poorest districts of the city. The school has a particularly high success rate despite the challenges that many of the children face in their communities.

Within Vrygrond Primary School there is a division of the Life Matters Foundation – a numeracy and literacy intervention project located in several schools in Cape Town. They assess all the children in the school each year and conduct specific literacy interventions to fast-track reading ages so that children can re-enter the mainstream classrooms. We donate our time in reading to the children, training teachers and supplying books and stationary.

We support the work of Pack for a Purpose – we encourage our clients to donate some space in their luggage to bring items with them that are needed locally. If the journey is equipment specific (e.g. cycling or hiking) we ask our clients to donate boots or helmets to local development initiatives which Pack for a Purpose redistributes for us.

This is an LGBTQ+ friendly journey.