A week in an exotic locale with my wife is a rare luxury,
and one normally spent doing things as a couple. However, as it has been her
lifelong dream to dunk herself in a cage in great-white-shark-infested waters,
it has been my dream for at least as long to avoid stomach-churning boat rides
and proffering my body as shark chum. So when she announced the intent to spend
one day of the vacation at sea I began searching for the perfect Cape Town
mountain bike guide.
Well, I found him. A fortuitous internet search led me to
Dan Dobinson and his bicycle touring company, iRide Africa. I made plans
to join a ride Dan was leading in Tokai Forest, an arboretum just outside of Cape Town. Giddy with excitement for the chance to ride on another
continent, I packed my bike shoes and shorts alongside sandals and swimsuit and
boarded a long, long plane ride to the southern tip of Africa.
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| Map of Tokai trails from the iRideAfrica website |
The weather on the morning of our ride was perfect: A sunny, pleasantly warm early fall day ahead of what looked to be nasty weather in the forecast. Just before 8am Dan showed up at the doorstep of my guesthouse with the other members of our group already loaded into the van. In addition to myself were two other clients, one guy from Norway and another from England. Both claimed to be experienced mountain bikers and appeared to be in good shape, allaying my fear of having to spend the day waiting for inexperienced riders to catch up. After twenty minutes of small talk in the van we found ourselves pulling up to the Tokai trailhead.
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| We weren't the only ones who thought it was a good day for a ride |
This day happened to be Good Friday, the beginning of the Easter holiday weekend, and the number of cars in the parking lot suggested that several of the area's mountain bikers had decided to spend their day off riding. Despite a full parking lot, however, we encountered very few riders on the trails.
Tokai is situated on the lower slopes of Constantia Berg, a 927-meter peak with excellent views of Cape Town's iconic Table Mountain. As an arboretum, Tokai consists of many different species of native and non-native trees, which made for an ever-changing landscape to ride through. Our plan of attack was generally to climb fire roads and doubletrack to gain elevation and then drop into a number of singletrack descents through the trees. The descents ran the gamut of wide and fast to tight and technical, with one trail that had been recently built up with some freeride features.
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| Tokai fire roads with Table Mountain in background |
Dan’s fleet of rental bikes made for fun descending. We were
set up on 2010/2011 Giant Trance X2s which were impeccably maintained. Compared
with my own Giant Anthem I found the Trance to be a great all-around bike and
really enjoyed the extra inch of travel and relaxed geometry on the descents.
But I’ll leave the gear reviews to Andy.
Dan had planned to lead us up toward the summit of
Constantia Berg where we would catch a long descent down. Halfway up, however,
we watched thick clouds race across the valley and quickly envelope the summit
in a cold, thick fog. Dan called off the summit push and led us on a short
detour to where the van had parked to meet us for lunch.
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| "See those clouds off in the distance?..." |
At the van we topped off our water bottles and snacked on
delicious bacon and vegetable mini quiches that Dan had baked the day before. I
managed to limit myself to two. The descending cloud cover drove the
temperature down at least 15 degrees Fahrenheit and we debated breaking out our
rain shells (well, the other guys did—I didn’t bring one). I shivered it out
for a few minutes but as soon as we got back on the bikes and descended out of
the clouds the temperature climbed back into short-sleeve range.
We spent the afternoon lapping trails on the lower slopes of
the mountain, which ended up being a lot of fun. At one point we were zipping
through a fast and twisty open section with some optional jumps and features
and came upon a rider on a massive downhill bike and sporting a full-faced
helmet and body armor. The terrain hardly justified such gear but nonetheless
the guy had brought his girlfriend along to videotape him shredding it up. Hopefully
he managed to edit out the footage of four spandex-clad guys on smaller bikes
flying past him.
While the downhill rider was a spectacle he was quickly
trumped by a group of baboons making their way across the trail. I was
assured that these baboons were not as aggressive as their relatives from the
heavily visited Cape Point, where we had heard of a group of tourists being
carjacked by junk food hungry baboons two days earlier. Aware of the sugary
energy bars in my jersey pocket I gave the creatures with weird-looking butts a
wide berth and managed to pass by without incident.
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| Even food-crazy baboons don't like PowerBars |
We rode a final flowy singletrack descent back to the Tokai
parking lot, where our ride finished up after logging around 20 miles of
riding. We regaled one another with tales of glory and geeked out about bikes
and gear as we guzzled fruit juice and I gobbled up more than my fair share of
the quiches. We piled into the van and headed back toward the city where we said
goodbyes and returned to our respective vacations.
The four of us came from three different continents, spoke
at least three different languages, and rode our bikes at home on different
terrain, in different ways, and on different sides of the trail (Note: When faced
with a head-on collision with another rider in South Africa, dive left).
Standing around our dusty bikes in the parking lot, though, we laughed and
joked like we had been riding buddies for years. Even cooler than the
experience of mountain biking in South Africa was discovering the bond I
shared with three guys from far away places who also called themselves mountain
bikers.
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