No sleep till Kigali

The Race Around Rwanda is an ultra-endurance loop of the Land of a Thousand Hills - part bikepacking odyssey, part study in sleep deprivation. Cyclist learns about freezing rain, spiders and hallucinations on the red gravel roads of Africa

- GRAHAM WILLGOSS

Picture someone with a machete trying to cut through a jungle,’ says Simon Jones. ‘That’s what we were doing for 30km, trying to descend out of this rainforest.’

If that’s how the Dubliner who managed to finish 15th overall in this year’s Race Around Rwanda sums up the route’s more difficult – scratch that: borderline impassable – sections, then you can be sure he wasn’t alone.

‘People were posting in the group chat asking if they’d gone the wrong way,’ he adds. ‘Because Rwanda is developing so quickly, some roads that were gravel a year ago are now paved. So the organisers just have to keep finding gnarlier sections to keep it at 400km of gravel.’

The Race Around Rwanda, first held in 2020, aims to cover 40% of its near-1,000km route on gravel as it takes in an anti-clockwise lap of Rwanda from Kigali, the capital. The other 600km is on tarmac, and the route takes in nearly 18,000m of elevation gain. The smooth, rich, red gravel roads you see here are typical. When it rains hard though, as it often does just a few degrees south of the equator, they can turn into what feels like a vertical mudslide.

From Kigali, the route heads east, then north to the Twin Lakes – a pair of crater lakes bordering each other at the base of the Mount Muhabura – before cutting west across verdant, rolling hillsides, around volcanic national parks, through tea plantations and then south to the mountainous Nyungwe Forest. Four checkpoints offer basic lodging and warm meals but beyond that the event is fully self-supported and has a time limit of six days.