The gear (or lack of it)

This journey is very much an act of putting a toe in the water so we haven't splashed out on a whole lot of bicycle touring gear. Additionally, cycle touring isn’t very big in South Africa so specialised equipment is not generally available. There is only one on-line dealer that specialises in cycle touring (based in Lady Grey, a tiny village hidden in the foothills of the Drakensberg mountains). The folk at our LBS stare blankly at us when we talk about bicycle touring and I am not aware of any brick and mortar shop that sells bicycle touring gear in South Africa.

Our initial idea was to simply buy some cheap bikes in Thailand and wing it from there but in the end, we decided to add a few things to our existing mountain bikes. This was based on the fact that we would be credit card touring and South East Asia should be warm enough to carry minimal clothing. Also, spare parts for the bikes should be relatively easy to find in South East Asia.

So Leigh will only be carrying an Ortlieb handlebar bag (for her binoculars and tablet) and I will be stuck with all our clothing and a laptop in rear panniers (Ortlieb BackRoller Classics), a handlebar bag (for a bridge camera, phone and binoculars) and a small bag on top of the rear rack for tools, spares, tubes etc.

When we backpack, we generally take an 80 litre backpack that carries all of our clothes, personal items etc and a camera bag with a couple of bodies and three lenses (a 400mm for birding, 70-200 zoom and 15-30 zoom). I carry the backpack and Leigh gets stuck with the camera bag which weighs almost as much as the backpack. Because we have scaled down what we can carry, I have bought an entry level bridge camera that has a greater range than all my lenses put together but is a small fraction of the weight of the camera bag.

Normal backpacking gear for the two of us. The small blue bag next to me on the bench zips onto the backpack.

The only other indulgence was a Brooks B17 saddle. I fell in love with it from the moment I first sat on it and it has got even more comfortable over several months of use.

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Steve Miller/GrampiesWow, here I am back at Step 1, with a question. What was the bridge camera you referred to? Do you still use it?
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3 months ago

Jean-Marc StrydomHi Steve. To be honest, the entry level bridge camera (I can't recall its Canon model number offhand) didn't work too well, mainly because the auto focus was up to latching onto birds . Also, it lacked a viewfinder so we could only use the rear LCD screen which was next to useless in bright light. We soon replaced it with a Canon SX40 which has an electronic viewfinder and better auto focus but it still wasn't good enough for bird photography. The first camera got dropped somewhere in Thailand and the LCD cracked making it even more useless but we still have the SX40 (lying unused in a drawer). I now shoot with a Lumix GX80 paired with a Leica 100-400mm lens - a lot heavier but it better suits my requirements.
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3 months ago