Sam and Tom, a long-time friend, one-time BV chef and now Bike Radar’s technical editor, went to Lesotho looking for adventure and some some fun between the race tapes. This they had and so much more. You can watch Tom’s video of their adventure below and/or read Sam’s account even further down.
Spoiler alert: Sam came uncomfortably close to dying. Spoiler spoiler alert: it wasn’t the riding, the roads or the wildlife that nearly did for him, but a DVT picked up whilst sitting still for a bit too long on the flight home. Who’d have thunk it?!
Anyway, his full write up on off.road.cc can be found here, it starts a little something like this:
3000m up in the Swiss Alps is a good place to plan an adventure. That’s where we were last autumn, wringing the very last drops of goodness from an absolute belter of a European summer when talk turned to the next objective on the horizon.
Our tick list was pretty high maintenance by anyone’s standards. Awesome biking went without saying. It had to be technical and basically bloody big in scale because the second thing we craved was an adventure. A bit of Type 2 fun (i.e. suffering) to add some zest to the endless savage singletrack we had in mind. Lastly, we wanted a sense of discovery, more on a social and cultural level than simply a new riding environment.
All we needed was an idea that ticked all these boxes, ideally at the tail-end of winter to warm our bones after the long cold months spent dreaming of dusty trails.
Enter the Kingdom Enduro at stage left. A three-day event billing itself as ‘Africa’s most badass Enduro’, it’s also an Enduro World Series qualifier event and it takes place high up in the Kingdom of Lesotho. Where? We didn’t know either.
Want to read the rest? Hop on over to off.road.cc or visit Bike Radar – happy reading!