Cycling ‘brothers’ find true grit
Firm friends Wandile Msomi and Jonathan Pinkhard get on their bikes and ride from Joburg to Durban over
“So you guys are here to die? People come to die up here; do you know how many bodies I’ve found around here?” the soldier who runs a shebeen atop Lesotho’s snowy Maloti Mountain range, some 3,000m above sea level, asks Wandile Msomi and Jonathan Pinkhard. “And you guys are wearing shorts,” he adds.
A short while earlier, Pinkhard had also been contemplating their mortality: “I remember thinking to myself, this is insane, we could die up here.”
They’d been cycling for days; they were exhausted; it was dark, windy, rainy and snowy. They felt as though hypothermia was setting in as they cycled up the mountain pass. Pinkhard couldn’t see Msomi. He called out to him in the dark: “Wands, I think we’re out of our depth, I think we need to call for help.”
Silence. “Wands!” he shouted.
Eventually, Msomi shouted back: “This is what we asked for. This is what we asked for!”
Just a few days earlier, the two friends, “brothers”, 39-year-old Msomi and 33-yearold Pinkhard, left the latter’s home in Northcliff, Johannesburg, with a plan to cycle 930km to Msomi’s house in Durban, via Lesotho, over 10 days.
They’d been a bit anxious as they left back in April 2022, when heavy rain had led to massive floods in KwaZulu-Natal and Lesotho had had quite a bit of snow. They’d prepared: a tent to share, sleeping bags, food, phones, a GPS system and clothes.
“I put in quite a bit of training. Wands cycles and commutes a lot; he’s just kind of fit in general. Whatever you put in front of him, he’s going to conquer it,” says Pinkhard.
Five days before death in the Lesotho Highlands would seem like a real possibility, their trip had got off to a physically intense but flatter start. The friends rode a total of 186km from Joburg to Vereeniging, across the Vaal River and to Heilbron in the Free State.
“The next day we got into some gravel roads. We rode through beautiful farm roads, endless corn fields and soy plantations,” says Pinkhard.
They found themselves a quiet patch of road next to a corn field, pitched their tent and slept peacefully. The following day brought colourful landscapes as they rode past fields of cosmos flowers to Bethlehem, and finally to the first hills as they approached the Drakensberg from Clarens.
When they’d shared their plans with a friend from Lesotho before leaving Joburg, he’d responded by asking, “You know there are hills there, right?”
They didn’t quite get how intense those hills would be. Msomi says: “I remember being, like, yeah that’s fine. But then when we were riding up those back-to-back hills, like, it’s something I’ve never experienced. When we cycled up to Clarens, I thought that was a lot. But trying to ride over Black Mountain in Lesotho, that is something I have never experienced in my life – it felt like the things that you hear about in the Tour de France; things that you hear and you’re, like, ‘Oh, man, it’d be so crazy to do that.’”
On the second day in Lesotho they experienced their greatest challenge, one that would lead them to the warmth of that mountaintop shebeen.