Brakeless In The Pearl of Africa. A Fixed Gear Adventure in Uganda. (Part 1)

Jan 17

By Kai Pringle and Stan Engelbrecht

What a story! Kai and Stan decided to embark on a trip through the Ugandan landscapes on their brakeless fixed-gear bikes. With breathtaking scenery and an epic adventure ahead, this is one ride you won’t forget. If you’d like to submit your guest articles, don't hesitate to use the contact page to get in touch!

Enjoy the read!

Fixed Gear Tracklopacking Bikepacking Fixed Gear Africa Uganda Film

During our Addis Ababa layover I decided I wanted a snack and a bottle of water, not the best idea. We missed our connecting flight and spent the night in fluorescent purgatory. One missed connection later Stan smugly watched on as I arduously assembled my Chinese aluminium bike with a finicky multitool. It took longer than I’d like to admit to notice I was missing something rather important. The one thing separating my fixed gear bike from an oversized push toy was absent: my chain. I made a panicked call to my girlfriend and made her vow to never tell Stan if she found it lying around at home. Stranded on Entebbe Airport island with security chuckling in my general direction, Stan ventured into town looking for something somewhat suitable. To my delight, Stan eventually wheeled in, chain in hand. Stranded to sailing, Uganda was our oyster.

The idea was born two months earlier when I got a cryptic text from Stan: “I’m cooking up something in Uganda. Two weeks, fixed, minimal gear. Wanna come?”

I’d known Stan for a while. We rode together often - there aren’t many fixed gear riders in Cape Town willing to knock out 100km+ rides. He’d invited me on trips before and I’d never been able to pull the trigger. After a myriad of excuses - I’d just been retrenched, I was broke and I was feeling sorry for myself. But after a little convincing, I realised I wasn’t gonna get another chance like this. Debt was inevitable but the promise of adventure had me salivating. I gave in, scrounged some cash and he booked us two tickets. It was on.

With tickets booked, the next scramble was gear and sponsorships - we had to make the trip feasible. Tailfin came on board with bags and storage, going as far as CNC-ing some custom track nuts that allowed me to mount their Aeropack system to a fixed gear bike. Ciovita, a super rad local brand jumped onboard ( thank you Charl! ) with some world class cargo bibs and a bunch of other damn fine kit. Ticket To The Moon sent us two of their lightest hammocks and comfiest as we would soon discover. Killat, another rad local company I have had a relationship with for a while, sent through a lovely canvas sling bag for my camera and film as well as a bit of spending cash (bless your soul Dane) and a cap to protect my noggin from the African sun. Cape Film Supply gave us a good deal on film and processing which allowed us to capture the whole trip on 35mm. Venture made me a pair of wicked trail sandals to let my feet breathe off the bike. Without all of them this trip wouldn’t have left our WhatsApp chat and I am eternally grateful.

Our first morning under the Ugandan sun began with a swim in Lake Victoria, washing away the previous day's chaos before pedaling for Kampala. We didn’t have much distance to cover but the road oﬀered more thrills than comfort with trucks constantly hurtling past us as we skirted an almost non-existent shoulder.

It didn’t take long before we met our arch nemesis for the first time: the Ugandan Speed Bump. They come in spiteful clusters of two to five, corrugated mountains put there purely to break us. Each time we hit them, our bikes groaned, threatening to fall apart beneath our sweaty arses. The signage and hand painted trucks provided much-needed distraction - oﬀerings of “Plan B Motel” and “Heart Breaker” kept our spirits high and the taste of adventure on our tongues.

Roughly 25kms before Kampala we rolled up to a roadside pub for lunch and a couple beers. Enter the Ugandan Rolex - one of many to come. The Rolex isn’t what you think. It’s a street food staple - breakfast, sometimes lunch, sometimes dinner, sometimes all of the above. A simple dough, ceremoniously rolled, kneaded and flattened, slapped on a hot plate and cooked. Then eggs, with onion, tomato or cabbage (if you’re lucky) cooked to a perfect omelette that is then encompassed by the chapati - said wrap made on the hot plate. It’s handed to you, burning hot and wrapped in oily plastic, deliciously honest and simple. It’s “Rolled Eggs”, get it? I had found love and it was about to be a very toxic relationship.

One of the first things I had noticed was that Uganda was green, like really, really green. At the airport, while waiting for Stan, I was told that if you plant a seed here, it grows. The land looked alive and you could sense it, the smell of fertile soil had set up permanent camp within our noses. Yet beneath the abundance, Uganda was drowning in plastic, it seemed as if every patch of lush beauty came with a scattering of the modern world's leftovers. You can’t escape the west's obsession with convenience and consumption, not even out here.

I wondered how long those seeds would continue to grow, or if one day their roots would only find plastic, merging with the remains of a philosophy that does not belong here. Uganda, like most African countries, has had a diﬃcult and complicated past. And while I’d love to oﬀer some deeper insight, I can barely pack and unpack my own bike without missing something. Uganda’s president has been in power since 1986. I won’t pretend to understand the politics, but when someone has been in charge of a democracy for nearly four decades you can assume it’s not all due to charm. Then again in a place where plastic seems to last forever, maybe power does too.

Just before Kampala we had stopped for some watermelon and I noticed an angry gash across the wall of my rear tyre, the tube bulged out like a tar pit bubble, ominous and ready to burst. Not good. We had spent the morning exploring Entebbe on some less than ideal gravel back roads and I must have sliced it open at some point. A shim would have to be made. ‘Luckily’ there was no shortage of plastic bottles kicking about. A piece was cut and crudely shoved between the inner tube and tire. Stan praised his dedication to Gatorskins and urged me to make the move too. I reluctantly agreed that they were the superior tyre and secretly vowed to get myself a pair when we got home. We checked in to the backpackers, had a google to try and find a bikeshop and quickly learned that the only halfway decent one was closing in 30 minutes - and wouldn’t reopen for two days. We ripped our Tailfin bags oﬀ the bikes and darted oﬀ, not entirely sure of where we were going.

Strangers to the city, we dashed madly through rush hour congestion - narrow roads with bathtub-sized potholes, around blind corners, dodging everything from waving kids, boda-bodas (little motorbike taxis), cars, chicken and cattle. This city was a trip! The shop ended up not existing (a common occurrence) and neither did the next.

Luckily en-route to the third best option a local cyclist directed us to Ronaldo's Bikeshop, a small hole-in-the wall type joint that you knew could fix whatever issue your bike had with a hammer and pliers. Amongst beaten and battered old bikes were some rare gems, a vintage Bridgestone MTB and, glaringly obvious, a gleaming full wireless Trek Madone. Bizarre. I even managed to find myself a brand new Continental Ultrasport.

The following morning I chose to play chicken with the tire, making the decision to keep riding the sliced one and hold onto the spare until it gave out. Our goal was Katosi, a small fishing town some 80kms away. Having not done too much research on Uganda, to the best of our knowledge it was mostly plateaus. Plateaus = easy riding. Reality check: plateaus don’t mean flat.

Rollers. Endless rollers. Climbing on fixed sucks, descending on fixed sucks. By lunchtime I felt mentally broken, and we stopped at a pork-joint for a couple too many beers and the most mouth-watering pig sticks. Thirty kilometres later, horror: I looked back at my Aeropack and my brand new tire was gone. Kicking myself for drunken hubris, I backtracked - all thirty KMs. No tire. Defeated, 170 thousand UGX (local currency) down, I turned, pedaled on and prayed that a Tilapia dinner would soothe my soul. I arrived in Katosi drowning in self pity, but nothing a beer and a soda in the shade can’t fix.

‘Hotel’ Cross City, where we planned to stay the night, was deserted and no amount of hootin’ and hollerin’ would open its gates. Night was setting in,and the bemused children surrounding us were no help. We were just two stupid Mzungus (white guys) in the middle of nowhere. Then, out of the dusk like a knight in rusting armour: Sinafi. The local rolled up on his old bicycle and asked us what we were doing. After taking us on an impromptu tour of town we wound up in a slightly suspicious alleyway, and Sinafi instructed me to wait outside with the bikes while he led Stan to the accommodation. Watching them walk away, half of me didn’t expect him to return. But he did, smiling. After Sinafi had a quick go on my fixie we hit the (cold) showers and went in search of food. Most places being closed, I kissed my dreams of Tilapia goodbye and settled for a Rolex and some warm beer. They were exceptionally good, exceptionally oily, and after a few games of pool with the locals we retired for the night.

Breakfast was matooke (mashed plantain), posho (maize porridge) and what appeared to be goat accompanied with some kind of herbal tea, though we had asked for coffee. After saying our goodbyes to Sinafi, we donned our rain jackets and set oﬀ for another day of rollers, hopefully carrying us to Jinja.

After 80kms of sweat, hills, and some of the greenest landscapes imaginable, we dragged ourselves into the town of Jinja and made a beeline for the first place advertising WiFi. Two Nile Specials (local beer) hit the table, and we realised we’d walked straight into the Mzungu mothership. Sunburnt expats, tour groups, kids running amok - the full foreign monty. Tourism in Uganda generally felt like an idea once considered but never fully committed to. Infrastructure had been built with hope but the faded hotel signs, abandoned building projects and peeling safari murals told us that the boom of tourism never quite came. Or it had come and gone long before we set eyes upon a Nile Special. We paid our overpriced bill and went to find someplace to set up our hammocks for the night, hopefully away from the other Mzungus.

We slept in our hammocks beneath a ceiling of what appeared to be glittering stars but turned out to be hundreds of hungry Orbweaver spiders, their sparkling eyes watching us slumber. Morning brought the usual craving of coﬀee and a dip in the Nile ( sadly no crocs). That afternoon I gave up the tire gamble. It had held for a couple hundred kilometres but I had no intention of tempting fate or walking through Uganda. Using some waxed thread from Stan and a needle found at the market that morning, I stitched up the gash and glued the shim in place.

The result was rough and ugly but I was fairly chuﬀed and confident it would hold. That night we drank cheap whiskey, half ironically listened to Primus on an iPhone speaker and played a few absolutely horrible games of pool. The next morning we learned that the local jumbo ants shared our feelings for the comfy hammocks as they’d spent the night chewing through our tree straps and carting oﬀ pieces of nylon like little textile bandits. Turns out it was the ants, not the spiders, who were the real operators around here. Uganda is beautiful, chaotic and has no respect for the food pyramid.

I’m not sure if we’d planned how far we were riding that day, but at some point I started calling it Big Wednesday. With our Ciovita cargo bibs stuffed with bananas, sunblock and sugarcane, we were putting the road behind us like two men on the run. After about 100kms we cruised into a small town called Namatumba, had a mindbogglingly good fish curry and decided to hit the road again. Maybe the curry was magic or maybe our legs just stopped bothering to complain, either way we ended up punching about 150km. Our goal was in sight: Sipi Falls. The tallest waterfall in Uganda - our “raison d’etre”. Stan had picked it out by essentially throwing a dart at a map, and making it our pilgrimage. Big Wednesday brought us to Mbale, a town at the foot of Mount Elgon. Sipi Falls was now in pissing distance. We arrived in Mbale absolutely burnt to a crisp, covered in grime, sweat and jonesing for a Nile Special.

From the moment we landed and began telling locals of our Sipi Falls ambition, we were consistently warned about the mountain pass we’d have to climb to get there. Some said 12 kilometers of climbing, others said 30. Being on a fixed gear bike, this was a little concerning. The morning we set out for the falls I felt at odds, on one hand we were so close to our goal, yet the tales of the mountain pass we would have to endure were eating away at me like ants. The route was beautiful but in the distance the pass snaked its way up the mountain, a visceral reminder of things to come. We reached the bottom of the climb and “changed gears”.

This meant finding a shady spot in someone’s garden to flip our rear wheels around to our lighter gear ratios. I moved from 45\16 to 45\17, ratios I would never use back home. The climb was breathtaking - in more ways than one. The views and quick elevation made for some truly incredible riding, at least when I managed to look up from the steady stream of sweat dripping down from my nose and covering my stem.

We had to tack all the way up, leaving a zigzagging Strava route up the pass. Despite starting in the blaring sun, a few hundred meters from the top, the sky turned dark and rain soon followed.