Dear all,

When I wrote in the first blog that I would be unable to send e-mails during the ride it was partly in jest. Little did I know that physical exhaustion would indeed keep me from updating the blog until now.
It has been a tough week.

The ride was the most challenging physical activity I have ever been involved in. Veterans of the ride who have done it for the past 10 years told me that this is the hardest ride Norwood has ever done. One rider told me he has cycled the length of Israel - some 450 miles from the Golan to Eilat - in 5 days, and this was harder. What I had not realised before about cycling is that distance is irrelevant. It´s all about the terrain.100 miles on relatively flat tarmac is a piece of cake, whilst 30 miles of hilly off-roading is a real killer.

The first day was a real shock to the system. Each days riding is divided into four stages with breaks for water and/ or lunch in between. I got a bit excited after the first stage because I completed it reasonably easily and ended up tiring myself out for the rest of the day. It was a struggle to finish but I kept going. It was more difficult than I had expected and I was not quite sure how I was going to get up at 6 am to do exactly the same thing, but it was within the realms of possibility. The second day was not.

Imagine flicking yourself on the head with a spoon.

At first it does not hurt. A bit annoying perhaps, but not painful.

Now imagine you continue flicking yourself for an hour. Your forehead starts to become sore and bruised. Your head starts to ache and throb.

Now imagine you continue doing this for 8 hours straight until your forehead is so tender that each flick of the spoon sends pulsating pains down your spine. Imagine you are not allowed to stop flicking yourself with that spoon until some Brazilian tour guide tells you to. Imagine that you had no idea that flicking yourself with a spoon could be so painful when you signed up for it but that now you have you can´t quit, because you´d be letting down the rest of the group and you sponsors.

This is pretty much what happened to me on the second day of riding, except (look away now ladies) the forehead was my bottom, and the spoon was a seriesof jagged rocks that we had to ride over. For some reason, in Brazil, rather than building proper cobbled streets, they have chosen to smash up rocks and stick the shards into the ground leaving its shap edges petruding ominously. By lunch I was seriously unhappy and wondering what on earth I had signed for. By the the final quarter of the ride I was really woried I was going to do myself permanent damage. Mord and I rode next to each other at snails pace, each meter causing us to literally wince in pain. It was murderous psychologically as well beacause we knew that right behind us was a comfortable minibus, which would happily pick up both us and our bikes and take us to the hotel. We carries on none the less. At times we just burst into laughter because the situation was so ridiculous. I literally had no energy left to expend, I just wanted to stop and crawl up in a ball. But we flipping well did it. I collapsed staright into bed as soon as we got to the hotel and tried to move as little as possible.
Oh yes - that day also happened to be my birthday! (thankyou to everyone for all the texts and e-mails by the way, they really cheered me up).

For me, that was about as hard as it got. After that day I felt I could do pretty much anything, and just got into the routine of waking up and moving my legs in a circular motion until someone said I could go to bed again. In fact, I even started to rather enjoy it. Some of the scenery which we rode through was absolutely breathtaking. We cycled through rainforests, under water falls and into small villages which I would never have seen if I wasn´t on top of a bike. Some of the scenes I saw there were really incredible.

I can not describe the sense of achievement I felt when we finnally cycled on to the Copacabana beach in Rio last friday. The sea and sky were blue, the sun was shining, and everything was good. I pushed myself to a limt I did not realise existed within me. Mord and I are even thinking of doing the ride next year in Kenya, but would definately want to get a group of us going, so have a think guys!

We are now in Rio and have already had a few capers, but I will save them for the next blog.

Hope all of you are well, and thanks again for the birthday messages. Sorry I couldn´t reply to the texts - its really expensive for me to send them from Brazil - but I will reply to e-mails - so keep em coming :)

Look forward to seeing you all soon,

Gidz and Mord

Dear friends, family and random websurfers!

I thought it best to make a posting before we set off on our ride as, having now seen the terrain which we are expected to master with our bicycles there is a fair chance I will be physically unable to write again in the near future.

We arrived in Sao Paulo early on thursday morning, well rested, as Mord managed to swindle us the fire exit seats (mmmmmm....leg room!) by quickly signing us up to the Varig frequent flyers club and then claiming it was a disgrace for them to treat frequent flyers in such a way!

Our hosts in Sao Paulo were the exceptionally hospitable Friedlander family, who live on Sao Paulo´s equivalent of Oxford street, and treated us like kings. Using our ever improving Portugese we managed to navigate ourselves around the city, and landed up in the ´Instituto Butantan`, an area so densely populated with snakes that poisonous venom literally runs freely in the streets........well not quite, but it does have more poisonous snakes than pretty much anywhere else in the world. They are all stored there so scientists can extract their venom to make the antidotes for diseases such as Yellow Fever (which I have had, but Mord has not, causing him some serious concern every time we see a mosquito!)

The local Brazilians are really friendly and seem to have no problem talking to us for ages in Portugese, even though we have made it perfectly clear that we don´t understand. Normally I respond to them in hebrew just to maintain the illusion that a conversation IS taking place. Yesterday I responded using ´´Bendigamos Alatissimo´´ which proved particularly effective.

Dan Freidlander showed us a really great time over shabbat in Sao Paulo which has a big (and pretty afluent) Jewish community. What was nice is that it seems really unified. We davened in the Bnei Akiva bayit, alongside about 10 black hatters all happily davening by a sign which read `´barech et medinat yisrael reishit smichat geulataynu´´ - and similarly, Dan happily goes to the Satma shul down the road - something we don´t see too much in London unfortunately. Dan also told me about some pretty interesting ´minhagim´they have there but I realise as I´m writing this that I have too much to say to be able to write it all here...(ask me later boys!)

We have now left Sao Paulo and joined the cycling group in Ouro Preto where the weather is mouldy. Grey and drizzly. Most of the group look ridiculously keen on cycling, super fit, and some genuinely appear to be giants. One in particular has caught our attention, and Mord believes him to be Og melech Ha´bashan in disguise.

Most of the Brazilians we met over the weekend found it VERY amusing that we were going to do this bike ride. Apparently the route we are taking is EXTREMELY hilly, and seems to be a bit further than we expected. All in all, I´m not too confidentof our chances, but as I said many times before we left - its all in the mind!

Anyhow, I must dash, as we caught a tremp into the city (sorry mum and dad!) and the lovely lady says she´ll give us a ride back to the hotel (sorry again mum and dad!) in 10 minutes.

Missing you all, so please drop me an e-mail, a text or I think you can even leave comments on this blog!

Gidz and Mord