Alfred Harms

With the bicycle through Africa 1954 Alfred Harms

Just when my grandfather got into the airplane to Cape town in 1954 he became aware oft he recklessness of his own plan. Driving as the first European with a bicycle alone from South Africa to Sudan. What might have sounded like a joke to my grandmother became an adventure journey for him. Just great luck saved him several times from the death, so he could finally make his trip back to his flower shop in Bremen, Germany. Besides botanical studies, hunting trips, bicycle accidents, sicknesses, nightly ambushes and poisonous snakes, he wrote about his experiences with the people and different countries. On his trip he went through: South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, South Sudan, Sudan and Egypt. More then 60 years later, this book is still relevant, as it tells about a discovery of Africa, in a time, when 4K cameras and smartphones were just not available. It does show the kind of adventure travellers today are looking for, but are hardly to experience