2024 Old Legs Tour New Zealand & Angola, Help plse

Welcome to the 2024 Old Legs New Zealand Tour.

My name is Mark Johnson, and I’m part of something called the Old Legs Tour. We’re called the Old Legs Tour because old sounds more polite than bloody ancient, and also because we ride to raise money and awareness for Zimbabwe’s pensioners.

Every year we ride our mountain bikes to somewhere ridiculously far away, looking to have fun, to do good and to do epic. We’ve braved lions and leopards, elephants and buffalos, and every tsetse fly in creation. We’ve pedalled to Cape Town through the Kalahari, and to the top of Kilimanjaro, the world’s highest free-standing mountain. We’ve pedalled to Uganda to walk with the last of the mountain gorillas, and to Namibia’s Skeleton Coast. In 2024 we are taking ridiculous to ridiculous lengths when the Old Legs ride New Zealand from top to bottom.

The New Zealand Tour will kick off at Cape Reinga, the most northerly point of the North Island, on March 01, 2024, at 07.00 sharp, unless we oversleep, and will finish less sharply 30 days and 2902 kilometres later at the South Island’s most southerly point, unless we get lost. Because I’ve been involved on the fringes of the route planning, getting lost is a strong possibility.

New Zealand might be known as the Land of the Long White Cloud, but according to Garmin, beneath the clouds, we will encounter mountains, lots and lots and lots of mountains. Even though we are riding from top to bottom, we’ll climb a staggering 32024 metres, which is almost one Everest per week, and four in the month. Ouch!! N.B. I also worry that my fingers and toes will go wrinkly like they do in the bath.

We are riding to raise money and awareness for Zimbabwe’s pensioners. The generation that built our country, teachers and nurses, doctors and lawyers, farmers and engineers, especially the poor farmers, have lost everything they own, homes, savings, pensions, all reduced to zero, by thirty years of economic stupidity and two bouts of hyper-inflation. And worse than that, so many of Zimbabwe’s pensioners also lost their families and safety nets, scattered to the furthest corners of the world to start their own lives over with nothing and , leaving their parents behind, dependent upon the charity they are too proud to ask for.

Our charity of choice is ZANE Australia. They support over 2000 pensioners across Zimbabwe, providing them with shelter, food and medicines, caring for them with love and kindness. ZANE also support the Old Medical Fund which helps pensioners needing surgeries. Unfortunately, in Zimbabwe, lifesaving surgeries are considered a luxury, and to pay for them pensioners would need to save every cent of the pensions they no longer receive for thirty or more years after they die, true story.

Please be invited to follow our best adventure ever on Facebook, or on www.oldlegstour.com, but be warned, we can make entire flocks of counting sheep nod off.