Episode 168: Daragh Cronin

Cycling the Length of Africa from Morocco to Cape Town

Daragh Cronin booked a flight to Marrakesh before he even owned a bike and honestly it tells you everything you need to know about him.

He’s a young Irish guy from Blackrock in Cork, a hurling town where he’d spent years playing the sport and being part of the strong community there. Prior to this adventure Daragh had no cycling background to speak of. He’d never even gone camping or slept in a tent. But what he did have was a very clear sense that he needed to do something enormous to shake himself out of where he was in life. So he picked Africa and set himself the goal of cycling from Morocco down to Cape Town, the full length of the west coast. If you’re going to do something, you may as well go for the hardest one. That’s Daragh’s logic, and once you’ve spent a few minutes talking with him you understand completely why it is.

The Preparation, If You Can Call It That

The preparation, if you can call it that, was characteristically full tilt. He bought the bike after booking the flight. He took it on a test ride from Malin Head to Mizen Head, the full length of Ireland, to see if he had anything in the tank. Four days in, somewhere around Galway, he blew his Achilles apart. He spent the next four days battling through serious pain to finish the ride anyway, which turned out to cause enough long-term damage that the Africa trip had to be pushed back to let him recover. At the time that felt like a setback but looking back on it now Daragh says it was the biggest blessing the trip could have given him, because of things that happened later on the road.

Two days before he was due to fly out, he went for a short shakeout ride, 25 kilometres from his house in Blackrock to Kinsale, just to settle his head. He made it about 15 kilometres before the weather, the tiny roads and the weight of what was coming got to him. He pulled over on the side of the road and, in a moment he kept to himself until well into the Africa trip, he took a blade to his own tyre so he’d have an excuse to call his twin brother for a lift rather than admit he just couldn’t do it. He sat at home that night repairing the puncture he’d deliberately caused, and three days later he got on the plane anyway.

We’ve all found a way to give ourselves an out when something feels too big and too frightening. What Daragh did differently was get on the plane regardless.

Arriving in Africa

Landing in Marrakesh was a full sensory collision. Daragh had never been to Africa before, never camped before, barely ridden the bike he was now about to put back together from a box in a Moroccan airport while immigration officials questioned whether he was entirely sane. He wasn’t travelling alone for those first two weeks, a friend from Cork named Adam McNulty had agreed to come and help him settle in, and Daragh credits him with a big part of why he actually got on that flight in the first place. If Adam hadn’t committed to those first two weeks, there was a real chance the fear would have won.

The first day out of Marrakesh, they ran out of water climbing a mountain pass in the Anti-Atlas, pushed through dehydration to rack up around 110 kilometres, rolled into a rough-looking city after sunset with nowhere to camp and no plan. A local man found them camping somewhere they absolutely shouldn’t have been, brought them inside his house, spent five hours talking with them through Google Translate and cooked them a tagine. That was night one. That was the tone the whole trip was going to set.

How Daragh Got Through 204 Days Cycling Africa

On the second morning they nearly got into a car. There was a mountain pass they couldn’t face, and they flagged down a vehicle and were about to load the bikes in. Daragh stopped and thought about what that would mean. If they took the easy option the first time things got genuinely hard, what would they do when things got harder further down the road, on their own, with no Adam and no safety net? They waved the car away and rode the pass. He says that decision became something he carried with him for the whole 204 days, a reference point which he could go back to every time he needed to remember what he was capable of.

The People Made It Possible

Daragh spent the first chunk of the journey with Adam, then with a Dutch cyclist named Theo who he met on day three and spent the next three and a half months convincing to keep going just a little further, from Agadir all the way to Guinea-Conakry. When Theo finally left, Daragh rode Sierra Leone alone and then picked up another travel companion, Paul, at the Liberia border, a guy who had been travelling within a few days of him for the whole journey without either of them knowing. He and Paul rode together for most of what remained, right to the Cape of Good Hope, and Daragh describes them now as brothers.

What 204 Days on the Road Actually Looks Like

The journey threw everything at him. Two serious bouts of food poisoning, one through Senegal and one through Ivory Coast, both of which he rode through rather than rest because he didn’t want to lose the people he was travelling with. A robbery in Ghana while they slept on a beach, just toiletries and a razor taken, but unnerving nonetheless.

A wrong turn in Sierra Leone that cost him seven hours of pushing his bike through 35-degree heat with no water, crying on the phone to his mum, who couldn’t hear him because the signal only worked one way. The iron ore train in Mauritania, which he rode in both directions, seventeen hours each way, first in empty rattling carriages through a sandstorm and then lying on top of the fully loaded ore watching the sun come up over the Sahara in the middle of the night. Being surrounded by crowds of people every time they stopped in Nigeria and Cameroon, wanting nothing more than five minutes of quiet, learning to stop outside the towns on the days when they were too mentally fried to perform.

Arriving at Cape Town

Daragh recalls the moment when the headwinds where doing their absolute worst to halt his progress and he saw the sign that said Cape Town 600 kilometres away. A place Daragh had been trying not to think about for seven months.

They camped 20 kilometres from the Cape of Good Hope on their last night. The next morning they rode to the end, arrived in hammering rain and brutal wind at around 10am with a case of beer, no phone signal and nowhere to be. They sat there for four or five hours, just the two of them, while busloads of tourists stopped for photos and ended up taking photos of them instead, two cyclists who had just spent 204 days riding from the top of Africa to the bottom of it. Daragh says he sat there thinking that all these things you’re told are possible, all the big mad dreams, he’d always assumed they were for other people. He realised he’d done the thing!

Cork to Everest Base Camp

As we sat down to record this episode, Daragh was a couple of days away from leaving again. This time it’s Cork to Everest Base Camp in Nepal, and he’s raising money for the Children’s Unit at Cork University Hospital, because the community in Cork who followed every kilometre of the Africa journey and kept his spirits up at his lowest points deserves something back. That’s very Daragh. The community is where this whole thing starts, and the community is where he’s choosing to return it.

Be sure to follow Daragh on his instagram – @RoaminWithCronin to watch his adventures unfold.

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