Deal to Durness (from the SE of England to the NW of Scotland)

15 days of cycling +

1000 miles,  60 miles a day + 

2 bikes +

0 support teams

= 1 Great British cycling adventure! 

 

On 8th June, after 4 months of training, we start pedaling from Deal. We'll be cycling the length of England and Scotland, hopping on and off several islands to reach Durness on 25th June.

 

We will average 60 miles a day, with 3 rest days along the way. This is a massive challenge for me, before the training began 4 months ago the most I had cycled was 40 miles in 1 day and my biggest cycling trip was 250 miles in 2 weeks.

 

This is not an organised charity event so we will have no support team or mechanical back-up, other than a cycling toolkit and Mike's mechanical know-how. We will be on the road come rain or shine (shine please!).

 

The money that you donate will go directly to MAG. MAG is a humanitarian charity that works with communities to remove landmines and unexploded bombs. They also educate people about the dangers. MAG has worked in over 40 countries affected by war. We were really impressed when we saw the projects they were undertaking in Laos and Vietnam to painstakingly clear areas of land.

 

Laos has the dubious distinction of being the world's most heavily bombed nation per capita. During the period of the American-Vietnam war, over half a million bombing missions dropped more than 2 million tons of ordnance on Laos, most of it anti-personnel cluster bombs. Each cluster bomb shell contained hundreds of individual bomblets, "bombies", about the size of a tennis ball. The aim of these was to severely injure but not kill. An estimated 30% of these munitions did not detonate.

 

Approximately 25% of the country's 10,000+ villages are contaminated with unexploded ordnance (UXO). All 17 provinces suffer from UXO contamination and are littered with artillery and mortar shells, mines, rockets, grenades, and other devices. These munitions pose a continuing obstacle to agriculture and a threat especially to children, who are attracted by the toy-like devices.

 

More than 270 million cluster munitions and about 75 million unexploded bombs were left across Laos after the war ended. From the end of the war in 1974 to 2008, more than 20,000 people were killed or injured as a result of UXO accidents.

 

From 2004 to June 2012, MAG cleared more than 38.7 million square metres of suspect land in Laos, destroying 161,802 items of UXO. As a result, nearly ½ a million people gained more safe land for farming, school compounds and roads and also access to clean water for drinking, latrines and irrigation for growing rice.

 

Please support my challenge and the vital work of MAG.