This is one of a series of blog posts linked to the research I did for the 'Discover Geography' series, and mentioning some of the reading I did to prepare some of the chapters.
Not all of this material made it into the final book so I'm sharing it in these posts.
For a chapter on the diverse lived experience of people in Africa I needed a way to get across the size of the continent.
I drew on the cycling exploits of Mark Beaumont.
I have a long-term interest in his journeys. Between Aug 5th 2007 and 15th February 2008 Mark Beaumont cycled around the world and set a new world record for solo circumnavigation of the globe by manpower alone. His former geography teacher Val Vannet blogged the geography of his journey, and I helped out when she was away and unable to commit to the daily effort of tracking his travels.He later made another Round the World trip but this time completed it in just under 80 days!
He planned a route from Cairo to Cape Town and mostly went down the eastern side of the continent for a number of reasons. The resource asks students to consider what some of those might be... including the state of the roads, the relative risk of conflict in each country, the prevailing winds, availability of water and food and safe places to stop etc.
I used the book as a way to explore the size of Africa.
It's huge of course: the second largest in order of size.
I'm putting together a resource to accompany this section of the book.
This will be appearing on LivingGeography once it's complete. It may form part of a refreshed unit for our Year 6 students.
We couldn't use too much of the book in the actual book itself in the end sadly, but it's easier to refer to the 'Africa Solo' project in a more personal web resource like this blog.
Here's the trailer for the film that can be watched by subscribers to a cycling channel.
From Mark's Komoot account:
Riding for 41 days, 10 hours and 22 minutes, covering 6,762 miles (10,882 km), spending 439 hours in the saddle - sometimes up to 16 hours a day - and climbing 190,355 feet (58,020 metres) through eight countries: Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Botswana and South Africa.
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