By Carl-Nils Kuchenmeister

Greetings from Sunny England, here is a run-down of my recent Mountain biking trip to Scotland with the iRide Africa crew consisting of Harry, Dan and Louise.

I guess the beginning would be a good place to start. Our trip up to awesome and surprisingly sunny Scotland began in the dull grey dirty streets of central London, Putney to be exact. After I arrived uncharacteristically on time at Harry’s flat we loaded up our bikes onto the rack and barely managed to squeeze ourselves and luggage into Harry’s Polo and we where off.

Things got silly almost immediately as Dan started flying a little remote controlled helicopter thing inside the car as we where negotiating our way through the maze of London’s clogged streets. The distance to cover was about 700km so we where going to be stuck in the car for a while, lucky for me I shot gunned the all important front seat so I had a bit more leg room. Unfortunately the coveted front seat has its disadvantages too, mainly not being able to see any attacks from the rear. On this occasion I was trying make sure my ears where not cut off by the blades of the little helicopter Dan was trying to fly it into my head. So we drove and drove and then drove some more and then finally after what seemed like an eternity, we where on the freeway and on our way out of London….kiff!

I’ve been friends with Harry and Dan since I was about 14 and I’m 32 now. You do the maths. We met in a little Town called Howick in Kwa Zulu Natal Midlands through a common love of pushing ourselves and getting hurt, which was taken care of by skateboarding, which I still do… the other two just turned into posers :p

Harry and Dan got into riding a few years before I did. I’m sure those two are thinking as they read this that I’m trying to make excuses for being slightly less fast as them on the down hills. Anyway…After my first ride through the Howick forests 12 years ago I was hooked! I’m sure anybody who rides knows the feeling I’m talking about. Mountain biking has been a large part of my life ever since, I learnt most of my skills riding with Harry and another good friend of ours Chris also a friend from good old Howick.

The Howick/Hilton/Pietermaritzburg area is excellent place to ride and has produced many talented and well known riders over the years like Roan Exelby, Brandon Stewart and Downhill champ Greg Minaar to name a few. Unfortunately there isn’t much else to do round those parts, which is probably why we are also A-grade pranksters.

After a decent 7 hour plus drive and a few stops we arrived at our destination, a small Scottish town called Peebles on the river Tweed. First thing we did upon our arrival was park the car in an open parking lot and leave our bikes unattended for about an hour while we went grocery shopping, NOT smart! You’d think a bunch of South Africans would be more careful- I guess all that clean Scottish air got to our heads.

Our accommodation for the week long trip was a very nice flat in a little place just a few kilometers between the trail centres of Glentress and Innerleithen. Glentress is one of the best known and most ridden trail centres in the UK and for good reason! Coming from South Africa and being use to riding more natural trails it was a bit of an eye opener, the trails are extremely well built and maintained. The selection of trails was really good and all the trails are graded according to length and difficulty.
* Green: beginner
* Blue: intermediate
* Red: moderately challenging
* Black: insane ..well pretty technical in places and quite a decent length 35km.

The great thing about the lay out of the trails is that we could stick to the route or mix and match what we wanted to ride as all the trails where easy to link up. Our favourites where the red and blue routes, mainly because those trails had an awesome mix of super fast flowing sections combined with nice jumps and drop offs. All the trails have a good mix of sweeping fast sections, bermed switchbacks, jumps, drop offs and hucks. The way the trails are designed means that its very easy to reach 50kph plus on most the downhill sections which is pretty damn quick for singletrack and super fun …except when you come off, but more about that later.