The Hills of Burundi
A bike ride across a beautiful, broken country
In June 2026 I rode the length and breadth of Burundi by bicycle — some four hundred miles, and a great deal of climbing, over seven days in the heat — as part of a charity ride for Great Lakes Outreach.
This is the book of that fortnight: a travelogue written up from the voice notes I recorded on the handlebars as I went. A dead pig on a bicycle and a live one on a lead; the source of the Nile dribbling out of a pipe; a hospital keeping premature babies alive in incubators built from eucalyptus and lightbulbs; a hilltop of sacred drums older than the monarchy; the day the heat beat me and a younger, kinder rider carried me home. And, underneath all of it, the quiet, extraordinary people rebuilding a country that has every reason to give up and refuses to.
Fair warning: it is a long account of a soft, desk-bound man being repeatedly humbled by hills, heat and his own bicycle. If that appeals, help yourself — in whichever form suits you.
Version 3 · 22 June 2026 — small corrections and a grammar fix since the first release.
An extra: A Thread to Burundi
Cogges and the church at Gasenyi
The ride ended on the Friday, and the book ends with it. But on the Sunday, before flying home, I went to church — at Gasenyi, an Anglican parish in the hills above Bujumbura that my own church in Witney has been joined to by a thread going back thirty years. That morning deserved a telling of its own, so it became this short essay: the story of the two churches, the people who quietly held the thread at both ends, and what it was like to finally stand at the far end of it. It reads on its own — you don’t need the book first.
The ride was in aid of Great Lakes Outreach, who back the Burundian leaders this book is about.