KarlT

I stay in the Kyalami AH area and we rode from my house to Asidlale today. We went past Kyalami Corner, over the hill and down to Barbaque downs and entered by the golf course. You can pay online or at the gate, however, the card machine at the gate was not working today. Luckily I had my phone and credit card with me and we could by two passes for the day. Overall the route is super nice, but needs to be ridden in a bit more in the golf course area as most of the riding is on grass, which is also not too bad. After that it's pretty much jeep track or single track all the way. There are some proper climbs, not gonna lie. The longest and steepest climb is from the Jukskei river level up towards the top of the hill where the Kyalami Castle is, and it is straight uphill, no zig zag like you would find at other bike parks. Once you are over the hill there is a nice decent and you loop around and head back over the hill. As was mentioned previously by JK7, the total ascent is around 600m over the 32km, so I think this is a awesome place to train for people staying in Joburg. They are also busy building flow lines which would be cool for the enduro guys. There are no coffee shops or places to buy snacks afterwards, but I think that's probably coming in the future when they will make use of the old club house. Asidlale has a lot of potential, so hopefully they can keep it up and get lots of people to ride there. I must admit the actual prison facilities, where the staff stay and the overall look of the buildings, is terrible. Lots of litter, overgrown sidewalks, and buildings that haven't been painted in probably 30 years. They have all the free labour they need to ensure that the place is nice and tidy, but I guess we cant expect too much from those that run the place.

At the start there should be signs with the various routes with their distances, difficulty level and elevation. Each route should be colour coded. A map is nice, a lot of people are into maps, but most wont remember it once they are on the trail. Out on the trail, coloured arrows from start to finish should be used to indicate to a rider where to go. If certain section is used by different trails (e.g. the 35km and the 50km) then both colour coded arrows should be shown, not just one of the two and expect people to figure out which route they are now actually on. The best I have seen (so far) are the signs at the Buffelsdrift trail head. Where the trail splits, they have the following:

I am part of our local sector crime forum in Midrand and information has just filtered through to us that a cyclist was shot and killed this morning at around 8AM during an armed robbery, north east of Copperleaf Estate, in Knoppieslaagte. Link to Location The only information we have at the moment is that he had an orange bicycle that was stolen. Condolences to his family and friends. Please be safe out there.

We were in Magoebaskloof around the 14th of Feb this year and before we went there I checked all the websites and found the various routes mentioned (yellow, green, red etc) starting from Cheerio Lodge. When we got to Cheerio Lodge the Saturday morning, we were told that it's pretty much impossible to ride any of the routes because they have not been maintained at all. Apparently the local tourism board is supposed to do this but it has basically fallen flat. Also, for security reasons, a lot of the farmers in the area have put up fencing and this has also closed some of the routes. So, unless you meet up with some of the local riders who can show you around, chances are you will only get to ride the local dirt roads or tar roads and no single track. I have also done the Magoebaskloof MTB classic many years ago and it was absolutely amazing. Its just such a pity that such an awesome place for mountain biking has not been maintained and it will take a lot of hard work to get it ready for tourists again.