David Whitley bites off more than his beer and pie-addled body can chew as he attempts downhill mountain biking in Cape Town.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Table Mountain is something of a theme park. Thousands of people go exploring on Cape Town’s icon every day, many of them fat old gimmers kept alive by a McDonalds drip. When you’ve got cable cars and buses ferrying you around somewhere, there is a tendency to consider it well and truly tamed.But try exploring Table Mountain under your own steam, and it’s altogether different. There are countless walking trails around the mountain. Many of them are steep heat-traps. It’s easy enough to get lost, dehydrated and worse.

Then there are the bikes. When I signed up for mountain biking down Table Mountain, I had assumed it would be a case of just following a nice sealed path as it slowly spiralled downwards. And, after falling off within three minutes of the descent, I realised that my preconceptions had been very wrong indeed. My experience of cycling is largely limited to nipping round to a friend’s house when I was younger and having the odd half-hearted go on my fiancée’s exercise bike while she’s at work. This CV doesn’t prepare you for going down steep scree slopes, with rocks, logs and miscreant tree roots all intent on smashing your limbs to pieces.

Cycling downhill over what amounts to rough gravel with numerous obstacles thrown in is largely an exercise of permanently squeezing your brakes and hoping that you’re not thrown over the handlebars. Some people may find this a thrill. I’m not one of them. I managed to survive this terrible peril with the odd graze and a lot of swearing, but then my guide informed me that this was just the test run. The next step in the torture process was going round and up again to where we started. This involved furiously pedalling through what may as well have been deep sand. Or, in my case, lugging my bike slowly through it as I trudged on foot. By this stage, my energies were being entirely channelled into creating new compound swear words.

Finally, we made the road for a nice bit of more uphill climbing – this time into a howling, fierce wind. Again, I managed very little actual cycling and considerably more huffing and puffing. By the time we’d got to the start of the actual descent, I was already a broken man. “There are two routes down, an easier one and a harde...” announced my guide before shooting a glance in my direction. “I think we’ll take the easier one.” Easier is very much a comparative word in this case. I faced more brake-clutching terror, and delightful though the scenery was, I was more concerned that my hands were entering a state of cramped agony.

We descended through forest, with often fabulous views of the city and the sea, and finally came out on a suburban road. “This is the dangerous bit,” I was told. Pschaw – I know how spectacularly bad South African drivers can be, but a nice, relatively flat road holds no fears for me anymore. If I can make it down that beast of a mountain - battered, bruised but relatively intact - I can take on the world.

Disclosure: David was a guest of Viator (Viator.com).

As I lay in the dust under an acacia bush with the rear wheel whirring three inches from my left ear I wondered once again why mountain-biking in Africa should be presenting such a challenge.

This was no iron-man conquest of the Dark Continent. We weren’t pedaling grim-faced into the forbidden quarters of what the colonial’s once knew - with carefully concealed respect - as MMBA: ‘miles and miles of bloody Africa.’ We were simply a group of thirty-somethings who were more interested getting to meet the locals than in breaking bones or records.

Culture shock comes quickly in Madagascar. Even as the plane swooped over the outskirts of Antananarivo I was scanning streets of red-clay houses and emerald patchworks of paddy fields for an image that would confirm my arrival in Africa. As a dilapidated Citroen taxi shuttled me onward into the capital, swerving around rickshaws and garishly painted carts drawn by hump-backed zebu cattle, I struggled even more against the illusion that I had landed in the Far East. Even the taxi driver’s fine-boned, café-au-lait features only served to confound my efforts to convince myself that this was Africa.

Twenty thousand years are all that it took for the San Bushman to learn to live off the ‘fat of the land.’ With nothing more than a pair of eland skin slippers, a bow and a quiver full of surprisingly spindly arrows they could travel vast distances.

I was all set to take on the Kalahari too, but I would do it on my terms. I was travelling light 21^st century style. With just a Britz Toyota Hi-lux 4x4 safari vehicle, fitted with long-range fuel-tanks, ten-gallon water containers and a high-level exhaust (in the unlikely event of floods). At night I would sleep out, as nature intended. With just the flimsy walls of an Eezi-Awn predator-proof roof-tent between me and the Kalahari night.

The guide spurred his horse forward: “Let’s Ride!...And try not to let any big pussy cats spook the horses.”

There’s nothing as thrilling as galloping through the African bushveld and, as I felt my horse surge underneath me and the wicked acacia thorns began to whip past my thighs, I gratefully delegated all responsibility for our welfare to my faithful steed. If either of us was in danger of getting ‘spooked’ it wasn’t Strider.

As Soweto prepares to host the 2010 FIFA World Cup final, David Whitley discovers how hope and opportunity are changing South Africa’s most famous township.

The man behind the street stall calls out to Ted. “Hey Papa, howzit?”

The story of how Ted Taylor, a humble tour guide, came to be known as Papa throughout Soweto is a fascinating one. He was one of the first guides to take tourists around Johannesburg’s most notorious township, and made a point of interacting with the residents.

So much so that when one of the bead sellers outside the Hector Pieterson Memorial died in 2004, he was invited to the funeral. Ted was the only white man there, and was told by fellow mourners that he was now part of the family.

The Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum are the focal points of Soweto’s burgeoning tourism industry, and they commemorate all the children who died in the battle against South Africa’s apartheid system.