Themeda to Sabie

Graeme and Gill invited caron and myself to join them at Themeda which is very near Crystal Springs just outside of Pilgrims Rest in Mpumalanga for the first week of december for some rest and relaxation as well as some pretty awesome mountain biking.

The mountain biking was to be a backroads trip from Themeda down to Sabie which should be a cinch since it has to be almost all downhill. So we thought. Since there are literally hundreds of logging backroads we decided to use google earth and trace our proposed route and then download this onto my GPS so all we had to do would be to follow the dots. What could be easier. The first technical problem was to convert the google file to a .gpx file so that garmins mapsource could read it. Thanks to the gpsies this turned out to be pretty easy but what wasn't so easy was weeding out 4750 of the original 5000 data points so that the GPS had enough memory to hold the entire route.

By the time we started our planned route looked like this



At the time, I didn't think that having the 1:50000 background on the GPS would be that useful but in the end it turned out to be invaluable.