James Clarkes Tour de Farce | Biking tours of Europe at low cost and enormous fun...

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Now you too can ride fat-tyred bikes with comfortable saddles and lots of gears through the beauty of Europe at low cost and have enormous fun while doing so.....

Greetings, I'm a retired, rather overweight journalist - a writer of humour, mostly - and I want to introduce an idea that might help you live forever without taking Carter's Little Liver Pills.

It's cycling in Europe. But not on carbon-fibre bikes with drop handlebars and tyres so thin that it brings Oxfam rushing out.

I speak of "coarse cycling" (as my colleague, Richard Steyn calls it)- riding sit-up-and-beg, fat-tyred bikes with comfortable saddles and lots of gears.

And I speak of low cost tours and of having enormous fun.

The six-man Tour de Farce team, of which I am the famously modest L*E*A*D*E*R, goes off every year for two weeks of cycling in Europe. We go to places that are not too costly and not too strenuous.

The youngest of us is 55 and the oldest 76.

Since I began writing about our adventures in my thrice-weekly humour column - Stoep Talk - in The Star, Johannesburg (Tour de Farce began in 2002) readers young and old have been asking to join us.

In fact I have had so many enquiries that Richard, who is one of the six in our team, suggested we use his website www.satravelguide.com to impart useful information and to field questions.

But first check…