Coronavirus: Canadian cyclist Cory Wallace used Covid-19 travel restrictions to ride his way through Nepal and Africa
- ‘If it hadn’t been for Omicron I would have missed out on this big African trip,” Wallace says
- Wallace rode off in search of a higher challenge, Kilimanjaro, where he set the fastest known time for biking to the roof of Africa
Cory Wallace is the definition of “living with Covid”. After leaving Canada for what he thought would be an easy three-week trip, it would be some 15 months before he was able to return home.
“When I left Canada the plan was to ride the Cape Epic race, and then to spend a week in Cape Town. A three-week trip,” he says.
In 2020 Wallace found himself stranded in Nepal for 11 months, before the Omicron outbreak found him stuck in Africa for another six months. But he was determined to make the most of a bad situation.
As fate would have it, The Munga, a semi-supported 1,000km mountain bike race through the remote Karoo in South Africa was coming up, and a few days before the start he was riding with World Tour road racer and endurance racing legend Lachlan Morton, who had flown in for the race.
“I was with him the day all of the flights got cancelled and he actually made it out. He flew business class via Ethiopia to get home, and he gave me his entry to the race. I just had a few days to prepare, and barely made the start line,” he says.
