Ride the blazing rainbow - Quentin van Marle

There are many strange ways to make a living. In my travels by touring bike I've met ghostbusters and exorcists, riverboat gamblers, stunt pilots, crocodile hunters, sponge divers, rodeo promotors and circus clowns. One chap I came across in Florida earns his crust as a Hemingway lookalike.And here in South Africa, the home of extreme sports and some extreme opinions, I'll be coming across a few more. Like the man who exports live sharks to all corners of the world. And the guy who spends his working day tossing nervous customers off a bridge, in what is the highest bungee-jump in the world.Besides, there's something oddly pleasing in cycling the open roads in search of radio stories for the BBC, and for narratives like this.Years ago, more than I care to remember, I lived in South Africa for an 18 month period, working as a journalist on the weekly Financial Mail. They were the days of a police state and apartheid, when black African suspects routinely exited the Johannesburg Police HQ via the interrogation room's 12th floor window.Today I'm in a different South Africa, and am certainly here for very different reasons. Many years on from Nelson Mandela's acclaimed walk to freedom, I'm about to pedal across a land where the race and colour thing has been papered over through a clever act of reinvention. Now branding itself as the Rainbow Nation, South Africa is experimenting with the most deliberate PR brainwave ever made by a country with a built-in race issue.My cross-country route is well trodden, though not by cyclists. The 1000 mile trek will begin in the steaming Indian Ocean city of Durban, follow the old coast road along the southern part of KwaZulu-Natal province, then head inland through the first part of the Eastern Cape -- from the Transkei to East London -- where it will rejoin the coast along to Port Elizabeth; it will then pick up the Garden Route in the Western Cape and head up into the wine country, ending with the brisk Atlantic blow that swirls through Cape Town like a posse of howling poltergeists.