Bring along a few safety pins as well as a few zip ties. Did you mention a pocket knife?

You may not need a first aid kit very often, but when you need one, you often really need it.

Luckily this happened while touring through a large city, and I was able to ride to an urgent care clinic. It took 21 stitches to close it up. It still takes supplies to stop the bleeding so you can get to to a medical facility. Vet Wrap is great stuff. Get it at your nearest farm supply store.


There is a mirror image scar from a gash on the shin side of my leg. This one happened where there was no medical facility readily available, it was smaller, and it was on the shin where there are no major tendons to damage; so we cleaned it, closed it with butterfly closures, wrapped it with "vet wrap" and continued riding. Both of these could have happened anywhere. Damn chainrings anyway!

I'd suggest adding a syringe to irrigate (clean) the wound, seri-strips or butterfly bandages to close the wound, a couple 4"x4" gauze pads and Vet Wrap to keep the wound clean. Also keeping one water bottle with just plain water in it is a good idea.


Full medical kit
Bee Sting kit, epi pen x 2
Antihistamine tablets
Tape
Vet wrap*, 2" & 4"
4-4X4
Bandaids
Anti diarrhea med
Antibiotics, 10 day, oral
Tylenol
Irrigaion syringe
Wound closure kit
Neosporin
Anti-fungal cream
Nitrile gloves


* https://www.valleyvet.com/ct_detail....2-00b0d0204ae5

I have travelled a bit in sub-Saharan Africa, though not on a bike. I would ditch the camping gear, for starters. (Likewise, the cooking gear.) For one thing, there are not that many campgrounds. For another, there are animals I would not want to encounter with only a tent between me and them. I stayed for a few days in a treehouse in South Africa; it was very cool to hear the buffalo snorting around below me at night, but it would have been a lot less cool had I been on the ground with them. Better a buffalo than a lion, though. And baboons who live near human settlements have often picked up on all the nifty things we carry with us. I had a little faceoff with one once; again, I would not have wanted to be in a tent at the time. (They have very large teeth, as I had time to notice when I was wondering what on earth to do about the fact that a rather large male had just appeared about five feet away from me, and we were staring at each other.)

There are often places to stay in bigger towns, but bear in mind that in a lot of the countryside, there is no real travel industry, and thus not that much travel infrastructure. You can generally find places that sell food, but I'd try to get from town to town to sleep (where town means: bigger than a village, but not yet a city.)

Second, I'd have a bike that was capable of dealing with rough roads. This, of course, depends on where you go, but pretty much anywhere in Africa you'll be a lot more limited if your bike can't handle unpaved roads that are often in really, really bad condition.

Third, in much of sub-Saharan Africa, you would need some things that are specific to traveling in parts of the world that have very rudimentary health infrastructure. Not just things like gauze pads, but, for instance, a clean needle and syringe. In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, they just don't have a lot of that stuff, and so they reuse it, which I imagine you'd want to avoid, since HIV is still widespread. Also, things like mosquito netting: you can take antimalarial medications, but last time I checked, there was no drug that prevented dengue fever, and you do not want to get that. In general, you should do a lot of research about what kinds of first aid stuff to bring, and it should be specific to the route you will be taking. I think your first aid list will almost certainly be a lot larger than what you've listed.

Oh goodness! Another former Pocketmail user! I used one to send and receive emails from Machka when she lived in Canada and I in Australia. Then one day, there was no service. In the end, I found out that the company had closed down the Pocketmail service entirely (and without any notice), and changed the name and activity of the company to mining.

Telstra payphones are becoming rarer and rarer. However, free wi-fi is becoming more and more common and municipal councils, in particular, try to make their areas more attractive to visitors. Add this to the inevitable fast-food outlet wi-fi services and the occasional ones in camp grounds, and it isn't too difficult to find access in towns.

Mobile phones, as cell phones are called here, are relatively easy to access. The backpackers who work as pickers on our orchard don't seem to have any problems buying phones and/or SIM cards when they arrive in Australia.

I have my smartphone with no SIM card in it configured so I can make phone calls where I have wifi. I can only receive calls if the phone is turned on, I have wifi at that time, and I am running the app for it, thus it is not a reliable substitute for a phone if you can rarely receive a call. But, it is a good option to have as a backup to make calls.

This app used to work with google voice, but google did something to disable it, now this app works with ring to, another VOIP phone service.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...grooveip&hl=en

There are no guarantees it will work in every country, but it came in really handy when I used it in Budapest to call one of my credit card companies in USA when my card stopped working.

One minor problem - when I make phone calls from one number and receive calls at another number, confusion sometimes happens.

Some cell phones are available as dual SIM card phones, you can plug in two SIM cards which can come in handy at times.

Where you are touring is more important than for how long when it comes to extra gear. If I was going across Siberia I would expand my tool kit and spares, carry more food and water and take some warmer clothes and maybe a SPOT device.

I've ridden across Siberia, here was my equipment list: Amsterdam to Vladivostok » Equipment

A few things to realize is that the gaps between services on the main roads are not as big as you might expect. For example, longest gap in water was perhaps 100 miles and less if we'd filtered. So it was useful to carry a 10L water bag, but typically only fill up in village and then go 10km out of town to camp. Same thing on food. It is a continental climate, so in summer at least the warm clothes are no greater deal than elsewhere. I did carry some more spare equipment, though the larger towns like Novosibirsk, Omsk, Irkutsk, Chita all had bike shops with pretty much what you'd expect here - and some smaller likely did as well.

In terms of being remote, northern Australia had larger gaps - from what I've seen western China as well. However, in both places if one was on the primary road, there was enough traffic that if one got into serious difficulties it would be possible to get a lift to a town.