It is rainy season when we are here, which means a daily downpour at around 2 or 3pm – just the right time to cool you off after the brutally high temperatures around midday. After the rain it gets very hot again. Naturally.

The tracks we travel on are mainly second-string, back roads connecting less-visited towns and villages, although we spent some time riding tarmac too.

Where the riding got interesting, though, was on the single-lane roads connecting the smallest villages to the slightly better-maintained main roads. Here you get a real chance to open up and rip some tricky downhill lines.

The roads themselves never get narrow enough to be called singletrack, but the amount of surface available to you that isn’t submerged in standing water or littered with yawning potholes, does make line selection that little bit more challenging.

And while, from a technical standpoint, it’s not going to test the more experienced mountain biker, the combination of environmental factors certainly makes life tougher.

Sky-high humidity compounds the already sky-high temperatures, while the constant need to take on water means there are plenty of times where you have to lay the bike down at the side of the road and scamper into the bush for a bit of bladder relief.

It’s like doing four days of enduro racing, complete with some testing climbs and tricky descents, but on a hardtail hybrid shopping bike with only half the gears available. The cycling has a real air of give-it-a-go amateurism about it, the kind of attitude the first MTB riders at Repack would probably have a lot of time for.

The official Challenge jerseys, kindly supplied by Hackney GT, feature the Street Child logo – and you find that it’s instantly recognised by people throughout both Sierra Leone and Liberia. When they aren’t shouting: “poomuin” at you, literally “white man”, they are shouting “Street Child!”

It sometimes feels quite fraudulent to be sat at the roadside eating chicken and noodles out of a tinfoil tray and have a stranger come up and say: ‘”Thank you.” Like you’re getting the credit for something you had no involvement in.

“It’s only when you stop riding and look around that you realise what a spectacular thing it is to be doing”

Each day on WACC starts early. It has to, to make the most of the morning when it’s definitely still hot, but not brain-meltingly so. For breakfast we eat bread and egg. If not a ‘speciality’ of West African cuisine, bread and egg is definitely one of the trip’s greatest hits.

The coffee comes in a sachet pre-mixed with sugar and milk. You pour it into hot water and seconds later you have a cup of something brown and liquidy. It’s not to everybody’s taste, but for someone with a sweet tooth and deeply-entrenched anti-morning sentiments it’s like nectar.

We get on our bikes. We talk about how much our bums hurt. We cycle for a bit. Africa is beautiful. We forget about our bums hurting.

Soon we have to stop and drink water. We drink water out of sealed plastic pouches unappealingly nicknamed ‘bagwater’. There is an art to tearing off a corner of the bag with your teeth, without splurting water all down your front. Doing this while riding is even more difficult.