MONSTER DAY IN REAL AFRICAN FEELING...

We are now entering the 4th week of tour D 'Afrique and by now certain things are starting to flow. Putting the tents and packing the truck lockers is definitely much more efficient. By now, every one has his own little tricks to save times on the various queues, locker queue, dinner queue, dish queue, water bottle queue and so on. My trick is to do things at a different timing than most and therefore queue less... I hate queues and I did not come to cross Africa on a bike for queuing...


Our routines are now well settled and it really feels good to be efficient when you are busy. Busy we were today... It was a monster stage... I was right last night when I said that many EFI's were gonna fly... It was a really hard day. 136 km with 90 km on the dirt... A bit of a shocker for many riders who have little or no off road experience. For us the mountain bikers; it was a different story, we finally got rewarded for riding those heavy bikes with fat wheels all the way here... The first 50 km was the same tarred road we have been riding since Khartoum, then suddenly, we veered left straight into the wind and on an horrible corrugated wash board road... Within a few kilometers most road bikes were dropped while the guys on mountain bikes were flying (except for the top riders who managed to beat the mountain bikers by a vast margin, these guys are good...) The dirt road took us through very remote villages were we were clearly the first ever white riders to pass. Some kids were really exited whilst others run away screaming... The houses were made of grass and the further we got away from the tarred road, the cleaner they became. The young adults were all lining up nicely along the dirt road and clapped their hands as we passed. At one stage, I got surrounded by a group of women who sung a song for me. Today we quickly forgot the few incidents of the previous day and Africa was smiling at us. So many kids, everywhere...

The stage got so long that some riders got lost, as a matter of fact some are still riding as I am writing this.... And many were so exhausted, they had to jump on the truck and lost their EFI

Tomorrow another big one, over 140 km monster stage on the dirt through a national park that apparently even has lions... So I better go and eat now as it will be an early night...