Wednesday 23 April 2014

Elephant Highway

From Livingstone, we rode to Maun, Botswana, and on to Windhoek, Namibia; ten riding days, 1.550 km....

We had two nice breaks. First as we decided as a group of racers to pause the race for a few hours to hang out at a beautiful lodge with bar and pool just of the road, giving others the chance to win a stage and giving our tired bodies a well deserved break. Another great break was the scenic flight from Maun; watching the sun set ovet the Okavenga Delta, heavy rain clouds forming in the distance and the elephants and antilopes down below enjoying a lazy late afternoon was just perfect.

The Elephant Highway lived up to its expectations. The second riding day I was lucky enough to see two herds of elephants; one standing just off the road, the other one crossing the road in front of us. Amazing to see those mighty animals up so close, from a bike! Other wildlife sightings include giraffe, several kinds of antilopes and a large variety of big bugs. Where the bugs were limited to mosquitos and one spider the size of a kitten, occupying a squat toilet in Malawi, Botswana is full of creepy insects; beetles, grasshoppers, and the most notorious of all; seven cm long cane crickets. The crickets love to hang out on the road, get run over by cars, their corpses attracting more cane crickets that eat their mates, and in turn get run over by a car.... this feast is spiralling out of control, resulting is so many crickets in various stages of death on the road that it is impossible not to run over them. The cracking sound of running over a cricket will haunt my dreams, as does the sticky yellow substance that was all over my bike, shoes and legs, which may have been either cricket intestines or the vomit they spit when they panic. I don't really want to know....

In the past few days we have also done the longest stage of the tour: 208 flat tarmac kilometers from Ghanzi, Botswana to the Namibian border. Race distance that day was 204 km, with a long standing women's record of 6:23. I set of with the boys in the morning, when it turned out that the winds were not favourable enough for them to break the standing men's record of 5:45 in such a small group of racers, they volunteered to help me break the women's record. Even with a flat tire (first flat tire on my road tires, in about 6.000km!) we made it in 5:57, shaving off 26 minutes of the record! After being sick and achieving to tie the record on the Blue Nile Gorge, I was happy to show that I cannot only tie records, but smash them as well!
A big thanks to my team of domestiques-for-one-day for their support: David G., WolfenDave, Jos, Diederik and Tobias!

The last section from Windhoek to Cape Town will start tomorrow; 1900 km, largely back on dirt roads, which is very much to my liking! Off road tires are back on the bike, we're ready...