I’ve now given up on the route described by Thomas Anderson in his excellent blog. Basically me and my bike can’t hack the dirt roads or more precisely the sand -(
lovely road
So today I sped along the gorgeous tarmac road towards Keetmanshoop. A fantastic 104 miler comfortably done under my own steam and easily in daylight! (7.30 to 4.30 including stops). I had booked into the Seeheim Hotel otherwise I might have done the extra 40km to Keetmanshoop.
I had a fabulous farewell from my SA farmer friends as their convoy overtook me hooting & waving. The road was pretty well deserted the rest of the day only an odd car and truck. No wind and slight downhill for long periods as I dropped from 5000 feet to 3000 feet.
Flowers
Towards the end of the day as you get closer to The Fish River the hillsides became clothed in a fragrant yellow flower (Double Kiss in Afrikaans) and greenery started to appear.
Some might say sanity has returned others may say why choose to go on a mega family outing with 6 adults and 7 energetic young kids 🙂
I decided to take a day of, Abrie & Ilze-Marie offered to let me tag along on their tour of Kolmanskop, Diaz Cross & Luderitz. Tomorrow a whole convoy of them are doing a 3 day dune driving experience.
I can now see why they drive so fast! It seemed to take ages even though it’s only 120km.
In Kolmanskop
Kolmanskop is an amazing ghost town that was once one of the wealthiest places on the planet. Around 1 ton of diamonds were literally picked up out of the sand! Once depleted and a new source was find everyone just upped and left 🙂 So the place has been left for the sand to encroach & destroy. I wonder how much of Germany’s wealth came from places like this.
Pink Flamingo
We then went for a walk to Diaz Cross which is on a peninsula jutting out from Luderitz. Fascinating to see pink flamingos just wandering along the beach’s and to see the unbridled energy of 7 kids roaming the rocks.
In Luderitz we found a Spar which unbelievably had yellow bananas etc etc plus I stocked up on Amila sachets as well as finding non chocolate coated energy bars 🙂
Tomorrow looks like another long day – the closest hotel seems to be at Seeheim. Although it appears there is a 40mile downhill stretch 🙂
Today was always going to be hard as the 105 miles between Rosh Pinah & Aus there is precisely niet. A couple of business guys at the hotel said they would arrange a lift on one of their trucks but of course no call came. So after wasting way to much time on trying to get Picasa to work (You really have to question the brains of the Google leaders) I set of.
Every 10km a picnic shade
First stop was the garage to buy 4.5 litres of water and some energy bars (why are they always coated in chocolate that turns into a gooey mass?). Then it was straight into the lovely tarmaced obligatory hill. This was a monster a 2600 feet steady climb over the first 25 miles. 🙂 My wonder sachets of Amila certainly helped as they made the warm water drinkable and kept me going.
……so the seemingly endless kilometres passed on more or less straight roads, wind never deciding if it was going to help or hinder me. Overall I think it helped 🙂
30km sign
As the day passed it was pretty clear I was going to run out of light, not stamina. At the 40km post I managed to get a signal so rang the hotel saying I was going to arrive late the owner kindly offered to pick me up! At the 30km marker I met him and we bombed back making it to The Bahnhof Hotel in Aus just before dusk.
The hotel is excellent, run with Teutonic efficiently I managed the first decent dinner in days!
Strava says I biked 86.7mi and rode up 4,358ft of hills. So a pretty good day which I could have biked the remaining 19 miles if I had left at 7am instead of after 9am
Uploading pictures in bulk is turning into a total nightmare! The Picasa uploader has now finished as obviously Google has disabled the ability to create new directories 🙁 Flickr drops out as it always did. Smugmug wants to upload the full file sizes which is impractical on such slow connections. All in all a mess. Google seems to be begging folks to use FaceBook…
The observant ones may wonder why day 25070 in the title. I rather liked the way Thomas Anderson used the number of days he has been away biking the world in his title. I thought I would use the number of days since I was born 🙂
The day started well. Way before sunrise I was having a breakfast at the local Wimpy bar and stocking up with energy bars (why oh why does everything here have to be covered in chocolate which turns into gooey mass by 10am).
Grape Vines
I turned on the light and pedalled of in the cool through all the vines. Apparently virtually all European eating grapes in November come from these fields. after a while I bumped into Alice & Oliver a young French couple cycling down to Cape Town it had taken them 4 weeks to get down from Victoria Falls on the A11 Elephant road to Nata in Botswana, sounded amazing. I continued down the dirt road aiming for the Spar shop but lost in my dreams I overshot it by a mile 🙁 so then had to pedal back 🙁 Stocking up on stuff for a planned overnight camp added at least 4kgs 🙁 Now I could barely lift the bike 🙁 onwards I went down the Orange River Valley.
Alice & Oliver
All was well to begin with although the gravel rapidly became a sand road – total murder with a laden bike. I stopped at a shady building with toilet etc. at the National Park border and devoured some lunch a litre of water followed by a nap. I set off again in the afternoon heat the going was very tough. Eventually I came to the start of the big hill, and started having to push the bike through the wretched sand, A big guy in a pick up truck stopped and asked if I wanted a lift 🙂 It took both of us to lift the bike into the truck!
The day in detail
Thank goodness I did the hill turned into a monster followed by a huge sandy descent it would have taken days for me to do it on the bike. We reached the farm, my prospective campsite, but I decided to stay with my good samaritan all the way to Rosh Pinah just counting myself extremely fortunate as the truck climbed up and down severe hills and round narrow bends. I kept thinking what super heroes these guys like Thomas Anderson are.
We pulled into the service station where I thanked my guy profusely and pedalled off to find a hotel. Fortunately the Amica had a cancellation due to the morning fog stopping flights here. A good ending to a very tiring day.
I did 53.2 miles and 1434 feet on the bike. and another 52 miles in the truck with an additional 4000 feet of climbing!
The pictures are on Smugmug today
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