It was a hectic morning getting ready to leave camp—collecting laundry and charged electronics, packing up for the new truck system, and eating breakfast and filling water bottles to an accelerated schedule so the lunch truck could beat the fastest racers to the lunch stop. Adding to my frustration was the discovery that my iPhone had been unplugged in the middle of the night and had gone back into its discharge-only mode. I had just posted my new phone number the day before so I people could reach me from back home, and now—once again—I would be completely unreachable for several days.
In all, it was a fun riding day. The roads were unpaved but in good condition. The first 15k or so out of camp was a nice downhill ride. The landscape was beautiful, with red roads cutting through green shrubbery being slowly consumed by hungry camels. I stopped to watch a group of baboons for a while, and saw a dikdik once.
Mid-day, I saw Reiner stopped along the side of the road and decided it was a good place to take a break. Dave did the same. While we were standing there, a few men in camouflage garb trickled out of the bush wielding large machine guns. They smiled and waved and we walked across the road to say hello. There was a bit of a language barrier, but we were able to discern that they were part of the Ethiopian Liberation Front. Who exactly they were fighting, we don’t know. But that did explain their Rastafarian haircuts, brightly-colored bandanas, and poor English skills. I shared my candy-coated peanuts and Dave distributed some cigarettes to the group. They seemed satisfied and we rolled down the hill one kilometer to a small village. The people in the town didn’t know there were rebel fighters so close by in the hills. We had a couple of warm sodas and finished the day.
Camp was in a small village with a few strange amenities. There were a couple of shops to buy warm drinks and chapatas. Down the street there was a shop that advertised cold drinks and videos. Inside, they had two car batteries with an inverter, TV set, DVD player, and some home-made video DVDs. A solar panel sat ready to charge the batteries, but judging from the size it might have taken weeks to get a full charge. There was a fridge for the drinks, but it wasn’t powered up.
The town’s biggest feature was a tall water tower, which offered a great view of the area. I’m sure we weren’t supposed to climb it, but nobody stopped us from doing so. The water tower didn’t supply the town’s water; it was empty. Instead, brought their farm animals to the dirty pond by our campsite to drink. They also obtained their own water from the pond. We were allowed to collect our own drinking water from the pond, but weren’t allowed to bathe in the “clean†water. I don’t think anyone took them up on the offer.
Once school let out, our campsite was flooded with schoolchildren. They were very curious about us, but generally on good behavior. They weren’t trying to steal everything from us like the Ethiopian children had been. I managed to finally completely dry my laundry before a sprinkling of rain. The mildew smell still lingers, but hopefully it will stop getting worse each day.
Something to note about most of the bushes in the area is that they are very sharp. The ones next to my tent have hooked barbs all along their branches. I dropped a shirt on one and spent five minutes trying to release it from its grasp. Lots of the bushes along the road have spikes an inch or two long that are very good at puncturing tires and scratching up arms and legs as well.
From the town, we had a bit of a longer day. We were heading out into the infamous Northern Kenya desert that we had all been dreading for so long. The first two thirds of the day was actually perfectly fine. The last 20k became a bit more challenging, with the last 10k being a difficult struggle in the heat. Still, I finished the day by 2PM, and found enough space between the lava rocks to set up my tent and spend the rest of the day sitting in the shade drinking soup.
The last stretch to Marsabit was rumored to be one of the toughest days—if not the toughest day—of the tour. I found it to be long and arduous at times, but definitely easier than Dinder National Park (DNFP). The corrugations were farther apart, and the day was just over half as long. The day consisted of a lot of bumpy lava rock, lots of corrugation, a fair bit of gravel that would steer the bike tire in inappropriate directions, and a final incline at the end of the day. I was excited to pull up to the coke stop just before lunch to hear the hum of a generator running. There were cold drinks! (Cold beverages are a definite rarity in this area.) The campsite wasn’t very well flagged, so I passed it by a couple of kilometers and had to come back. Evidently several other people had done the same thing. It wasn’t the best way to end a long, hot day, but at least we had arrived at the rest day.
As with most of our border crossing days, this was a shorter day than usual. After three weeks of persistently annoying Ethiopian children, we were all welcoming change, even though the last couple of days have been fairly unpopulated and pleasant.
The need for the short day became obvious when we got to the border. It was officially a holiday on the Ethiopian side, so the immigrations staff were very anxious to go home. There was a problem with the US passports as well: the optical scanners couldn’t read the latest edition of passports. This led to a long queue while we practically typed our own information in the computer system to get our exit stamps. The border itself is relatively porous—even more so than the Sudan/Ethiopia border. The road connecting the two sides of the town can be freely crossed back and forth. Looking around, you will have no question as to which side of town you are in. The pavement ends immediately on the Kenyan side. Traffic switches from the right side to the left. People smile and say “Hello†or “Jambo†without expecting handouts; calls of “YouYouYouYouYou†come to an abrupt halt.
Moyale is quite a bit more built-up than Yabello, where we spent our last rest day. It’s still not a big town by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s more than a village. This gave us a chance to get some rest-day things done. I got my first taste of [excruciatingly slow] Internet access in a couple of weeks. It wasn’t fast enough to enter a blog entry or view a web page with pictures, but fast enough to send a quick email and update my Facebook status. I also bought a new SIM card for my phone for a ridiculously-cheap 100 schillings. My laundry had a chance to become nearly dry since the rains began during our rest day. There was an outlet in the radio room at the camp, so I had a chance to recharge my stuff as well.
In the morning I collected all my wet laundry but left my clothesline behind. The scenery was beautiful, and mostly devoid of people. I heard very few “You†and “Ferengi†calls. The few people I did meet along the road were quite friendly. The big surprise of the day was that our new, temporary lunch truck broke down at lunch—the starter motor just wouldn’t work. That means that I was in camp hours before my stuff was there. I spent the time wandering around the desert looking for any possible shelter from the ominous rain clouds forming overhead and climbing acacia trees and termite mounds. I also took the time to visit the nearby singing wells. The singing wells are an interesting phenomenon. Instead of digging wells straight down, the locals dig long ramps down into the water table. When they need water, they all get together in a chain and hoist the buckets to the top of the ramp. They sing to pass the time. Unfortunately, there was no hoisting or singing going on this afternoon.
South of our camp in the dry lake bed, the road was sparsely populated and peaceful. There was a lot of downhill terrain to enjoy and more lush green vegetation. We had some rain during the ride, but not enough to crush my spirits—we were on our way to another rest day. My knees barely survived the long ride. The incredible amount of unexpected climbing the day before destroyed them. If not for the rest day, I might have had to ride the truck.
The booming metropolis of Yabello was a bit of a disappointment. We camped on the grounds of a hotel. The only place to eat in town was our hotel restaurant, where the service was phenomenally incompetent. The waiters definitely played favorites, and I definitely wasn’t one of the favorites. They would actively avoid me once it became obvious that just ignoring me wouldn’t make me go away. If I waved, they would wave back and walk away. If I tapped them on the shoulder, they would pull away, and if I stood in front of them, they would push me out of the way. Nobody had good results. People spent two to three hours of pestering to get an order of fries. The bills were never right, and the waiters had to be cornered if we wanted change. The best results came from going the kitchen and placing the orders ourselves.
Aside from the food, the other surprises included a complete lack of Internet access in the town. There was also only one shop with food, and it was nearly sold out by the time I had arrived. Electricity was often unavailable, or worse—stuck in an electronic-damaging 70-volt brownout. Finally, I washed my clothes immediately when we arrived and hung them out on a line to dry, where they sat through the rainstorm that started just after dark. I spent most of the rest of the rest day creatively hanging/wringing things out trying to get them to dry.
This is just a quick post to let my loyal viewers–both of you–know that I haven’t abandoned this blog. I’m just struggling to find places that have both electricity and adequate Internet bandwidth to post new entries. I’m now 3,500km into the journey in Addis Ababa, where “Broadband” means 14,400kb dial-up connections shared by at least 20 computers. Viewing web pages that contain even the smallest graphics is time-consuming. Uploading any pictures is a strict no-no.
So this is just a temporary post to fill in the gaps. In summary, Ethiopia is much different from Sudan. The landscape changed dramatically from sparse deserts to beautiful, fertile mountains. There are children everywhere, shouting “YouYouYouYouYou” and “Where are you go?” Most are friendly, but some of them are angry and throw rocks. Most rocks are small, but others have left riders with stitches, bruises, dented helmets, and damaged bicycle frames. We always have an audience when we set up our tents, eat, brush our teeth, or go to the bathroom. It takes some getting used to.
The brakes of one of our trucks went out, and shifting it into low gear to bring it to a stop destroyed the engine, so we had an extra rest day in Dongola and are using a rented bus and flatbed truck for the time-being. We had another rest day in Bahir Dar and had a Mardi Gras theme party. After that, it has been a lot of climbing through the mountains and the Blue Nile Gorge. From here we head South toward Nairobe, Kenya. There are some rough roads ahead.
This is a space holder. Watch for new entries here at the next Internet access opportunity.
The group was significantly smaller when we left camp in the morning. Ten people had already gone ahead to Gonder from Sudan and another six hitched a ride ahead in the morning. The day was a “Mando Day.†Racers are allowed to drop their three longest stages from their total race times. Mando Days cannot be dropped, presumably because they are the most difficult days. The day did involve a lot of climbing, and was difficult. I am a bit used to climbing because of the terrain we have back home, so I didn’t find it as difficult as some did. I didn’t ride very fast, either.
The day took its toll in other ways as well. Our dinner truck lost its brakes on a downhill. The driver, in an attempt to bring it safely to a stop threw the transmission into a low gear. The engine responded with a loud bang and a gaping hole in the crankcase. The result is that we got an extra much-needed rest day in Gonder while the truck situation was sorted out. A second casualty occurred during the day. One of the fastest riders ran into a woman who jumped out in front of him. She was alright, but he ended up breaking his collarbone. He lost EFI status and will be missing many days of riding (if he is able to continue at all).
Gonder is a nice town high up in the hills. Our hotel, the Goha, is at the very top of the tallest hill. It provides a nice view, but a less pleasant bike ride to the top at the end of a long day. On the first rest day, I went with a group to visit the charity that Tony is raising money for. He has been donating money to a school in the area and they were very thankful for his contributions. They had named an entire wing “The Tony Block†in appreciation. We watched an intramural football game, then saw coffee beans being roasted and then ground with a mortar and pestle, before finally being turned into coffee over hot coals. Some popcorn was popped over those same coals while we watched a small dance performance by a few schoolgirls. One interesting way of improving school attendance was to build quality toilet stalls. Many of the homes don’t have their own toilets, so providing a place for the girls to go to the bathroom keeps them in school for a couple years longer.
We were all invited to visit the Dashen Brewery, so the first evening, we all went down to check it out. It has a big open beer garden, so we spent a lot of time hanging out and enjoying the free drinks there, happy to not be on our bikes.
I picked the right time to visit Ethiopia, as the 56 days before Easter everyone is fasting. That made it easy to always find fasting (vegetarian) food. The main staple food in Ethiopia is injera, a porous pancake-like bread made from the local grain tef. On top of the injera is a variety of spicy and delicious dishes. No silverware is used; you eat the food by tearing off pieces of the injera. We found a good restaurant in town that had a buffet. I ate lunch here twice.
Gonder’s big feature is a big castle grounds next to town, so I made sure to fit in a tour during the day. I am also having problems with sun sensitivity due to the doxycycline, so I went looking for Malarone as malaria prophylaxis replacement. I found a pharmacy that said they didn’t have it, but their supplier around the corner did. They sent a boy with me to the place “around the corner.†After a half-hour walk, we arrived at another pharmacy—a veterinary pharmacy. I decided not to buy anything.
Today marked our transition from Sudan into Ethiopia. The border towns of Metema and Gallabat were separated by a thin piece of rope and a lot of outdated bureaucratic paperwork. We got our exit stamps the night before by filling out an entry form that had “entry†crossed out and “exit†written in. On the Ethiopian side, the process of checking each passport against a non-indexed, non-alphabetized list of unwanted visitors could have taken all day. So once the first few passports started coming through, we all slipped through the border and waited for the TDA staff to deliver our passports in the evening.
The contrasts from one side of the rope to the other were immediately obvious. There were more children everywhere. Their familiar calls of “hello†were replaced by “You you you you you!†Building styles and donkey carts had changed in appearance. As soon as we left the town, the landscape left a huge impression upon us. The endless flat desert was replaced by hills and trees. Temperatures were a little cooler as well. The views of the canyons along the way were stunning.
Camp was next to a small village at the top of a significant hill. An area around the trucks was cordoned off with a piece of colorful string to keep the locals at a semi-comfortable distance. It soon became clear why: when we set up camp, everyone from the village came up to the line and just stood and stared at us until darkness fell and they wandered off to bed.
Everything that we do has consequences, and today was filled with consequences. It’s important to understand just how hectic our mornings tend to be, taking down our tents, eating breakfast, loading the trucks (a very trying process), filling our water bottles, applying sunscreen, etc. The slower riders (like me) try to leave as early as possible to have the highest chance of completely finishing the day.
When everybody arrives in camp after dark, the nightly rider meeting gets pushed forward to the morning, taking up precious minutes we just don’t have. This morning, I also had to track down my bike again, as it had been removed from the truck. Next, I had to repair a flat tire that was fine when I last saw it. The bikes were treated horribly on the back of the police vehicles. My bike computer was also broken, and I tried fixing it to no avail. The lockout valve on the forks was damaged as well, but still functional. In the frenzy getting out of camp, I forgot to scan out, so 20 minutes down the road I had to turn around and come back to camp to sign out. An extra 40 minutes of riding I didn’t need today.
I eventually caught up with some other riders in the morning so I was no longer the last one of the day. At a town, I made a coke stop, but forgot to top off my water. The TDA truck passed me. I tried to ask for water, but the staff was too busy trying to tell me the truck was too full to take on any other riders. They had just told another that was too sick to go on that he had to find his own ride to camp (that cost 150 pounds). All our support vehicles were filled to capacity today, another repercussion of the Dinder experiment.
Along the road, I was getting hot and kept asking locals for water. A couple riders were able to give me some. Along the way the road turned to worse-than-Dinder conditions and I caught up with Andra who was also low on water. We got some from a couple of guys from Darfur. I was thankful, but didn’t fully trust the quality, as it was poured from a motor oil jug and tasted a bit like camel hair, cigarette ashes, dirt, and oil all at once.
We got some more water down the road from another group of huts. While it was also poured from a motor oil jug, it was clear and tasted fine. A little further down the road, we found more huts with friendly locals that gave us sweet tea and shade. We chatted with them for a while. I had been suffering from mild heat exhaustion. Several times I thought I was too hot to continue, but it was becoming clear that no support vehicles were coming. In fact, there were no vehicles at all on this road—not even the one the sick rider had taken. At least the road conditions had improved greatly.
We arrived at the lunch stop at 3:45PM, the latest lunch arrival so far. The sweep was already there. She had taken a short cut through another village, the same route that the sick rider must have taken. Several riders at the stop were tired of waiting, and expressed their frustration of being there so long. I felt a bit bad about riding so slowly, but the support vehicles are usually there for those sorts of situations when riders can’t continue.
Other riders were experiencing repercussions of their own from the Dinder Experiment. Three male riders were peeing blood. Another was passing it in his stool. Another rider had heat stroke, and many riders were too sick or tired to continue throughout the day. Out of nearly 60 riders, only about 15 are still EFI, and we are still in the 2nd country of the tour.
The Dinder National Fabulous Park (DNFP) experience has been described by some as the “Biggest EFI massacre in TDA historyâ€. Warning bells had already gone off in my head when I learned that we would be riding 140k in dirt today. Even on the best of roads, this was going to be a very hard day. We definitely didn’t have the best of roads. What we encountered was 140k of brutal, pounding, corrugated roads, with just enough loose sand to prevent proper traction from occurring. Lots of people spent the day falling over, but more importantly, less than half the riders were able to finish at all. That’s even when the total distance was reduced from 140k to 118k.
There were two reasons for experimenting with this new route this year: one was to keep us off the dangerous paved roads south of Khartoum; the other was to experience the supposed abundant wildlife in the park. No group has ever been allowed to cycle through the park before.
I consider myself to be quite lucky with the wildlife. We were supposed to be riding in groups through the park, but I found myself on my own for long periods. It was while I was on my own that I came across maybe 50 baboons hanging around the road. They scattered when I stopped to take pictures, of course. At another point, when I thought I missed the lunch stop, I headed for the dry river bank to look for other riders. Instead, I found a group of wildebeest that ran into the tall grass when they saw me.
I had strained a muscle in my calf in the morning, and almost stopped riding at lunch. Most of the people at the lunch stop were actually waiting for a support truck to carry them the rest of the way. I decided to scarf down some lunch and try to get through the park. Back on the road, some quick math told me that it wasn’t going to be possible to get to camp before 8PM. By then I would have been swept off the course anyway. 6km past lunch, I decided to stop punishing my body with the road and get on the sweep truck. That’s literally on the truck, since there was no room in the truck.
Past the lunch stop, we were all riding with armed guards since the park officials were worried about possible attacks from lions. The truck I was on was riding behind the last few riders at 8km/h, so when we had the chance to switch trucks, a few of us jumped into the back of another pickup truck. Not too far down the road, we stopped to help another truck and waited there until the sweep vehicle eventually passed us. Eventually, Paul showed up in a newly-rented dump truck. It had become clear that there weren’t enough vehicles in the park to carry all the riders and bicycles that had to be carried to the finish, so this random utility vehicle had come to our rescue. Even that vehicle broke down twice on the way to the end of the park. We worked our way over the rough roads at high speed with sharp thorn branches scraping our arms and faces to the end of the park in the dark. Each rider we passed was required to get on the truck. Most were disappointed. Some were understandably upset at losing their hard-earned EFI status. Once we reached the impassible river bank at the edge of the park, we all unloaded and walked to our trucks waiting for us on the other side (they had gone around the park).
We arrived at camp after 9PM (well past my usual bedtime) and I had no idea where my bike was. None of the staff did either. Eventually, I found another rider who had stayed on the sweep truck with it and pointed me to my bike bag. (My bike was carrying things I needed for the evening: dishes, medications, toilet paper, etc.) My bike was actually loaded on top of our lunch truck, and is inaccessible until morning