Day Three - Secondary School to Field Camp

Distance: 98.7km

Ride time: 8:25 (includes a lunchtime nap)

Climb: 1026

Best shuffled song: Master of Puppets by Metallica

Today was another dirt day. My game plan for the day was to make a picnic. And I executed perfectly. I was taking it pretty easy and on track for a six hour day. Then at lunch, I heard that the bike rack on the dinner truck (the truck with my tent and everything else) had broken the bike rack and would be late into camp. I figured that I might as well sit around the lunch stop and eat mangoes for a while. Better than sitting around camp with nothing to wear and nothing to do. After I ate a bunch of mangoes and looked for some buried treasure, I felt a bit tired and figured that I might as well have a nap as well.

Sleeping sprawled across three camping stools is easier than it sounds.

An hour or so later, I felt like I should actually get going.

The other highlight of the day was finding singletrack to ride on. Parallel (sorta) to the main road is a footpath / bikepath. Not only is it easier going than the often corrugated and sandy road, but it is way more fun. Twisty, narrow track with bushes and flowering plants growing right up to the edge is pretty fun to ride along. One descent was particularly cool. Narrow track across open slick rock and gravel. Super fast. Way better than thumping down the road, smashing into rocks and grinding through sand. It was so good that I ended up spending a bit of time back tracking looking for entrances to more tracks.

Some of the riders have very little experience riding off road. As in, limited to the amount of off road that we've done on the TDA. I'm no great shakes on the dirt, but for these guys it must be even harder. They have to ride for a much longer time (no naps and mangoes for them) and have less confidence on the descents. At the end of a long day, it is easy to misjudge something, even something as innocuous as some sand, and end up falling over. I managed to do just that. For me it is more funny than scary. If I'd done it at high speed and put a rock into my ribs it would have been a lot less funny though. Anyway. My whole point here is that some of the riders ended up having to play it safe and walk down some of the descents. That must have sucked. They made it to camp though in one piece though, so yeah.

When I got to camp the people that I normally (used to?) ride with told me that they were getting worried when I hadn't turned up and were thinking about sending back a bike with spare parts. It is good that some people are watching my back. I'd better not make a habit of lunch naps, or they might get too used to me being late. Then I'd really be missing those spare parts. Camp rumour is so rife at the moment that one guy had heard that I was deathly ill and that is why I had to take a nap.

One of the expedition riders, Jeff, somehow got hooked up with a local and took the "cut-off". According to him, it was an hour long descent of single track. Instead of going up and over the hill that we rode up, he traversed across the ridge line, going through villages, dry river beds and canyons. Sounded pretty awesome - and the local dropped him right at one of the TDA trucks, so he was dead on target. Jeff said that the local was in a real hurry. He was going to be riding until 6 o'clock that night to get where he was going. It amazes me that someone that keen to get wherever it is that they were going had no faster way of getting there. Not in a bad way, just a puzzled way. Maybe the spirit of commuters is worldwide.

Oh. Ali (our Kenyan and Tanzanian fixer) and Sharita were filming and taking photos at the descent down the big hill of the day. The climb itself had been pretty fun. Plenty of almost technical riding that required picking a nice line and working up little rock ledges. But a lot of spinning as well. It was only a 200m 4km climb but that, plus having to absorb the bumps from the rocks on the way down, meant that I was pretty tired. I did not cut a very dashing figure - so don't be holding out for an "EXTREMEZ HARDCORE CORNERING" video on the TDA website any time soon.

Only four more days of dirt until we get to Iringa and then it is pavement (no doubt of varying quality) until Namibia. I'm not sure where Namibia is exactly, but I hope it is a long way away. We get to Dodoma, the administrative capital of Tanzania, tomorrow. I hope that I'll be able to get a hotel room for the night.

Pineapple update: No pineapples to be found within walking distance of camp last night. Six mangoes at lunch today more than made up for it.

Dan's Camping Tip: Bring a tent peg mallet. You will be camping on hard ground. Nothing is more futile looking than a tired man trying to hammer a peg into a rock hard ground. Except the peg springing right back out thirty seconds later.