Distance: 119.7km
Ride time: 6:37
Climb: 1201m
Best shuffled song: Brain too rattled to remember.
Mando day. The idea of these days is that they are so hard or representative of the riding in the country that your time for them must be counted towards your race time. You can't drop the time as one of your three grace days. The winner of the stage also get a 30 minute time bonus.
These have been a pretty mixed bag so far. Some, like the Blue Nile Gorge and the constant climb day in Ethiopia, have been awesome. Challenging riding and plenty of things to look at. Others, like the lava rock day in Marsabit, have been really, really hard and taken a lot out of me.
Today's mango day was one of the easiest but also pretty uninspiring. All but ~5km was unpaved. A mixture between road construction, corrugated, rutted roads and pretty nice dirt road. Plenty of variation in road surface, but with a definite preponderance of third world dirt. I guess that all the construction work means that this section will be paved by next year, just like our last 20km yesterday had been paved as well.
The best part of the ride today was definitely the dirt climbs after lunch. Some of the pinches were 15%. Nice way to spend lunchtime. Also good was negotiating the small tracks on the side of the rutted roads. Made for a terrible average speed, but way more fun than smashing over another set of corrugations.
I've put up my tent, baby wiped, peeled a bunch of garlic and eaten soup. Now all I have to do is walk to the nearest village and see if they will sell me a pineapple. Pineapple is the king of fruits.
Some of the views during the day - definitely in big sky country out here.
Dan's Camping Tip: If you leave your lantern on in your tent, try not to also leave your inner unzipped. Especially when you are in the Tropics. Spiders, strange bugs and massive flies are not what you want to be dealing with last thing at night.
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