Wadi Halfa to Dongola

Kilometres riden: 1507.5

After getting through Sudanese immigration, we were ready to start riding. In earlier years, this part of the route was the first really rough section - bad, dirt roads full of corrugations and bumps. This year it has all been paved (though one rider managed to leave the road and fly down some embankments) - so the route has through Northern Sudan has been changed. The idea is to spend less time on the busy paved roads and detour through Dinder National Park. This is meant to be a pretty good game reserve. And we will get guarded by guys on camels with AKs.

Anyways, this means that we did our first medium sized back to back days. Two ~150km days in a row. I found the riding pretty easy going, but I am still having to tweak my setup every day to ease up my lower back.

The landscape up here is pretty surreal. Really barren desert with melted looking rock hills. Around the Nile there is a narrow fertile section where most of the houses and fields are. Every now and again, there is a comparatively massive mesa, which you can see from kilometres away.

Seeing the bigger mesas, and watching them come closer then swing by reminds me what I like most about longer distance riding. The magic feeling of pulling the landmarks towards you, just by spinning your legs, is very satisfying. Out here, where the landscape is so flat, except for those mesas, the feeling is magnified ten fold.

I am getting more of feel for riding in a pack. On the shorter day into Dongola (109km), Rod, Julianna, Stuart and I worked pretty well together. Riding in the larger bunch in the morning highlights the difference.

In the morning, the fastest group hasn't split off yet and there are a lot of people out looking to see how long they can stick with the faster riders, so the group is massive. This makes for some interesting maneouvres as people try to get into a groove while other people are weaving in and out. The funniest thing is, the first hour, the fast guys normally seem to take it pretty easy. It isn't until a bit after that when one of the faster guys (or an experimenting slow guy) will start to push the pace ups. In dribs and drabs, the slower guys will get ejected from the fast group and litter the road in panting, heaving blobs.

Yesterday, the fast guys pushed the pace up to around 48km and the large group started to fragment. I managed to get around some of the people dropping off, felt pretty strong and had a clear view of the fast guys. One of the other fast guys was near me as well and I guess is always looking for a challenge, since he is training for the Race Across America. He was keen for us to chase down the fast guys, so he lead out our attempt to bridge to Franz's wheel. He got me to within about 50m of Franz, then peeled off, so I had to get down into the aero position and try power the rest of the way. Well. 10m to go: every muscle in my body limp, breathing like a broken down steam train. Stood up to get a little bit of extra power: even my hip abductors were weak, rubbery. I had nothing more to give.

In the end, I conked out within metres of the easy breathing spot in the back of the fast guys. Pretty exciting though as the pack splits and you power around trying to get back on.

Now, the #2 woman behind Julianna is Gissi, who had been dropped a little earlier than us. Gissi had ridden straight through lunch though, so there was a pretty good chance that she would be able to jump on to the back of the fast guys as they left lunch and steamed through. This meant that Rod and Julianna wanted to minimise how much time Gissi pulled back. Straight out of lunch, Stuart thought he had a mechanical, so he pulled over and I turned around to go back. Rod and Julianna kept going, so once again I was trying to bridge. This time, I managed a pretty sustained effort at 40+ to hook back up. We made it though, and managed to pull our weight for the afternoon.

I hope everyone else finds the minutae of the day-to-day toings and froings on the bikes interesting. Sudan is so laid back, that the only other really noteworthy stuff is what kind of "facilitados" there are at each camp site. That does remind me, in Dongola we are camping at the old zoo. It is actually a really nice park with neat lawns and some good shade trees. The showering facilities are just a hose, but it was really relaxing to stand in my swimmers on the lawn and soap up then hose down. Kind of like the old downstairs shower at the coast. Very nice after a few days of baby wipes in a stinking hot tent after getting off the bike.

Oh yeah. Stinking hot times reminds me of something that happened on the last 150km day. Eric on his Bike (there are three Erics all up) rode straight through lunch then did a massive solo effort trying to stay in front of six of us for the next 70kms. It was getting pretty hot by then (this being the Sudanese desert) and riding solo with no breaks would be pretty hard (I found that out the day before). He managed to stay in front until about 8km from camp. This would have been a really, really hard thing to do. Pretty gutsy stuff. The downside was that he overcooked himself pretty badly and wound up under the truck with a bad heat attack. The first thing that we knew about it was a massive "HEE-UURGH" from under the truck as his post-ride soup bounced. He powered back again the next day to come in not far behind the four of us though.

The only other drama has been one of the slower packs managed to axe themselves. It sounds like one rider was riding on their sticky out time trial bars then managed to touch wheels with the rider in front. Then they breaked (broke?) hard and took down a bunch of other riders. I guess that is part of the problem with riding in a bigger pack of inexperienced riders.

I am getting to be a dab hand at setting up and breaking down my camp each day.

No pictures, because you need a photography permit in Sudan and I haven't got one yet.