Life on Rest Days

Rest days have been pretty good so far. Normally the day before a rest day is a shorter day, so I get to the camp and set up before noon. Then there is a whole extra day where we don't have much to do except clean our bikes, tents, clothes and selves.

As I said (wrote) in an earlier post, we are resting up today in Dongola. I've spent most of my time finding and eating food. Breakfast was the last of our stash of Nutella and Nusa with some awesome bread that we found last night. Lunch was a couple of beef and vegetable rolls from a street stall, a whole watermelon, three mangoes and five bananas. Good stuff.

Yesterday's lunch was half a charcoal chicken, some pickled cucumber, normal cucumber and onion on a bed of rice. With bread.

Then dinner was a big banquet of meats, beans, bread and salad. One of the younger, slower guys was eating with the group and was loving cramming his hand into the food to load up his bread. Then explaining how he had had a bad stomach the last few days. Kids today. I wish they would just get off my lawn already and stop with all their street jive.

I spend the time between eating, which their isn't a lot of, reading, sitting around and looking for more snacks. For the last few days, I've been pretty hungry after getting off the bike and no amount of soup has been able to sate me. I found something that I hope will fill the gaps.

All in all, rest days are definitely something to look forward to.

Plans for riding into Khartoum are shaping up to be pretty hard going. We have 500 odd km to cover in 4 days. And one day will be short because we ride into the city under escort for part of the day. Could be another brutal stretch.

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.

Aswan to Wadi Halfa Ferry

So. In Egypt they have this thing called the Aswan Dam. It was pretty neat to ride across both dams, but that isn't the main reason that it exists. The main reason is so that they have a lake big enough to run the worst ferry service in the world.

It really does pull no punches. The cafeteria is infested with cockroaches. A pile of cigarette butts in the corner that the door opens across - if you can't see it when the door is open, it mustn't exist I guess. People spitting on the floor in the corridor. Bugs living under the mattresses. Stuff getting pilfered off the bikes on the deck. By the end of the journey one of the squatters blocked up (probably because some people on the tour still haven't worked out that you bin, not flush toilet paper here) and overflowed.

I felt pretty run down after spending most of two days and a night on the ferry.

Luckily, we found some pretty good food in Wadi Halfa, including some awesome spicy / curried potatoes, so that recharged my batteries for the 150, 150, and 109km days. So far, Sudan is a lot more laid back than Egypt. Everyone seems to be appreciating the lack of touts and other tomfoolery that got foisted on us in Egypt.

Day Something - Luxor to Edfu to Aswan

Kilometres riden: 1090

Just finished the two day ride from Luxor to Aswan. Two pretty easy days.

On day one, the fast guys were taking it easy and riding with Rod and Julianna's group. We didn't seem to be pushing too hard though. When it got to be my turn to pull, I decided to conduct a highly scientific experiment to answer two questions:

1. has my changed bike set up let me ride any more consistently?
2. what happens when I take the group speed from <35km/h >40km/h?

Does the changed bike setup let me ride constantly with no need to stand?

I feel pretty confident about my answer to this: kind of. I can definitely ride longer, but I do still get a fair bit of lower back pain when I am in the middle of the group. When I am pulling, I have no pain at all. When I am in the back, I can stand up and weave around to let the pressure off. In the middle, I can't stand and I get pain. I think that maybe this is because I don't change my gears as the group speed changes.

This is a pretty easy thing to fix if I remember to think about it.

Having my seat 2.5cm lower and further forward definitely lets me cruise at a higher speed without having to strain much. It is like a free 2 or 3 km/h.

What happens when someone takes the group speed up?

Very easy to answer. What happens is that all the fast guys also speed up. They will also start to ride past someone at the front that is going too slow and take another turn. This is kind of cool, but means that if you come off the front expecting the pace to ease up, you will be pretty surprised.

Yesterday, I was in the back position with Stuart immediately in front of me. He slowed for a few seconds to roll his shoulders and when he looked up, a 10m gap had opened up between him and the next person. We both tried to bridge back to the main group, but neither of us had enough beans to make it.

We caught the bunch again at lunch and tried to hang on again. I only lasted two more pulls before I blew up and evicted myself from the group. After a few kilometres of solo riding, I found Stuart again and we rode it out.

All in all, one very informative day.

Day two was much of the same. Riding alongside the Nile, going through little villages. Kind of thing that is par for the course. When you are riding next to the Nile. Nice as it is, I think it is good that we went East to the Red Sea then over the mountains to get to Luxor. It would have been pretty monotonous following the Nile the whole way.

In Aswan today. Our bunch got an awesome escort in. Two motorcycle police keeping a lane on the Corniche clear for us and stopping traffic at intersections. We might have almost looked like we knew what we were doing to an untrained eye.

We ride over the dams tomorrow to catch our ferry to Wadi Halfa. A group of us have stocked up on our ferry food. Our prize possession is the massive jar of Nutella we found. All that we know about the ferry is rumour. Bed bugs? Power points? Decks full of goats and chickens? We have no real idea. The TDA guys like to keep things a bit interesting.

I am sure that there will be at least one goat. In my mind, it will be like getting on a domestic flight in the USA where people are stuffing all their junk into the overhead lockers then complaining that their lampshade / hat box / baby carrier won't fit.

Oh yeah. I have found the best McDonalds anywhere. The McDonalds here is on the Corniche el Nile. It overlooks the river, so you can watch the Feluccas go by as you eat your two meals. And an Oreo McFlurry. And a chocolate sundae. And another coke. Plus, it has the best toilet in all of Egypt.

This is the packaging left after six people finished eating. We were like some sort of primal embodiment of gluttony.

Plans

Kilometres riden: Same as before, but with a short ride in Luxor during which mild adventure took place.

The rider board has been posted with set of stages that will take us to the next rest day.

We don't really know how hard or easy these days are going to be. Rider speculation is that days that we do a reasonable distance (100km+) mean that the conditions are going to be easy. So, fingers crossed, I should have a pretty cruisy run into Dongola. We'll see what Sudan has to say about that.

The two short days are for getting on and off the ferry. These days are a bit risky EFI-wise, because if you get a flat or other mechanical in the convoy, you run a real risk of going on the truck so that the convoy can keep on moving.

That would not suck.

Day Six - Desert Camp to Luxor

Kilometres riden: 867.7

Today was by far the best day of riding so far. Straight off the bat we dropped straight down, 30km clean to Qena on the Nile. I had had a cold all night and eating hurt my chest, so I was a bit worried, but as soon as I got on the bike, I felt really strong, so I could pull pretty hard to the river.

A day like this really makes road cycling make sense. With just two or three people in the group, it is quiet, and the perfect conditions mean that we can steam along. So satisfying. I'm not sure that is is quite as satisfying as getting a technical section right on the mountain bike.

Other people weren't feeling as strong after yesterday. People had jumped on the dinner truck straight away. This was by far the fullest that I've seen the bike rack in the morning.

I thought that these guys missed out on an awesome ride. Apparently though, the guys at the back caught a bit of grief. One rider got hit by a tomato and rock. Another one got mobbed by kids.

Once we got onto the Nile, the scenery really changed. It was so green and cultivated it kind of reminded me of Queensland. That they were harvesting sugar cane probably added to that a bit. We had a couple of sketchy, out-of-the-saddle pushes to overtake tractors pulling huge loads of cane.

Even the people seemed heaps happier to see us. All the little kids and people shout out "Heeeellloooo, how are you?" and look pretty stoked when we wave back. I kind of wonder if the protracted way it is said is because they only ever hear cyclists yelling it out as they go by, and they think the Doppler effect is part of how it is said.

Now that we have advanced a level, the police have changed uniforms. There are now guys in traditional looking robes (which could be the latest Spring fashion for all I know of Egyptology) with shotguns. These guys are on every bridge heading to the West side of the Nile. I have no idea what is on the West side that is so valuable, or on the East side that is so dangerous. I am a stranger in a strange land. In the way of video games, there are still the normal police at their checkpoints and in their utes as well.

These little critters at lunch we also pretty happy to see us. Two of them ran behind our lunch truck, but as soon as they saw my vagrant beard, they turned and booked it for the hills. Lunch was right by this building. It is a topic of contention whether buildings here are left unfinished because uncompleted structures are taxed differently or what.

Lunch has been something to look forward to every day so far. We basically eat pita bread with some vegetables, a meat like tuna or baloney or leftover dinner from the night before. Even on a fast day where "lunch" is at 0830, I normally cram down a couple. I kind of feel like I could eat a pita sandwich full of just margarine and be pretty happy. Yesterday, I even ate some meatless sandwich meat and found it pretty tasty.

My hobo beard has reached a new level. It stops looking like a beard and is now a fringe of sorts, jutting away from my chin like the edge of a crab.

All good things must come to an end though. So, while we have two days rest here in Luxor, I headed into town to find a barber. The biggest difference between an Egyptian barber and the barber in Yass is that there isn't cricket on the TV here. Apart from that it is pretty similar. My do was so good, another guy went to the same place. I told the guy that I wanted bak-sheesh for my finder's fee. He found that funny enough to give me 25 piastres.

The end result.

Oh yeah. The other difference is that in Egypt, they roll cotton over your face to get all the small hairs off. So now I have Egyptian style plucked eyebrows. I am a stylish looking guy.

They watch you while you... everything.

So, the police here in Egypt are pretty different to in Australia.

Firstly, you see them everywhere. In Giza, they had a couple of covered pickup trucks at most intersections. Out here in the desert, they have police checkpoints every 50km or so. Sometimes they are stopping cars, sometimes the cars breeze straight through. But they are alway official looking structures with guard towers and a compound.

Secondly, they all have guns.

These guys are really concerned about us. Tourism is a big industry over here, and a bunch of layabouts with nothing to do except eat food and drink questionable Egyptian beer most be a real boon.

The upshot of this is that we have been seeing a lot of the police. Even before the tour started, the groups of us that went out riding in the morning would pick up a police escort. They'd block a lane of traffic so no-one hit us. On the first real day, we had that huge convoy that shut a lane of traffic and all the highway entrances and exits. This has all made our trip way easier so far, and it is always reassuring to see them go by on the road and wait for us to give them a thumbs up.

Even through a tiny town today, riding alone, I got escorted by police car until I went out through another huge checkpoint. A tiny part of me thinks that it is a bit like being run out of town - John Rambo style. Mostly though, they are really friendly guys, so it isn't a big deal.

Camp tonight is by a police / army checkpoint on the road through the Red Sea Mountains (I guess) from Safagha to Qena. There is the normal road blocks and cool steel rope that they can raise across the road to stop traffic. The normal guard towers and guys with rifles.

While I was out digging a hole, two of the border sentries stopped me from going to far from camp - pointing at their guns then out in the distance. I guess that they meant that other guys with guns might be out that way as well. Vague as this is, it is a bit unsettling.

So yeah, pretty different to Australia.