Sunday, March 6, 2011

The road less travelled.

Northern Kenya here we are.  Who comes to visit Northern Kenya?  No one.  Who lives in Northern Kenya?  Shockingly, a continuous sighting of individuals.  It's another desert here.  Nothing but lava rocks and sand into the horizon.  How these people live, I am still unsure.
We are in Marsabit now, possibly the most far out place we've been on tour.  It feels like an old country western town from another decade.  With our first day of cloud cover, with our first storm brewing in the air, the light a little softer than usual, an ominous feeling looms overhead.

Before I go on with life and times in Kenya, I must add one details to the last post, the most unbelievable difference about life in Ethiopia, so huge I don't know how I missed it, so huge you might not even believe it; Ethiopia does not operate on the same calendar nor clock as the rest of the world.  The year is currently 2003, don't ask me what month it is, but if it's noon your time then it's currently 6:00 Ethiopia time.  How awesome is that.  Eff you real world!  We work on our own time.  yes.

Life on tour since Addis.  One rider came out with the most brilliant line summing up life what life is like over here "The days are long, but the weeks fly by".  Nothing could be more true.  For ease of piling the weeks of tour highlights out to the world, I'll fall back on another trusted list.
A list of 'Things' that have happened since Addis Ababa:

So things go missing in Ethiopia.  There are always locals about circling closer into camp, waiting to see what they can walk off with.  Fair enough.  A few rider meetings back, we informed the group that 11 whole camp chairs have managed to walk off without any of us noticing.  11 chairs!  It's not like you can slip that under a jacket.  Unfortunate, not the end of the world, and really actually kind of funny in my books.

Funny until the next unveiling of theft a few days later.  2 pairs of cycling shoes....!  Cycling shoes might be one of the more central items to this here trip.  That was a bit of a kicker.  Still working on a solution there.

We managed to break the handle off of the door on the inside of our lunch truck/staff truck/ med clinic.  Ooops.

4 riders have left the tour for various periods of time, for various medical reasons, all headed off in various directions on and off the continent.

The front windscreen of the land cruiser is still intact yet completely smashed.  Not fallen in but does have a rather large spider of fractures splintering out from one corner.  For the full story on that you'll just have to wait until I get back.

About 100 new roads have been built since the last time the tour took this route, and as a result, our directions are not too too accurate.  Lead vehicles sprinting ahead trying to find the right route, flagging madly, hoping the kids don't steel the flagging tape and oh I can't tell you how much the riders loooooove biking 100+km's and then coming into town and being totally confused by the difference between the notes we gave them and the reality on the road.

The last few days we've been on a 'highway' that makes logging roads back home look like a freeway.  Little rough to say the least.  So rough that the two bench seats inside our poor lunch/staff/medic truck actually collapsed into the storage bins below.

Had an epic day crossing the boarder into Kenya.  Always a busy day at the best of times, paired with one staff needing a run to the local  hospital, a few blood tests later, and he's going home.  Hey, you haven't really been to the tropics unless you've picked up a tropical disease right?   This could be a blog posting in itself, but I'll just say that our man is fine and in good hands now.

As we've headed out of the hills and back into the desert, we've rejoined the ongoing hum of stress known as where the hell are we going to fill the water truck next?  Our first town out of Addis had it's water cut off that day, and so it began, and so it remains.  Come on rain clouds, we could use it.

With rain, come crops, with crops comes produce.  With our lack of rain, our ease of collecting enough food for our ravaged machine of riders has also followed a similar path teetering between stress and success.

 A few nights back we camped in the bed of a massive valley.  Unbelievably beautiful.  Steep dirt roads leading out in all directions.  One of our tankers of a support trucks, got stuck on the first up hill out of camp, then a flat tire, then of coarse ran out of diesel.  They made it.  Steve the magic mechanic.  That was just one day on the rough road though.  There have been air bags, shocks, flats, springs, all sorts of giant pieces of the toughest possible overland machinery that have crumbled like dust as we head further and further from civilization.

On that, cell coverage is nill.  Sat phone's it is, with 3 phones between 12 staff to coordinate the solutions to all the fun and games on tour.

This seems like it should be enough events for a two week stretch but I really do feel like I'm missing some big ones.  If you're wondering how the staff are doing after all of this.  Have a read of my latest TDA post.
'And The Staff Are OK'
http://www.tourdafrique.com/blog/tourdafrique

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