Round and round we go

Day Total: No Riding
Song of the Day: The Scorpions – Rock Me Like a Hurricane

I went to bed last night in rough shape – approximately 2 out of 5 on the body/attitude index – with mild concern that the efforts of the previous days may have had more lasting impact. Dinner was a battle, notable as the first meal of the trip in which I could not finish all of the food placed before me. I’m guessing dehydration was the culprit, but fortunately I awoke this morning with a raging appetite. I also awoke with significant soreness in my hands as a result of the pounding they took against the bars of my bike over the previous 3 days. This pain is not trivial and it prevented me from properly holding my utensils at breakfast or squeezing water from my bike bottle. I am hopeful that it is simply muscle fatigue that will fade with time.

Some rest days are a real treat: Luxor, Khartoum, Addis Ababa. These cities presented a multitude of interesting foods, sights, smells, conveniences, and general availability of everything one needs to prepare for the upcoming riding days. Other towns present what roughly equates to another day of the work, albeit not on the bike. The small town of Marsabit fell in the latter category and as its primary challenge offered up finding reasonable food to eat. In its defense, what it lacked in restaurants it made up for in availability of “luxury” items such as Cadbury chocolate, mediocre ice cream, and other assorted snacks.

The rest day routine in towns with limited ammenities goes like this: wake up and eat a lot (3 omelet minimum), solve the laundry problem by doing a quick build-versus-buy calculation, eat, find a place to upload the blog posts, eat, eat, eat. In the end it rarely goes according to plan and today was no exception. We ate a lot, the blog got updated, the laundry was dropped off but was not ready for a LONG time. I ate more while waiting for the laundry, stocked up on chocolate/chips, and talked to the locals. Once the laundry was ready we conducted fierce negotiations with a man with a car to drive us back to the diocese campus where we were camping.

A bit dry, but to be honest, there wasn’t much going on there. The campsite was pretty tame as everyone licked their wounds from the previous 7 riding days. Another 5 riding days will deliver us into Nairobi and from there it’s only 2 riding days to the halfway mark of the tour. I am still trying to digest the last 2 days riding – it was that difficult – to make some sense out of the general apathy towards riding my bike that I feel at this moment. A good night’s rest will surely make some sense of all of this…