Tuesday 26 October 2010

Kenya, where did you say the road was?

The Kenyan Moyale crossing was by far the easiest and most pain free so far, a complete opposite to the road to follow as we would soon find out.

Delilah feeling the long hours
The 'road' consists of loads of corrugation of varying sizes, rocks, mud, sand, more rocks, some boulders …constant and seemingly never ending, well about 500km in length. It seemed my job was written from the offset, mop up crew. I actually found the road quite manageable, this is not to say that the road was not tough on the body and the bikes, I just went a lot slower than everyone else to stay behind the slowest person. First it was Andrey and Andre that fell prey to this infamous road that is to be surfaced soon, then it was Jan, an ex-South African we met in Moyale on the Ethiopian side. Jan's husband, Paul and Australian was also with us on the road to Isiolo. After a few more falls, and being hit by a stone on the body, Jan decided to put her bike on a truck all the way to Isiolo while we carried on. Pete in his Land Rover, had completely left us in his dust and we hadn’t seem him the rest of the day. It was only Delilah, Andre, Andrey (Russian), Paul (Aussie) and I left to try and reach Marsabit in one piece. The scenery was not particularly outstanding, which helped as any lack of concentration on this 10 hour section of road meant you would be lying flat on the ground seconds later. This did happen to me once and twice to Delilah, luckily with no injuries.

We eventually reached a point about 40km before Marsabit, around 210km into the road and decided to stay over in a small village as the sun was setting. The “hotel” consisted of just a room with 3 beds, no shower, toilet or running water. Delilah and I decided to sleep outside in our tent, with the rest occupying the beds in the room. Paul (the Aussie), realized he had completely lost his bash plate on his bike … completely missing, including his toolbox on the front ... didn’t even notice he had lost it ... he thought he just went over a big rock

The next morning, we left for Marsabit …same story, lots of rocks and sand, then we started to get some really good clay/gravel road and all seemed like it would end as well as the previous day started. This lasted for about 5 minutes till it got really misty, you couldn’t even see 10m in front of you, not the worst thing in the world as the bikesa were not receiving the pounding they were getting previously.

On reaching Marsabit, we managed to find Pete, had some breakfast and then discussed our options. The final mutual decision was that it would be better for us to put the bikes on a truck for the next leg of the journey to Isiolo as they were just taking too much of a pounding and the £70 it cost per bike on the truck would be far less than the amount needed to repair the bikes later if we carried on with the road. While loading the bikes, we told Pete to carry on ahead as the trucks were quite a bit faster than the other vehicles on the previous leg.
Biker (forgot the name, sorry) from SA, heading north to Cairo
The journey on the truck was on its own an adventure, even though they were tied down 'securely' at first and then securely by ourselves afterwards, they still managed to sustain a bit of damage. Tree of the bikes had bent side stands and one bike had a badly scratched paintwork … nightmare ride. At times it felt like adventure cattle rustling in the back of a moving vehicle and the bumps in the back of the truck seemed a lot worse than what I had felt on the bikes the day before. We eventually reached Isiolo well after sunset .. probably around midnight actually .. off loaded the bikes, had a steak for dinner and camped the night in a hotels parking while the others had a room, which was good as we really needed a descent shower after the days events.

The only scenic thing on the road. Really beautiful

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