jonnywhite

Believe it or not, riders are getting bored. Even though we’re in a new country nearly every week these days, the routine stays the same: up at 5, oatmeal, on the bike for 7 hours, sit around at camp, mass dinner, bed. We joke about it as just another day at the office. And the office, for the last 2 countries, has been flat flat flat. Entertainment of late has consisted of watching Tom change continuously popping tires, ordering full legs of strange animals at restaurants for dinner (Oryx, Springbok, Zebra), and hoisting a sleeping frenchman’s bike up a flagpole. I also raced a few days lately and managed to get my stage win, so with that monkey off my shoulder I’m going to take it pretty easy from here to Cape Town.

The stage I managed to win (actually tied for 1st with 3 other riders) was made interesting by a rider notorious for his ‘race tactics’. In bike racing, drafting behind other bikes is incredibly important to conserve energy, but if the whole pack always tries to draft each other they don’t get anywhere. Instead, each rider ‘pulls’ (leads) the pack for a few minutes at a time and then switches to the back to draft. This racer, a.k.a. everyone’s nemesis, tried to drop me by taking the pack on a sprint after the first three times I pulled (which is generally when your legs are the most tired and therefore a sprint might leave you behind). When that didn’t work, he told me I wasn’t pulling fast enough and that our mutual friend was going to lose the stage if I didn’t put my head down and give it all I had on my next pull (which would make me really tired and easy to drop). I told him to eat crap, which was phrased more politely as: “If I’m not going fast enough you should try to drop me”. We rolled in together with the two others in the pack in an agreed-upon tie, we do have to live together after all.

After the race, of course, we’re all friends, or at least bitter enemies pretending to be friends for the sake of peace. As I haven’t been racing much and am generally easy going you can take this example x 1000 to characterize the relationships between some of the other racers. We occasionally catch them sneaking around at night with daggers. This trip could really be made into a TV show, something like: “Tour de France meets Survivor meets Lost meets Desperate Housewives…”.

In other news, we sighted some wild dogs, which are an endangered species, last week. Given their rarity, one of our leisure riders in his 60’s, Jimmy, stopped to snap a few pictures. The dogs decided to make it interesting for him by attacking so Jim swung his bike at them to fend them off and took off in the direction he had come, to roll with the wind. Other riders behind him wondered why he was going twice his normal speed in the wrong direction, but strange things happen in Africa.

While these events break the routine and give us something to talk about, many of us (original riders) are finding, to our surprise, that we have used up all of the ‘awe’ that we had stored for use over the next 10 years. We have seen so much in such a short span that now when we see an elephant, a fist-sized cricket, a family of baboons, or a spectacular vista, we just smile, shrug, and roll on. It’s a little sad perhaps but it’s also a sign that things are wrapping up on time. We’re still having a blast but we reminisce about the start and talk about the end much more often. Two weeks to go in the trip of a lifetime. A measly 2,000km and it’s all over – it’s the same bittersweet feeling as a graduation or a friend moving away. All we can do is make the most of it.