Aaaand sometimes you’re less lucky! First thing in the morning, not 10km out of Magadi, I saw my ass. Those soda pans are bloody tricky, I tell you. Last time I came through here, the place was 10” thick with sloppy mud the consistency of duck shit (into which I fell). Now it looked dry, like white pavement, and given just yesterday I was riding my Pig full blast on similar stuff, so I was not expecting to go down like a sack of potatoes on a totally innocuous, perfectly flat section. Turns out sometimes that stuff, when packed, keeps a wee layer of slime just on the surface that is deadly as oil on tarmac.
Above: It was a looong slide… I wasn’t going fast, but I wasn’t going slow. My hip now looks like a handful of strawberries and a bunch of grapes exploded just under the skin. Otherwise, none the worse for wear.
Above: Lake Magadi in the morning
We were riding into the early sun, through an extinct volcano, out of the deepest part of the Rift Valley on a track nobody but a handful of boda boda guys ride. Brilliant way to start the day! In the beninging, the track is very rocky and slow, but once you pass through the volcano and rise up a ways, it’s fast and furious all the way to Torosei where we stopped for a quick Coke.
Above: Looking up through the eroded remains of the volcano… our track goest through there somewhere
Above: Wry enjoying the early rock riding
Above: Again, luck found us surrounded by game. This time, a big group of ostrich.
From Torosei, it was about 20 km of quick, lovely dirt roads, the kind the Pig just eats alive. Wry kept calling it the Big Red Rock Eater, and I couldn’t argue. Especially at speed, the XR650R is a dream over rough terrain. Eventually, the road we were on disappeared into a well-worn cattle path leading to a water point. It’s a great ride, but this time around it was positively jam packed with cattle and donkeys on the move. We pushed through the tides of hides and popped out the other side in time for an early lunch in the shade of a tree.
Above: Wry starts down the cattle/donkey superhighway
Above: With or without the helmet, Wry does resemble domestic livestock
Above: Shade-tree lunch and an odd pile of burned bones… I prefer not to question the motive
After lunch came what was undoubtedly the highlight of the ride: thirty kilometers of hard-packed riverbed winding all the way past Oldonyo Orok. I’ve been in this riverbed with Panic before, and last time I was there with Frogger, it was a running river so we had to give it a miss. This time, the sand was perfect for riding. Not churned up, it was hard enough to ride quickly on but soft enough to make drifting a breeze. We flew for ages until we reached a rocky section that up to now I had not explored beyond. This time, we rode around it and dropped back in for more. It’s fantastic, beautiful, hard, fast… awesome.
Above: Wry’s goofy expression says it all: This is awesome!
Above: Sometimes open, sometimes tight, the riverbed was always a delight.
Above: As we continued, Oldonyo Oruk grew nearer. The riverbed goes all the way around its northern edge to the tarmac road and is rideable (almost) all the way.
Above: In some sections, the sand gave way to odd volcanic rock formations. With a little patience, we could ride through it, which in itself was fun, and we always found sand on the other side.
Above: Some of the rocky segments left deep holes on the other side… take care!
Above: Just before we climbed out of the riverbed, we came upon a couple of Masai guys. One had a hunk of butchered goat in a plastic bag and the other had bone marrow in a small bucket. They’d come from donating some of their goats to the local church: Read that closely: they’d given their animals away to the church, not vice-versa.
Knackered from the riverbed, but riding a high, we climbed out and headed the 10km to Namanga. It would be the first tar we’d seen so far, and we’d done over 300 km total. Namanga, like most border towns, is a dump, but we wanted a mid-day beer so we suffered through the annoyance of the local madman (John), the sound of a grinder next door, and the smell of raw meat and enjoyed our beer dammit. The next bit would drop us into another world.
Above: Scenes from Namanga: John, the madman; A high kwality KTM, and lunch if you want it (to be honest, it looked really good… If we could have gotten John to pose in the middle of the butcher shop, it would have looked a lot like a
Lucian Freud painting.
To be continued...
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