Day 1 Continued:
I put together the video of the first section of the special stage. Be sure to put up the quality on the video and enjoy
[flash=800,600]https://www.youtube.com/v/eQAt9s0RINA[/flash]
As you can see from the video, the sand was especially sandy. The front runners were kind enough to churn things up nicely for us noobs starting at the back. Just in case we thought it's not challenging enough or something
Now usually I'm "ok" with sand riding or I wouldn't even have thought of signing up for this, but this is not the same. Riverbed sand is almost like a really fine sand, with really fine rocks in between. Basically it feels like you have absolutely no control over where the bike is going. I thought it was scary shit.
At the beginning of the video you can see an old dam wall. It's one of numerous obstacles we had to navigate around. The worst by far were the gigantic holes dug into the riverbed. You could literally put a car into some of those holes. There's a few visible on the video.
Actually... The worst part was somewhere halfway I managed to fall into one... I absolutely didn't see it coming and when I tried to dodge it at the last minute the back wheel just slipped on in... I decided to abandon ship though, as falling into the hole didn't look fun. "Smooth Minxy, smooth." I managed to wave down a guy to come help me, I would like to thank him again, but I really can't remember who it was. GeeS also stopped and we quickly pushed the bike out. That was just too close for comfort.
The rest of the riverbed was basically more of this hell with a handful of slow fails from my side around some of the twisty sections. If things go well and I get to do Amageza again, riverbed riding is something I'll definitely need to work on.
We stopped briefly with riders Adie and son as well as Rikus Botha who had lost his clutch cover. He did the most amazing fix ever, cutting the plastic screen from the F2R roadbook holder to build a cover for his clutch, finishing it off with duct tape. I couldn't believe the Macgyver fix he just improvised and the best part is it worked!
Anyway, for me this was the longest 40km of my life... When we finally managed to get out of there I nearly cried in my helmet I was so happy. Little did I know there was a second river bed in store for us later in the stage.
