Day 5
(pictures in this episode can be viewed at better resolution here:
https://flic.kr/s/aHsmdTcZH3)
Getting out of the tent in the morning still in the dark, I half hoped that bush fairies or Himba AA did a courtesy fix for me, but no luck. I checked the tube and had my doubts straight away as the patch didn’t seem to be set strongly enough. I blew the tube up and the corners started lifting, so I just ripped it off.
I checked my sat phone and found message from Justin with detail patching instructions - I have sent him a message night before asking for advice. And sure enough, my downfall was not letting the glue dry enough before applying the patch.
So I patched the tube for the third time, this time making sure that glue was properly dry before applying the patch. I gave it a lot of time to set and then installed it in the tyre, and everything seemed to be good. So I broke down the camp, packed everything, geared up and set-off.
By now it was way past 10 o’clock. I was tempted to try find the riverbed shortcut one more time, but eventually decided against it. I was already blowing through our only planned rest day, and we still had good 7 - 8 days of pretty intense riding to do after the 4 we have just done. So I opted to rather take it easy and try to conserve - ideally even recover - some of the energy back. I turned back and back-tracked 20 or so km back to the junction where I parted with the other two, and followed D3701 all the way to Kunene.
Once there I decided to go for a bit or refreshment, turned right and headed down to Kunene river lodge about 5 km away for late breakfast/early lunch. I chilled at their wooden veranda overlooking Kunene river for well over 2 hours enjoying couple of tuna sandwiches, about 10 cokes and worst of all - wifi.
I had a little chat with the new lodge manager. It got slightly awkward, once he exclaimed with a bit of pride that he is a hunter first and foremost. I am no tree hugger, eat meat and have no problem with hunting for food, or to prevent overgrazing or some such, and obviously for self defence but I cannot wrap my head around trophy hunting. Unless it is fundamentally just for the two reasons I mentioned in the las sentence- which it probably mostly is so admittedly I do not have much leg to stand on here.
But for better or worse I do feel strong sympathy towards the desert elephants and other animals living this side of the world and do not like the idea of people shooting them basically for fun. I am not saying he did that, but I got suspicious when he started to question whether there is such a thing as ‘desert’ elephants, claiming they are all just ‘Etosha’ elephants, whatever that is. Now, I’m no biologist, and if you put a desert elephant next to a bushpig I may not be able tell the difference, but I have seen firsthand the differences in behaviour of elephants in Kaokoland and Damaraland riverbeds, and for the bushes of Botswana. Simple pass of a herd of elephant through bush in Botswana makes it look like Vietnamese jungle after an agent orange attack - more or less all trees and bushes destroyed. While here in the desert elephants take great care not to break a branch, but rather nibble at the leaves grooming them into a semblance of English garden, only nicer. They clearly understand that if they destroy the vegetation, they are toast. I’m not sure ‘non-desert’ elephants get that and that local riverbed vegetation would survive few passes of those. And there are so few of elephants adapted to this environment that I just don’t see a point in shooting them.
Now, I’m not implicating the manager in anything - he seemed decent enough person, and as far as I know he never shot anything around there. I’m just showing what a precious snowflake I am and how easily I get triggered by what may have been perfectly innocent comment (that and the fact that one or two elephants MaxThePanda & the gang encountered there got shot a week or so later). End of the sermon (fuck, and I call Justin a hippie…).
Here are few pictures from the lodge (none of them actually showing the lodge):
First pink dog I have ever seen. Manager's son found him on the side of the road already colored and adopted him. Cannot wrap my head around why would people color dogs, but the boy told me that Americans do that quite often. I doubt Americans brought their pink dog for safari though...
Eventually, way past 1pm it was time to rein in the gastro dude and hesitant animal rights activist and move on - otherwise I wouldn’t make Epupa before dark. So I had the last Coke for the road, geared up and set-off.
I have an ambivalent relationship to the dirt road between Swarbooisdrif and Epupa. On the one hand as far as Namibian dirt highways go, this is one of the best, with plenty of steep uphills and downhills and turns keeping one focused and entertained, and running through scenery of bizarrely colourful mountains to the south and palm trees flanked Kunene river to the north. But I still remember how much more fun it was to navigate the old double track alternating between the mountains and the river. 90 km to Epupa now takes 1.5 - 2 hours of ride/drive, while at that time only 4x4s applied and they took between 8 - 12 hours to get there (bikes about 3.5 - 4 hours on appropriate bike, on big SUV - if the rider was brave/stupid enough, more). Just for the old time sake, here is my video of riding the old track sometimes in 2012:
[youtube]https://youtu.be/8A91M4uqiqY[/youtube]
And here are few pictures I took this time:
Zebra hills from the other side:
When I came to that river I wanted to take through the zebra mountains day before (i.e. where I would have exited the mountains should I succeed), I took it up for km or two to see what it is like. It looked very doable running through a wide valley in the mountains, and there were even tracks of 4x4 or two who came to play there. Next time I'll make sure I have a time to investigate it properly:
I arrived at Epupa Falls after 3pm and found the other two holed up in their chalet in the Epupa Falls lodge all sweaty in their undies and fast asleep. When I woke them up they made up some bullshit story about how they went for a walk looking for crocodiles in the morning, but I would bet they didn’t get their asses out of the bed since breakfast. They didn’t even bother to go and have a look at main attraction - Epupa Falls, which their chalet sat right on top of.
After I scolded them they grudgingly agreed to go and have a look before it gets too dark and I went to settle into the next chalet. When I laid down for a bit of my own shuteye, I’ve heard two 500s come to life. Granted, it is about 100 meters to the falls going around the next campsite and they were being under strict recovery regime, but I still - I found that a bit lazy.
I didn’t manage to fall asleep and once they came back I walked to the falls myself. There was plenty of daylight left, but the sun was already low and the falls were in shade. Not ideal for pictures, but here is what I got:
When I came back I went to fetch something from the bike when I heard sudden ‘pfffft’ and the rear went flat. Oh, for fuck’s sake - not this shit again! I wasn’t even pissed off because the tyre went flat, but because I believed that it was because of my sloppy patchwork.
It was too close to dinner, so I went to eat first and after dinner Justin and Bertie helped me to take the punctured tube out, and put Tubeliss back, this time with Justin’s spare inner Tubeliss tube. I watched closely how Justin installed the thing in and it looked easy and safe enough when done in slow methodical way. The only problem was that we just couldn’t get the tyre over the rim afterwards using whatever force we could muster. We were baffled, until Bertie, who spectated the whole proceeding noticed the problem: we have started with the tyre at the rimlock side and by the time we got to the other side, it was too tight as we couldn’t push the tyre into the center of the wheel at the rimlock’s side to ease the tension on the other side. So we swapped, starting at the opposite side, and everything went on smoothly. The thing that cheered me up - my patch from the morning was all good and well, it didn't off as I suspected. I just got another puncture.
With that sorted, we hit the beds hoping for a first early start next morning.
