Day 10, nineth riding day
Puros to Palmwag
Right, today we pack up again and head to Palmwag (where we'd been before when coming up).
Johan's 690 had proved to behave well the previous day (only a single coolant topup required) so the 'mod' done to his bike (fan permanently on, plus coolant in the system lol) seemed to do the trick.
The day ahead was on roads, but had an 'optional' loop in it - a riverbed with, according to Hardy, quite a bit of FeshFesh!
200km to Palmwag, or 272km's if the riverbed-loop was taken.
FeshFesh hmm?
If you dunno what this is, it's kinda brownish/yellowish Talcum-powder which only
looks like sand but will
not carry anything, not even a flea on it, the poor critter will versuip.... let alone a bike which will get swallowed, with a resulting dustcloud the size of a double decker bus.
Also, but admittedly in hindsight, Hardy underplayed the beauty and challenges this loop offered a little - so why sukkel eh?
I had just replaced my airfilter with a fresh one, and the prospect of washing it tonight wasn't an attractive one to me, let alone the fact that I thought all the available filteroil was depleted already by this time (because many washed their filters regularly).
"Aag no, why bother..." I thought, so I settled in mentally for the dirthighway route.
Along the way we'd encounter a village (forgot the name of course :-[ ) in which we were to fill up with petrol, so we did.
At the petrolstation (imagine a canopy of sorts under which 2 pumps, being all there!) a young knaapie came to me holding a clean clear sandwich plastic bag in which the absolute complete KTM sidestand assembly (dual springs, bracket, bush and even the screw!), and told me that someone had lost this.
I took it, looked at it, and the cleanliness of it all rattled me a bit - I'm from Gauteng you see, my automatic scammometer on high alert now .... but here, in this remote part of the world?
The young man also did not ask or beg for money, he just gave it to me and walked off to his friends... this isn't normal now izzit?
"Whoaa, YOU, stop, wait a second, hang on a bit here!" ... and the lad came back to me.
I handed him a Nam$ 50 note and thanked him, explaining that I was sure it was someone of our group (sheez, who else hmm?

) who had lost it, and that ALL of us were super happy he found it and handed it to us..... but such deserved a reward as these were important parts we needed, so Thank You Very Much?
I swear his initial reaction was a genuine surprise, but then happiness took over - Desereved & Well Done matey, good on you! :thumleft:
Anyway, I also stopped at a bar (Yes Danie, guilty as charged, it was the very
first bar I saw!) for a beer, and a few others joined me here.
There's very little cold one's to have in this region you see, and beer I find is an excellent if not the
best rehydrate one can get,
especially when it's a
cold one - it's warm there! :thumleft: :thumleft:
Refreshed I left, and this dorpie was big enough to have some guys begging for a wheelie to be pulled, so I tried to be nice to them
Then, having left the village somewhere quite a bit further along the dirtroad I saw a lone sign "Cold Beer" ...... and, because I was riding alone and didn't see any dust ahead of me I thought it a good idea to investigate to see if some of my fellow beeraddicts had not pulled in there!
I rode back a little to check for tyre tracks..... aww, none of them!
Ah well, turn my head to check for traffic, turn around - and loose my balance and tip over! ;D
I actually laughed all by myself, after having done all that distance I eventually fall over because of a need for beer!
Dunno, happens to the worst & best alike I reckon
I carry on, skip the turnoff to the loop and arrive in Palmwag without any incident or anything especially noteworthy, hence my few photos I made this day.
And I regret that!
Back at camp I hear raving reviews about that loop - exciting, challenging, fast stuff, no pesky game and above all, only two small feshfesh places which were easily circumnavigated...... shit, I missed that!

It was there, and then!, that I decided never to listen to Hardy during this trip anymore!
Look, I get it, he's the one ultimately responsible for things that may go wrong, it's all 'his' baby so to say.... but I'm not there to miss the best bits due to avoiding a little risk, no way Jose!
Talking of which, enter Mike and Johannes

Johannes without GPS hence following Mike, and Mike with his GPS set to (again lol) a scale of 'Namibia entirely visible in the screen' :

The story goes like 'we were hammering it in this riverbed' and 'after a while we did see no tracks anymore' (this "while" was only some 70-odd kilometers.....) to 'then we set the GPS to a more sensible scale and saw that the camp was only 128 km from us' (the
entire detour was a distance of 72 km's!) ;D ;D ;D
Anyway, with luck and more luck (hey, zero skills here ma chinas

) they made their way to the camp, and they made it on vapours in the tanks, I think Mike's bike was spluttering by the time they made the petrol station
All that ends good is good though, and we had a nice eve at the camp!
The sidestand assembly turned out to be Pieter's :thumleft: