YEP 12 Africa Expedition – Day 14

Written by Nadja and Tanguy

The morning started off nice and cold. It was nice finally sleeping in real beds. We had some breakfast, washed our bikes in the river and started biking. Today was supposed to be a bit shorter route, but we decided to extend it from 45 to 67 km. It seemed like we will be lucky and have some nice weather today, sunny and warm. We biked for 25 km going up one of the two hills we had in front of us today. On top of the hill we left our bikes and went hiking for a couple of hours. Our hiking destination was Bushmans Arch on top of one of the hills around. Apparently Bushmans sacrificed animals under that arch hoping to have luck in the hunt. 

We climbed up and near the top we lost the track we were going on so just started climbing random rocks trying to get to the arch. It was a great experience climbing up because the view was just amazing. We were surrounded by a lot of plants and green mountains which was a nice change from desert. After this nice walk with the beautiful landscape we came back to the place were we left our bikes. We had another  40 km to ride before we could reach the camp site and it was already 15 past 3 in the afternoon. We had to hurry up because the darkness is coming very quickly, and then it gets very cold. So we jumped on our bike and started biking with the energy that we had left. We biked amongst beautiful landscape through small villages. Biking on the sand made it more difficult because we couldn’t bike without falling down. Then came a big downhill which wasn’t easy because there were a lot of rocks that could easily make you fall down. After that big downhill came a huge uphill with took us a long time to bike.

Only Nora managed to make the all climb without getting off her bike. Arriving to the top of the mountain we couldn’t even stand on our bike, but we managed to find a little bit of power that we had left to ride the 5 last kilometres to reach the camp site. Finally we made it to the camp and it was already getting dark. We could eat some nice warm 'Trek'n Eat next  to camp fire, before we could sleep in our tents, that were still wet from the last night.