Repurcussions (Day 25)
By admin. Filed in Sudan |
Everything that we do has consequences, and today was filled with consequences. It’s important to understand just how hectic our mornings tend to be, taking down our tents, eating breakfast, loading the trucks (a very trying process), filling our water bottles, applying sunscreen, etc. The slower riders (like me) try to leave as early as possible to have the highest chance of completely finishing the day.
When everybody arrives in camp after dark, the nightly rider meeting gets pushed forward to the morning, taking up precious minutes we just don’t have. This morning, I also had to track down my bike again, as it had been removed from the truck. Next, I had to repair a flat tire that was fine when I last saw it. The bikes were treated horribly on the back of the police vehicles. My bike computer was also broken, and I tried fixing it to no avail. The lockout valve on the forks was damaged as well, but still functional. In the frenzy getting out of camp, I forgot to scan out, so 20 minutes down the road I had to turn around and come back to camp to sign out. An extra 40 minutes of riding I didn’t need today.
I eventually caught up with some other riders in the morning so I was no longer the last one of the day. At a town, I made a coke stop, but forgot to top off my water. The TDA truck passed me. I tried to ask for water, but the staff was too busy trying to tell me the truck was too full to take on any other riders. They had just told another that was too sick to go on that he had to find his own ride to camp (that cost 150 pounds). All our support vehicles were filled to capacity today, another repercussion of the Dinder experiment.
Along the road, I was getting hot and kept asking locals for water. A couple riders were able to give me some. Along the way the road turned to worse-than-Dinder conditions and I caught up with Andra who was also low on water. We got some from a couple of guys from Darfur. I was thankful, but didn’t fully trust the quality, as it was poured from a motor oil jug and tasted a bit like camel hair, cigarette ashes, dirt, and oil all at once.
We got some more water down the road from another group of huts. While it was also poured from a motor oil jug, it was clear and tasted fine. A little further down the road, we found more huts with friendly locals that gave us sweet tea and shade. We chatted with them for a while. I had been suffering from mild heat exhaustion. Several times I thought I was too hot to continue, but it was becoming clear that no support vehicles were coming. In fact, there were no vehicles at all on this road—not even the one the sick rider had taken. At least the road conditions had improved greatly.
We arrived at the lunch stop at 3:45PM, the latest lunch arrival so far. The sweep was already there. She had taken a short cut through another village, the same route that the sick rider must have taken. Several riders at the stop were tired of waiting, and expressed their frustration of being there so long. I felt a bit bad about riding so slowly, but the support vehicles are usually there for those sorts of situations when riders can’t continue.
Other riders were experiencing repercussions of their own from the Dinder Experiment. Three male riders were peeing blood. Another was passing it in his stool. Another rider had heat stroke, and many riders were too sick or tired to continue throughout the day. Out of nearly 60 riders, only about 15 are still EFI, and we are still in the 2nd country of the tour.