Day 9I had two days to get back to Joburg, which should be easily doable from Planet Baobab even including lots of dirt. So that is what I wanted to do. My usual route through Makgadikgadi was out, so instead I aimed to hit the dirt roads along the Zimbabwean border all the way down to Tuli block, where I would spend the last night of the trip in Molema campsite. Next day I would then hit as much dirt as possible crossing to SA through Zanzibar and then riding down through Belfast and Waterberg to Joburg. Pretty straightforward.
As I was out of the sticks, I took it easy in the morning, having lazy breakfast and walk-around before setting of way past 9:00 am. First 100 km was boring straight tar to Nata, so I dialed in my normal cruising speed of hundred something and went to sleep again. I woke up again about 20-30 km later, when my rear started to weave about little bit. The inteligent response of course would be stop and check what's going on, but that is not how I roll.
Instead for next 5 - 10 I accelerated and decelerated number of times to see what is going to happen. When I sped up the weave seemed to go away, while slowing down made it more pronounced. Always good at imagining the worst scenarion I was wondering if the reare wheel bearings are gone and eventually decided to stop and check. And, as anybody with two brain cells have already correctly guessed by now, it was another flat. The hard walled E09Dakar somewhat managed to stay on the rin and at higher speed almost seemed completely normal - at least in the straight line.
I pulled off the road and set-up workshop in the shade under the only tree/bush for few km around:
As soon as I pulled the tyre off I realized full extent of my idiocy. Riding those 5-10 km on flat tyre in the excess of 100 kmh completely destroyed the tube. That was stupid, but I had a spare tube, so no biggie. The real problem was that the tube ripped off the duct tape from the rim exposing the spokes. I knew I didn't have enough duct tape left to cover the rim (in my weight/space saving efforts I took only small roll of duct tape instead of the big one I used to carry before - and it turned out the small one is good to cover about 1,5 rim) and now finally fully awake realised that without covering the spokes I'm going nowhere even with new tube. The tube would get punctured withing 10 - 20 km at most by the spokes.
The only course of action left was begging, so I positioned myself on the road trying to look presentable in my Maun acquired hat (I don't think I would have any chance in that beanie Straatkat kindly posted pictures of me in) while trying to intercept very sparse traffic. Initiaully I got passed by quite a few cars - including those bling tourist 4x4s, but eventually people seemed to start like me more and few cars - locals as well as tourists - stopped. To my surprise, most of them never heard of, let alone had, a duct tape. Until then I lived under sweet misconception, that anybody in Africa venturing in a vehicle more than 10 km out of town carries duct tape and cable ties as the basic minimum survival kit. Not so, it turned out.
About two hours into manning the road block, my brain started itching. You see, I'm not very smart at planning and organising my trips - I do not prepare and tick off checklists of things to have, and despise thinking hard upfront about what I will really need or not. The way I compensate for this sloppiness is redundancy - when I do pack what I believe in the moment is the absolute minimum required for the trip, I take step back and feel proud about how much space I have left in my luggage. And then proceed to fill-up the space with another peace of almost everything I've already packed - for some reason usually packing it separately from the original items. So now I started to have this nagging feeling that I may have packed another roll of duct tape somewhere about the bike.
And indeed I found one in the pouch designated for food! Well, there went two hours of my life I'm not getting back. Relieved, I taped over the spokes, put in the spare tube and, leaving baggage behind, took the bike for quick spin to get the bead set in (it gets tiring to try to inflate tyre enough with MTB hand pump). The tube, patched by the guys in the Khwai Tented Camp, turned out to be leaking, so back to the workshop for another round of tube extraction and patching.
My patch didn't work 100% either so I have repeated the process one or two more times (the solution Bill the Bong adviced on kindly later on seems to be to use Rubber Cement instead of that vucanising solution provided in most of the current tube patching kits - unless the tube is from natural rubber which most tubes are not nowadays) and almost started to enjoy it.
I was ripped off my tyre fixing revelry at about 4:00 pm by mother of all storms approaching from west, lightnings and all. There are few thing I like less than electric storm on the flat Botswanian plains, so I assembled the bike back ctogether after the last patch, packed hastily and set-off with lightnings striking close by now towards Nata. The plan was to stop regularly to reinflate the tyre with the pump and try to find permanent solution in Nata. I've made it to Nata in one go at dusk - the tube was leaking air much slower after the last patch - and I stopped at couple of garages to buy new duct tape and tyre-fix spray, that I hopped could stop the slow puncture. It turns out they didn't carry those in this thorn ridden 4x4 country, so I set-up a watch at one of the garages looking for an unsuspecting whiteys that may carry such things. Pretty soon an elderly white couple in some kind of 4x4 on their way to Kasane stopped by, and I was able to buy from them a big can of tyre fix which I promptly sprayed into the rear tube.
With that sorted I headed already in the dark 10 km south to the Nata lodge to sleep over.
To sum up, in about 8 hours of pretty hard work I have managed to ride 100 km on tar between Planet Baobab and Nata:
By now it was clear I'm not going to make it back on time for work, so I SMSed my boss taking one more day off.
Topic: Short way around the delta (Read 19957 times)
