
A quick stop in Creighton:

By the time we had had a late breakfast in Matatiele it was time to hit the gravel again, in the back country between Matat and Maclear.
By now the temperature was dropping, plummeting actually. It became overcast and cold rain began to fall.
It was at this time we had the mandatory puncture, the rear on Phil’s 800. It was a sodding piece of rusty fencing wire stuck into his brand new Motoz Desert H/T. Here we all are crowded around looking like a HazMat clean up crew.


Fortunately we had the amazing Desert Fox tyre-putter-onner tool which made it easy to re-seat the stiff Motoz tyre.

I had a new Motoz Desert HT fitted to my bike and from the looks of it we were headed neither for desert nor Hard Terrain...
The next 6 hours went by in a blur of mud, clay, slipping, poor traction, icy cold, wet boots, wet gloves, a lot of colorful language and near hypothermia. There are no photos of this section, it was all about surviving.
This section of the journey would be sublime in good weather, it reminded me in some way of the backroads in Lesotho.
By the time we reached the R56 it was dark and freezing. We were soaked right through and my heated grips were giving “battery care” warnings. We had managed a paltry 35km/hr average since Matatiele.
We followed each other through the pelting cold rain down the Katkop Pass and directly to Tops for a bottle of OBS then to the Maclear KFC for supper and hot black coffee (they had run out of milk!!).
Finally we made it to our self-catering accommodation for the night - Cosy Cottages - where Andre was waiting with a fire going in a braai drum.
Our bikes got to park under cover, and we got creative to get kit dry:


With five of us spread out between two big rooms, hot showers and electric blankets, life was looking up again. We had stuck to our route and conquered the weather, right? Wrong.
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