The state of Neb’s bike cinched it for us: We needed to start heading back home in a rather direct fashion. We’d already had to ditch climbing the Borana escarpment to Timau, but Neb had organized a desirable alternative: a pilot friend finagled a place to crash at the Loisaba Conservancy’s research tents. We had our plan: Bust out of Ngurunit, ride up the Milgis Lugga to the Mathews Range for one last bit of interesting dirt, and zip up to Loisaba. Following day, slab it home. It almost went according to plan…
Above: Leaving Ngurunit was challenging with all the rush hour traffic
Above: Ndotos make a great backdrop for any XRR
Above: In the Milgis again, throttles were opening, but not as much as before. Going upstream meant we’d be hitting sandy lips from below, so we were being fairly cautious
Above: Stopping to tighten bolts or something on Neb’s bike, we parked up next to fresh elephant prints. I love knowing those creatures are out there.
Above: The Breakfast Club pose
We really were taking it easy by our own standards, but we got hit by an unexpected turn of events. I was ahead, keeping it around 80kph and was about to exit the riverbed at the big rock waterfall. I stopped to take a pic of Neb roosting his way up. Panic arrived, but Neb was nowhere to be seen. We had just stopped together, so this was odd. Looking back into the sun down the river, we couldn’t see anybody. Then, a tall silhouette appeared, like something out of the Wild West, but sans cowboy hat. Uh oh. Panic went back first and I followed. As I got closer, I could see churned up sand and knew he’d gone down hard.
Above: Toodling along, singing a song, getting knocked silly.
Neb was up and talking, so I started taking pics and shooting the shit, teasing. After being recorded by him in less than flattering ways in Kulal, I was ready to repay the favour! He pointed to his zig-zagging tracks coming along, where it hit a little sand lip and a bike length later it hit a stick in the sand. Frankly, I couldn’t see why he crashed, and he couldn’t either. He said he just started to lose control, like he’d had a blowout, but it went beyond what he could handle and he bailed. Weird as hell, but it got weirder… He started repeating himself, telling the story again from the beginning. Then he said: “I have this feeling I broke my frame…” as if that wasn’t all we’d talked about in Ngurunit last night. And when he saw it, he said: “How the heck did I do that?” Then, “I don’t remember where we slept last night.” Obviously, he’d hit his head, hard. I looked at his face then, and could see the whites of one eye was bloody. He later reported that seeing me look at his eye was the first thing he remembered after the crash.
Above: The scene… so innocuous… that little stick took him down? No way. Sand snakes maybe. Knocked his glasses clean off his schnoot.
I shot Panic a glance and he shot me one back. This wasn’t funny. Neb said for the fifth time: “Well, I’m up and I’m talking, so I’m okay.” And repeated again how the biggest bummer for him was breaking his GPS. “I love that GPS”. Then he went through the crash details again, talking about feeling like it was a blowout. I walked out to the zigzagging tracks that were a meter or less off from where Panic and I had ridden (our tracks were straight). I kicked the sand and lo and behold there was the greasiest mud you’ve ever seen hiding just under the surface. Still, it’s not like the tracks broke the surface. Anyway, this mystery would have to wait. We were now worried about Neb. Panic and I decided that I would ride ahead to a nearby camp I knew of to see if I could phone the flying doctors for advice, and he and Neb would find shade and wait. I didn’t want to blow it off and find out it was something really serious, so off I went… not so casually this time.
Above: Neb’s broken GPS after the big off
I rode 10km up the Milgis, found an exit, and climbed a scrabbly hill to the camp (beautifully situated, by the way… I’ll definitely stop there next time! They even had cold beers!) and found a chap from the Milgis Trust with a radio. Sadly, no cell reception, and his sat phone was not working. He pointed up a valley in front of us and said: Go to that mabati roofed building and look for a guy with a car, I’ll radio him. He will take you to a tree that gets cell coverage. So I did. Fun riding too, if you’re in the mood for it. I wasn’t. I found Moses (another Moses), we climbed in the 4x4, drove down the lugga, and crawled our way up the hillside in the blasting heat to the famed cell phone tree. No bars. By now, I’d been gone an hour and was anxious to check back in with the guys, so I was preparing to go back when the radio crackled to life. Neb and Panic had ridden to the camp and he was feeling better. To quote Panic: “Well, at least he’s not babbling anymore.”
Above: Some fun exploring to be had, if you’re not worried about your mate’s potential vegetative state.
To be continued...
Topic: 2019 - Big Red Pigs in Kenya (Read 3938 times)
