An hour later, we’re on the road again. Light is fading fast, so we fuck off down the dirt roads towards Opuwo.
My bike is doing 130km/h and handling great. No fishtailing like before. Totally stable.
I have no idea why, but I’m thrilled.
And then it hits me.
The UHD tube.
That motherfucker must have put the rear wheel so out of balance that it was upsetting the entire bike.
Now, with the stock tube back in, the wheel was balanced again (sort of) and the bike was handling normally.
I grinned in my helmet having finally solved half of the puzzle. Then I remembered that I still have a UHD tube in the front tire. Perhaps that’s what is messing up the front end.
But that’s a story for later…
We arrive in Opuwo, find a place to stay, shower and head out to find food. Opuwo is a grungy town with a lot of character. Himba people, Herero people, White, Black – all co-habituating. I really want to return here on my next trip.
We arrive at the only steakhouse in town.
Shortly after ordering, the 2 guys at the next table come over to talk with us about our bikes.“
Are you guys going to ride Van Zyl’s Pass?” they ask.
“For sure we are…”
“We’re heading there tomorrow… to Otjitanda.” they say.
Turns out that these two guys (Johan and Johan) are missionaries and also bikers. They are heading out to a remote village along the route we’ll be taking 2 days from now.
In that area, it’s hard to know if you’ll ever find fuel, and this is a problem that we’ve been trying to mitigate from the beginning.
Then Marc has a genius idea!
“Johan, do you think you could take some fuel to the school for us and leave it there?”
Johan thinks for a while and agrees. “But you have to give me the fuel now. We leave at 5am tomorrow.” he says.
I jump up from the table and run to the petrol station and buy three 5-liter bottles of water.
Then, I empty all the water out of them so that I can use them for fuel.
The looks I got were incredulous.
“What? It’s just water!” I think to myself.
Finally, it dawns on me that I am in a drought ridden land dumping 15 liters of perfectly good drinking water down the drain. Whoops.
White tourist moment.
I fill the bottles with fuel as Johan pulls up at the petrol station. He takes the bottles and loads them into his truck.
It’s a miracle. I praise the fuel gods for bestowing their blessings upon us and apologize to the tire gods for using their name in vain… Because if it were not for the 5 hours of fixing punctures, we would not have met Johan and Johan.
Johan gives us a map to find the school.
Amen.
We sleep like babies in our air-conditioned room. All the puncture repairs have bonded us, we’re safe, we have fuel, we have bikes, we have beer, we have full bellies…
What more could we want for?
Night night.
Topic: Virgin Sand In Kaokoland (a post lockdown adventure) (Read 11119 times)
