Today i felt like a full on rally driver. The only thing to make it more official was if dad had pace notes calling the corners out to me. Thus far, my favourite day of driving. Namibia has brought everything that was promised and then some! 600k’s today and about 500 of it was on gravel, and it was the most beautiful gravel roads ever: wide, smooth, no potholes. On tarmac we sit at about 107-108kph and on the straights the roads were good enough to do the same speeds. It was just heaven. And over the entire day we only dropped about 17 minutes over 6 time controls, and we even cleared a few of the sections. I was so chuffed about the results. And now we have jumped up to 31st position! Movers and shackers over here, watch out leader board! haha.
We were also about 1minute before our schedule time to leave after a lunchtime stop, and we see that one of our rear tyres was de-laminating and falling apart. And because we don’t have any spare wheels, the only thing to do was change the tyre, with levers and lube. We mananged to change a tyre and tube and be back on the ground in no more than 12 minutes, then a mad dash to the next time control (luckily they moved that time back 8 minutes) to be 1 minute early. So in all, changed a tubed tyre with no loss time! Bonus!
The Namibian’s take their stop signs at police checkpoints very seriously as well. We got hardcore yelled at because we didn’t stop on the line and started rolling forward. It looked like he waved us through, but no, eveidently he didn’t. And then proceded to tell us that a stop sign actually means STOP instead of ‘please, keep rolling through.’
Heaps more warthogs on the roads today, we were flogging it up a hill, dad was looking behind us taking a picture of the scenery and then BAM, a family of warthogs dashes out of the scrubs, sees us and thinks we are a giant predator and then scuttled away again. All in the blink of an eye.
James