K
Kamanya
Guest
Previous part 2:
http://www.austouring.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=183
It was a little funny at times as there are some upgrades if you could call them that, where the track has been improved and rerouted. But in the dark and not bothering to stop and work out which one was the better we often rode through the older and rougher choice that only became apparent once you were committed.
Around the last bend and I could at last see lights of the camps. There are about 5 or 6 camps in Epupa. Before the trip I had phoned and booked us into the Epupa River Lodge Camp. Complete fluke saw us ride into that Camp first. And who should we meet straight off was Mark and Cathy!
The elation of having conquered the road and then running into them was brilliant. Mark immediately thrust an ice cold beer into my hand and did the same to Craig.
It was a special moment for Craig and I, well worth the sweat and toil. What a day! It was a great feeling of accomplishment.
Fritz the camp owner and manager showed us where to camp and it didn’t take us long to get stuck into what his bar had to offer and then off to Mark and his new found Friends’ camp fire for a night of story telling and re-riding the route.
Craig got caught telling some story and was blatantly jacking up the figures and the size of the hills a bit. I am sure I must have been doing the same but I had the camera!
Adrenaline has worn off and the beer is kicking in.
Total for the day 97.53k’s
Day 7
Rest day. Did little more than Sleep and swim and watch the locals play an ancient game that resembles backgammon.
There were other bikers there, a pair who had travelled the same track we did the previous day. One guy was on a BMW f650 dakar and the other was on BMW 80R. The 650 guy never came off once but the other guy said he stopped counting after 30, he was exhausted. His bike had blown it’s fork seals and his clutch was starting to slip. Kudos to him for completing the trip. They had a buddy that had an 1150GS who had wisely elected to take the easier route.
There were 4 other BMW GS’s from Austria, 3 guys and a girl. Two adventures an 1150 and an1100, they also took the easy route and one thing that they enviously had was bike to bike radio systems. Something we have decided would be a good safety factor on a trip like this. They had flown their bikes in for a Namibian adventure and were flying out in a few days time.
Epupa falls is an amazing set of falls, and to think that there was a plan to dam the river at this point. It would have meant that the falls would have been underwater and lost forever. Dams are not the easy answer for power and water needs. Apart from a host of ecological disasters the local tribes would have had their culture destroyed with the dam.
What is interesting is that unusually for a major water fall, the main falls run in line or parallel with the flow of the river, so the river falls into a long slot. There is a small amount of flow that goes around the falls and creates great Jacuzzi type pools that are wonderful to laze in.
That night was a big decision night. I wanted to do a section of the North of Namibia that goes through a famously bad stretch of road called Van Zyl’s Pass. It is so bad that there is strong advice only to tackle it from one direction and that makes the pass a mostly downwards affair. The reason is that going up the pass causes way more erosion and if you had to meet someone on the trail it would be next to impossible to turn around or get to a spot where you can pass each other.
I was very confident that if we had done the Epupa river road, the pass road was not any worse, possibly easier. Plus on a bike going down is way easier than going up. Having spoken to close friends who had driven the route I was absolutely certain that it was doable.
The only hitch is that fuel is an issue; you need a range of 450k’s minimum to safely do it. Now that we had caught Mark and Cathy and Fritz did have the 50 litres that I had ordered by phone. Our bikes took about 17 litres to get back to full each and 20 litres could go on Marks roof, more than enough to see us through.
The only issue was Craig, he had had his full of adventure and was not so keen. It is understandable as his introduction to off road riding had been a very steep curve. I let the issue wait till morning and then he could decide, I’d go with whatever he chose. So there was a fair bit of Rum and whiskey to throw back and hopefully lubricate his decision making processes.
Total for the day 0k’s
Day 7
Early morning, 10 meters from my tent. The falls are rumbling just to the left. Jeez! Life’s good!
Looking upstream
"So Craig what’s it going to be?"
He took a big sigh and said, "Ok, let’s just get this Van Zyl’s thing over with, but after that, we are doing it my way. I just want a cruizy trip after that"
Cool! Here we go! The Rum and Whiskey lubricant must have worked after all!
The 60k’s to Okangwati are easy and fast, it is from there that you either turn left for the easier route or carry on straight to Van Zyl’s. Fritz had said that there was a touring group of 16 bikers from France I think that apparently had ridden up van Zyl’s on the way to his camp. We passed them on this stretch. Most of them were 525’s and 640’s and a big assortment of small calibre MX bikes, but there were 3 950 adventures too. I stopped the first guy who seemed to be the leader and asked about Van Zyl’s. He said that only 3 of them had done it and that it was very hard and he was on a 640. He looked at my bike and said that I would probably suffer some damage. Hmm food for thought.
I also flagged down the support vehicle, it was one of those monstrous Dakar looking things and he was really flying. He slithered to a halt just past where I was stopped and said much the same.
I made my mind up just before Okangwati. My tyre was not wearing as well as I thought it might and seemed to have taken a real bashing on the track. Also we had had such a great time and got off relatively unscathed, it would be a pity to come to any grief now. It just didn’t feel right and gut feelings are not to be messed with.
When I mentioned to Craig what I thought we should do the easier route he was impressively unemotional about the decision.
Mark and the gang had just arrived and Mark was begging me to swap with him for a ride on my bike. He also has a 950 that was bought the same time as mine and he used to race enduro for quite a while. He is planning to do our route in April. He looked desperate, it must have eaten him when we came flying past him on this last stretch, and I know how I would have felt. He even offered me ice cold beer and the company of his better half! (her conversational skills of course!)
Well as we were now no longer going to do the pass, he could stop begging as we would go our separate ways. We said our goodbyes and were back on the road to Opuwo. It felt good; we had made the right choice.
In this part of world it is muscle power that gets things done. These herders are watering their cattle, they are young guys I guess about 12 to 16, they work hard!
Life in this part of the word is very tough and you have to be a bit of a make a plan kind of person to survive, this chap certainly had to do that. His truck that was carrying 3 massive blocks of granite ran out of diesel on a small incline and though he had all of his braking systems on, the weight of the blocks dragged him back down the hill into the bush. Weight of blocks 18 and 19 tons each, capacity of trailer 16 tons. Therefore Gravity 1 trailer 0.
He had already pulled the first trailer out with one of the blocks on and was back to get this one. You can see that the trailer is bent from the strain. I offered to attach my bike and help him pull it out. 950’s have more than enough power to do that kind of thing. I think he thought I was joking.
Opuwo is a grim little town were we stopped to get some anti-inflammatory pills, (Craig’s shoulder and my knee), petrol and some lunch.
Then it was a long haul to Sesfontein and onto Ongongo Springs.
The camp site is a community one and it shows but the spring is the attraction. The tricky bit it is getting across the small rocky stream to where the camping is. It is very slippery with algae and it was only seconds before I went down.
Craig 4 Andrew 6!
Craig made it look easy. I volunteered to go back the 10k’s to find the local guy who we had given money to to buy us a few cool drinks at the shop on the main road. We needed more than cool drinks and beer was going to do the trick.
He took a video of me trying to cross the stream again. I don’t fall but it doesn’t look elegant. It doesn’t help the ego when you replay the video to hear him cackling in the background.
On the subject of falls.
Craig said that surely losing a windscreen, getting stuck in a donga and having a bike nearly crush you to death counted for way more than a piddly drop on a flat road?
"Ah", I countered, "what you are not taking into consideration are the other variables like blows to the ego and embarrassment factors". Dropping it in front of a group of Himba’s for example while showing off would rate very highly too.
He was in agreement immediately and on reflection actually started saying that my first drop was possibly capable of getting a higher rating than his donga bashing. In the end this is where our drop count ends; neither of us fell off anymore after this.
So I won. 6 – 4. He’ll just have to try harder next time.
Craig went to go soak his bod in the spring...
...while I went off to go find out about our guy and beer. He walked the whole 10k's way there and was about to come back before I found him at the Kooka Shop and told him that I was also going to need beer.
We repacked the bottles and some bully beef in my tank bag and the ruck sack that we had given him for the walk and then in front of a now big gathering of locals, I headed off with our local guy hanging on grimly.
One of the crowd, as I was getting on my bike asked if she could some too, to "visit"? Her meaning of the word and my understanding of it were two very different things. Apparently I would have to pay for the honour. "$50! cheap!"
"Um... no space, another time, maybe?" was all I could come up with before I roared off.
Once I returned it was into the spring for a good soak and a few beers and watch the bird life and the sun set.
That night was Bully beef and beans with the beer and a bit of whiskey.
Why do the simple meals taste so good on trips like these?
Total for the day 319.04k’s
http://www.austouring.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=183
It was a little funny at times as there are some upgrades if you could call them that, where the track has been improved and rerouted. But in the dark and not bothering to stop and work out which one was the better we often rode through the older and rougher choice that only became apparent once you were committed.
Around the last bend and I could at last see lights of the camps. There are about 5 or 6 camps in Epupa. Before the trip I had phoned and booked us into the Epupa River Lodge Camp. Complete fluke saw us ride into that Camp first. And who should we meet straight off was Mark and Cathy!
The elation of having conquered the road and then running into them was brilliant. Mark immediately thrust an ice cold beer into my hand and did the same to Craig.
It was a special moment for Craig and I, well worth the sweat and toil. What a day! It was a great feeling of accomplishment.
Fritz the camp owner and manager showed us where to camp and it didn’t take us long to get stuck into what his bar had to offer and then off to Mark and his new found Friends’ camp fire for a night of story telling and re-riding the route.
Craig got caught telling some story and was blatantly jacking up the figures and the size of the hills a bit. I am sure I must have been doing the same but I had the camera!
Adrenaline has worn off and the beer is kicking in.
Total for the day 97.53k’s
Day 7
Rest day. Did little more than Sleep and swim and watch the locals play an ancient game that resembles backgammon.
There were other bikers there, a pair who had travelled the same track we did the previous day. One guy was on a BMW f650 dakar and the other was on BMW 80R. The 650 guy never came off once but the other guy said he stopped counting after 30, he was exhausted. His bike had blown it’s fork seals and his clutch was starting to slip. Kudos to him for completing the trip. They had a buddy that had an 1150GS who had wisely elected to take the easier route.
There were 4 other BMW GS’s from Austria, 3 guys and a girl. Two adventures an 1150 and an1100, they also took the easy route and one thing that they enviously had was bike to bike radio systems. Something we have decided would be a good safety factor on a trip like this. They had flown their bikes in for a Namibian adventure and were flying out in a few days time.
Epupa falls is an amazing set of falls, and to think that there was a plan to dam the river at this point. It would have meant that the falls would have been underwater and lost forever. Dams are not the easy answer for power and water needs. Apart from a host of ecological disasters the local tribes would have had their culture destroyed with the dam.
What is interesting is that unusually for a major water fall, the main falls run in line or parallel with the flow of the river, so the river falls into a long slot. There is a small amount of flow that goes around the falls and creates great Jacuzzi type pools that are wonderful to laze in.
That night was a big decision night. I wanted to do a section of the North of Namibia that goes through a famously bad stretch of road called Van Zyl’s Pass. It is so bad that there is strong advice only to tackle it from one direction and that makes the pass a mostly downwards affair. The reason is that going up the pass causes way more erosion and if you had to meet someone on the trail it would be next to impossible to turn around or get to a spot where you can pass each other.
I was very confident that if we had done the Epupa river road, the pass road was not any worse, possibly easier. Plus on a bike going down is way easier than going up. Having spoken to close friends who had driven the route I was absolutely certain that it was doable.
The only hitch is that fuel is an issue; you need a range of 450k’s minimum to safely do it. Now that we had caught Mark and Cathy and Fritz did have the 50 litres that I had ordered by phone. Our bikes took about 17 litres to get back to full each and 20 litres could go on Marks roof, more than enough to see us through.
The only issue was Craig, he had had his full of adventure and was not so keen. It is understandable as his introduction to off road riding had been a very steep curve. I let the issue wait till morning and then he could decide, I’d go with whatever he chose. So there was a fair bit of Rum and whiskey to throw back and hopefully lubricate his decision making processes.
Total for the day 0k’s
Day 7
Early morning, 10 meters from my tent. The falls are rumbling just to the left. Jeez! Life’s good!
Looking upstream
"So Craig what’s it going to be?"
He took a big sigh and said, "Ok, let’s just get this Van Zyl’s thing over with, but after that, we are doing it my way. I just want a cruizy trip after that"
Cool! Here we go! The Rum and Whiskey lubricant must have worked after all!
The 60k’s to Okangwati are easy and fast, it is from there that you either turn left for the easier route or carry on straight to Van Zyl’s. Fritz had said that there was a touring group of 16 bikers from France I think that apparently had ridden up van Zyl’s on the way to his camp. We passed them on this stretch. Most of them were 525’s and 640’s and a big assortment of small calibre MX bikes, but there were 3 950 adventures too. I stopped the first guy who seemed to be the leader and asked about Van Zyl’s. He said that only 3 of them had done it and that it was very hard and he was on a 640. He looked at my bike and said that I would probably suffer some damage. Hmm food for thought.
I also flagged down the support vehicle, it was one of those monstrous Dakar looking things and he was really flying. He slithered to a halt just past where I was stopped and said much the same.
I made my mind up just before Okangwati. My tyre was not wearing as well as I thought it might and seemed to have taken a real bashing on the track. Also we had had such a great time and got off relatively unscathed, it would be a pity to come to any grief now. It just didn’t feel right and gut feelings are not to be messed with.
When I mentioned to Craig what I thought we should do the easier route he was impressively unemotional about the decision.
Mark and the gang had just arrived and Mark was begging me to swap with him for a ride on my bike. He also has a 950 that was bought the same time as mine and he used to race enduro for quite a while. He is planning to do our route in April. He looked desperate, it must have eaten him when we came flying past him on this last stretch, and I know how I would have felt. He even offered me ice cold beer and the company of his better half! (her conversational skills of course!)
Well as we were now no longer going to do the pass, he could stop begging as we would go our separate ways. We said our goodbyes and were back on the road to Opuwo. It felt good; we had made the right choice.
In this part of world it is muscle power that gets things done. These herders are watering their cattle, they are young guys I guess about 12 to 16, they work hard!
Life in this part of the word is very tough and you have to be a bit of a make a plan kind of person to survive, this chap certainly had to do that. His truck that was carrying 3 massive blocks of granite ran out of diesel on a small incline and though he had all of his braking systems on, the weight of the blocks dragged him back down the hill into the bush. Weight of blocks 18 and 19 tons each, capacity of trailer 16 tons. Therefore Gravity 1 trailer 0.
He had already pulled the first trailer out with one of the blocks on and was back to get this one. You can see that the trailer is bent from the strain. I offered to attach my bike and help him pull it out. 950’s have more than enough power to do that kind of thing. I think he thought I was joking.
Opuwo is a grim little town were we stopped to get some anti-inflammatory pills, (Craig’s shoulder and my knee), petrol and some lunch.
Then it was a long haul to Sesfontein and onto Ongongo Springs.
The camp site is a community one and it shows but the spring is the attraction. The tricky bit it is getting across the small rocky stream to where the camping is. It is very slippery with algae and it was only seconds before I went down.
Craig 4 Andrew 6!
Craig made it look easy. I volunteered to go back the 10k’s to find the local guy who we had given money to to buy us a few cool drinks at the shop on the main road. We needed more than cool drinks and beer was going to do the trick.
He took a video of me trying to cross the stream again. I don’t fall but it doesn’t look elegant. It doesn’t help the ego when you replay the video to hear him cackling in the background.
On the subject of falls.
Craig said that surely losing a windscreen, getting stuck in a donga and having a bike nearly crush you to death counted for way more than a piddly drop on a flat road?
"Ah", I countered, "what you are not taking into consideration are the other variables like blows to the ego and embarrassment factors". Dropping it in front of a group of Himba’s for example while showing off would rate very highly too.
He was in agreement immediately and on reflection actually started saying that my first drop was possibly capable of getting a higher rating than his donga bashing. In the end this is where our drop count ends; neither of us fell off anymore after this.
So I won. 6 – 4. He’ll just have to try harder next time.
Craig went to go soak his bod in the spring...
...while I went off to go find out about our guy and beer. He walked the whole 10k's way there and was about to come back before I found him at the Kooka Shop and told him that I was also going to need beer.
We repacked the bottles and some bully beef in my tank bag and the ruck sack that we had given him for the walk and then in front of a now big gathering of locals, I headed off with our local guy hanging on grimly.
One of the crowd, as I was getting on my bike asked if she could some too, to "visit"? Her meaning of the word and my understanding of it were two very different things. Apparently I would have to pay for the honour. "$50! cheap!"
"Um... no space, another time, maybe?" was all I could come up with before I roared off.
Once I returned it was into the spring for a good soak and a few beers and watch the bird life and the sun set.
That night was Bully beef and beans with the beer and a bit of whiskey.
Why do the simple meals taste so good on trips like these?
Total for the day 319.04k’s