Eighth section part 1

After a rather unpleasant stay in Addis due to the loss of my phone, I was quite happy to hit the road again… As for entering into the city, we had, for safety reasons to organize a convoy to leave the Ethiopian capital. Therefore, as 2 days ago, we blocked the circulation and created a lovely mess as we did move again at the speed of a depressed turtle. Moreover after a few kilometres, we were forced to do a U-turn to avoid some protests in the streets (this was a nice chaos). Hopefully, after around 16 km we’ve finally been released and could bike as we wanted towards our next camp. After a few kilometres alone, Baldr and Clément joined me and we started to bike together. These two guys being among the strongest and fastest riders of the group, it was quite a challenge to follow them until our camp of lake Koka. Moreover it seems to me that their ultimate goal is to ignore the potholes (there was a lot of them on that stretch) by going as fast as possible to fly over them…this was scary. On the same kind of idea, Baldr decided to draft behind a truck, which is not a bad idea, but choosing the garbage truck…
Anyway, after a bit more than 4 hours we finally reached the camp (I was almost dead), where we’ve been welcomed by many Marabu Storch, the usual kids crew and a many cows (a few of them decided to pass through our camp..). The location of this camp on the shore of lake Koka was absolutely beautiful and we therefore enjoyed a nice and relax afternoon, surrounded by kids. Angela and myself went to play table soccer against the kids and even won a few games.

On the following day the program was quite basic, turning left after the camp, biking 107 flat km and then turning right into Ostrich camp. There is therefore, not so much to say about that day, the landscape was rather boring with some very long flat stretches and as we had a quite friendly tailwind, Mike and I made these 107 km in less than 4 hours without pushing at all (I could not have push anyway as my legs were quite impacted by the previous day). As we were getting close to our camp and still had a lot of time, we decided to stop in the last village on our way to enjoy a few beers and a bit of conversation with the locals. And there we had the chance to meet the oldest man of the village, 97 years old, 7 wife and 36 kids… (not sure if these figures are 100% correct ..) And the gentleman was still quite fit as he was “protecting” us against some local drunk guys, respect Monsieur! We finally reach the Ostrich camp and as said in the name, we had quite a few of these funny animals walking around within the camp which was quite funny. And as a big luxury, some locals even managed to organize a very basic shower! A fantastic pleasure!!!