Eighth section part II! & Ethiopia

As we had a border to cross on that day, the stage was rather short with 82 km on our schedule. As I had quite some energy on that morning I decided to go on my own and to do the first 66km till lunch as fast as possible. Therefore I reached lunch after a bit more than 2 hours, being the first one there for the first time… As the recommendation of the team was to ride in groups till the border, as the area is not the safest one, I joined Loren, Clement and Andrew to reach the Ethiopian border. And there we go, the usual African border crossing fun started. But to my surprise the two borders crossing went surprisingly fast for us, unfortunately not that fast for our truck, we therefore waited a few hours at the Kenyan border until we could finally enter the country.
And here we are, after 17 days in Ethiopia, we reached our 4th country Jambo! Kenya. For me the first challenge started right after the border as we do have to bike on the wrong/other side of the road and this does take a bit of time to get used to it. (the first roundabout we crossed was quite funny as we had riders going in all directions and locals shouting at us..). Hopefully on that day we did not have to bike for long in Kenya as 2 km after the border we reached our camp which was located just behind the local jail….
As we arrived there rather early we enjoyed a cold shower (I love camp with shower) and then went to town to achieve the two most important milestone in each and every country we enter: 1 exchanging money 2: getting a local SIM card. The first part was not so successful as banks are closed on Saturday afternoon (thanks god they have ATM) but the second one went smoothly even if it took ages as the local telecom shop is obviously not used to get 40 data hungry customers on the same day. Anyway after 2 hours I finally got my new local SIM card! How cool is that?
On a normal day it would have been the end of it but…as I said earlier we were camping close to the local jail and the local jail is having a canteen and a very friendly and welcoming bar.
And that is how all good stories are starting, a bar a few beers and…to make it short, a few hours, beers and brandy later, Vik, Baldr, Irena and myself finally decided to go back to camp having missed the rider meeting and diner (one of us missed his washing duty as well). At camp we had the surprise to find the fence closed and therefore had to climb it to finally reach our tent at around 10 pm. (and yes 10 pm is awfully late for us as we are used to go to bed at 8 at the latest).

As you can imagine, the wake up on the following day was not the nicest, for whatever reasons, my head was kind of hurting. Anyway, I went on my bike and tried to enjoy this first day of biking in Kenya. We started with a lovely 40 km downhill and the landscape was fantastic. The only issue was the number of speed bumps as my head definitely disliked them. 
After the downhill, the landscape went a bit more plain with very long stretch of road and very dry savanna and rock on both sides of the road. At lunch I met Baldr and we decided to finish the day together, biking on a medium pace and stopping a few kilometres before camp to enjoy some, not so cold, drink. As of a few km before camps, we saw a few signs with beware of the strong cross wind, and even if we did not knew it at that time, this was a first hint of what was waiting for us on the next day.  After our coke stop, we reached the camp and as we put on our tent, we could feel that we were definitely on a lower altitude as temperature was increasing drastically (40-43°) and shade was almost non existent.

After 1 day of bus and 6 days of biking, today this was the 7th and last day of the longest section we had so far.
As we’ve been warned during the rider meeting that we might face some very strong crosswind on that stretch, we decided to work together and to create a “train” (for the non-bikers, it means always having one or two bikers in front getting the wind and protecting the others one and exchanging places regularly to keep everybody as rested as possible). As it was the first “train” for many of the riders, the first km were slightly confused but we quickly improved and managed to reach lunch after 67 km with our 12 bikers. Taking in account how strong the cross wind were, it was definitely a good idea to work together.
After a very sandy lunch, as there was no possibility to avoid the wind, we kept on riding our train ,which grow to 14 riders, nevertheless as the day went on and the heat, wind and climb increased, our train shrank significantly and as we reached Marsabit, after a 60 km climb for 900 hm we were only 5 remaining bikers out of the 14 who started after lunch. And that was it, after 120 km on that day and 786 km on that section we are done and looking forward to enjoy a well deserved rest day in Marsabit!