Eleventh section is done!

After 4 days of biking, my legs were not any more feeling the volcano climb but i was starting to feel my shoulders and wrist as the dirt roads are impacting the upper part of the body.
I started this day with a part of the Dutch connection, (Baldr and Dann) and we went on a slightly slower tempo than during the previous day, enjoying the forests we were going through and trying to see some wildlife (unfortunately to the exception of a few baboons trying to steal our food at lunch I was highly unsuccessful).
After a few kilometres, we enjoyed a coffee with an old local gentleman and learned, to our surprise, that the most feared animal by the locals is the elephant. After this nice break we reached our lunch where some baboons tried to attack us but we resisted successfully ;-). Unfortunately the afternoon went differently as after 18 km Baldr fell down and cut himself quite deeply below his knee. As he was not able to bike any more we tried to call the TDA team to get a pick up but could not reach them as we had no signal for our cellphones. Therefore, while Dann stayed with Baldr, Tim and I biked to the next small village and asked someone to use his cellphone (hoping for a better connection. As the local guy did not have any credit (almost everybody uses a prepaid in these countries) I first had to buy some top up for his phone before we could finally try to call one of the TDA members but again without success. Knowing that Jen (our doc) was still at lunch, as she was doing the sweep on that afternoon, I decided to hire a local motorbiker to drive me back to our lunch place to inform her of the situation and organize some support. And off I was, 20 km on a local motorbike, enjoying the dirt road again to reach our doc and our support team. Well all in all it was a quite interesting experience and as Baldr was not badly injured and could be picked up by one of our vehicle and brought to camp, this will stay as a kind of amusing memory.
After this incident, the road changed drastically and we had to bike on a very sandy road, a very unstable and exhausting exercise. Many bikers fell down on that part of the stretch and so did I twice as my front wheel stayed planted in the sand. Luckily I only collected a few bruises and my bike did not suffer either. On top of these very rough road, we met the lovely Tse Tse flies and these guys can really make your life miserable as despite the speed of the biking (ok on that day I was not so fast) they stick to you and bite quite strongly. Well as you can imagine, between the flies, the roads and the incident it was not and easy day and I was quite relieved that the storm which was getting closer and closer decided to avoid us. I therefore reached our camp quite late in the afternoon and enjoyed a bottle shower (2×1.5 L can make miracle believe me) to clean myself up.
After the tough previous day, many bikers were a bit nervous to the idea of having again 120 km of dirt to ride. The roads were fortunately better on that day and even if riding dirt stays a very exhausting exercise, physically as well as mentally as you need to stay focused the whole time to avoid potholes, stones, sandy patches and so on I really enjoyed this third day of dirt. Nothing special happened on that day, I simply enjoyed the biking and scenery had a few coke stops and so on. Another day on the bike in Africa ;-). One nice thing is that I could finally try the “Michikaki” (not sure about the spelling) which are some very tasty local beef skewer and drink a cold beer (I know it sounds funny for Europeans but we haven’t had any really cold drinks since a few days) in the small town of Makongolosi.