Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
The Last Day of Summer
523km
Hit the road works properly today, sometimes slowing right down to 60kph in some of the loose stuff. Other places the road is wide open and I could tear through the dust overtaking the Jap imports with their drivers waving and cheering me on, like a slow motion desert race I imagined. The road has been made on most of these sections, it just isn't sealed. And it's wide, looks like they're planning to build a ten lane super highway in sections! There aren't really any rules to follow, I havn't seen any traffic police for the last two days, just don't run into anything. Seems fairly normal for everyone to drive on the wrong side of the road, this had me squinting into the dust constantly looking for on-coming traffic. The best thing about this is you can ride on whatever part of the road looks the best, as you'd imagine the edges are normally the smoothest and probably the safest spot to dodge the on-coming cars too.
I found a nice spot to camp next to a river. There were a few people around fishing who came to say hello, I kept asking if they'd caught anything and all had replied by shaking their heads, shrugging their shoulders and looking confused. I guessed maybe it was just a bad day or something to do with the moon or stars or whatever until...
The next morning I climbed out of the tent just after sunrise to see a couple of blokes pull up in their Lada, blow up a dingey and paddle up river. As they went past me they looked a bit suspicous, I gave them a wave and that seemed to relax them a bit with both of them waving and smiling back. They sort of had that look about them that they were doing something wrong. I thought nothing of it as they paddled out of site. They returned with a dingey full of fish just as I was packing the last of my gear on the bike. After unloading their catch into the Lada they came over to see what I was about. They were both very friendly when they relised I wasn't a local, I asked them the obvious question if they were fisherman using that casting action to indicate fishing. One replied yes and the other laughed and said yes but not like this (indicating the rod casting action I had just performed), like this (and made an action like casting a net). They both laughed and I worked out that the reason nobody else could catch any fish was that these two entrepreneur's had the whole river netted and obviously turned up early to empty the nets before any locals showed up to question their fishing technique. No chance of me telling anyone though, I still had a continent to ride across.
- comments