Tanzanian Dirt Roads ALMOST broke my body and spirit, ALMOST (50 hour bike week)

Where The Pavement Begins....Heaven

Iringa, Tanzania AT LAST!! The last seven days have been the most difficult days for me on the trip thus far… Having logged almost 50 hours on my bike this week, this is the most hard earned rest day that I have gotten to. The dirt in Tanzania is a mixture of thick sand, chunky rocks and dirt and clay making the rides very long. Mix in a lot of up hill climbing (a lot) and difficult tedious downhill sections on the dirt and I would have to say this might have been more difficult for me than Northern Kenya. Two days this week I arrived at camp after 6pm which is disheartening because you change out of your biking clothes, baby wipe and then go to rider’s meeting, wipe the bike down and prepare for the next day of riding. No real time to recoup. I have also been plagued lately with an incurable case of insomnia which on top of the hours and hours in the saddle is slowly killing me. I The nerves in my right hand have also decided they have had enough of the endless banging around on the dirt and they are not allowing my fingers to function properly anymore. My index finger and middle finger on my right hand are stuck together and will not separate independently of me pulling them apart. It is not painful, but it makes handwriting and typing next to impossible… Hopefully this will go away when I stop riding every day. Obviously that would have to happen in my right hand. There were defiantly a few days this week I wanted to pack the trip in, but it seems that when things get really low something cool happens to remind us where we are, like twenty monkeys walking out on the road in front of us or a chameleon crossing to the road.

My rest day turned out to be very eventful as I have been having problems with my big toe on my right foot ever since Dinder Park, My bike shoe is a little tight and it has given me a black toe and I took bets around camp for everyone to put in a date when they thought that the toe nail would fall off for good. It seemed like a fun game at the time…However today the fun game turned to be not so enjoyable when I snagged the toe nail on the ground when I bent down and it tore the nail off and now it is dangling by a thread. There was a lot of blood and a lot of pain and now I am trying to devise a plan to squeeze this painful mess into my bike shoe tomorrow. After I stopped crying, one of the riders asked me who one the bet…I guess I had that coming… Luckily one of the other girls on the trip had gotten an infected ingrown toenail on her same big toe and has been in the hospital twice on the trip, once to have it removed and once when it got infected so I have an expert to help me through the pain of this less than enjoyable injury….And thus I didn’t get on the internet to post this blog and all that will have to wait until the next rest day in Malawi…