Well, someone has to do it, and it might as well be us.

That is what Wes my bike buddy says as we are camped under this Baobab tree.


On a trip doing stuff like below.



Some background for Wes's statement.

This Baobab is one day bike ride from Arusha on dirt roads, eventually not even a track, just some game trails going our way for awhile. This is tetse fly area and so people don't live in this pocket of bush on the east side of Tarangire National Park. We ride pretty much all day to get here, the last few hours in bush, the first in farming / grazing land.

We look for a place to camp 30 minutes before dark and come up with this Baobab. Not ideal but will do. We scrounge wood , make a fire , and lay our bags out, and sit around the campfire cooking, roasting meat, talking, and drinking whiskey. Tetse flies have gone to sleep, there are no mosquitoes, no bugs, no lights, no roads, no cows. And we have no trail to follow in the morning, just a direction.

Now Wes says "Well, someone has to do this shit, and it might as well be us."

Next morning the cock ups start.

(1) We lost each other. Huh. Unbelievable but yes, we lost each other. I had given up and was planning the rest of the trip alone when we bumped into each other.

(2) I lost one of my panniers. Unbelievable also. I was stupid. Even more unbelievable is we spent 3 hours and could not find the bag in less than 1 km. Deep grass. No defined track.
Here is a link to movie about the lost bag.
Lost Bag Story
Be ye warned they are big files and the server is in dark Africa, but they are watchable.

So we take stock of the situation. The big losses are the whiskey and my bike tools. Next was the cooking pot, the only one. Next was all my spare clothes sweater and sleeping pad. We opted for continuing. The only real question was whether we dared continue without tools.


(3) Wes was caught by a wait a bit thorn. He dodge the first one, the second one took his hat. And the third grabbed his kisser and raked it good. I have a good video of his description of that. Wait a Bit Story

(4) Park ranger says " Well I should arrest you I guess." We lie that we were never in the park, that we just entered into the remote ranger station to see if they had any extra water. Yeah right. Well at least better than previous bike trip when we were way way into the park, and started seeing tour vehicles off in the distance.

Jeez I have almost told the whole trip. Someday I will write about the whole trip.