The morning started ok, I felt ok, the weather was ok and the road was ok. Things then got better as I cycled to the crest of a hill, i overlooked a lake and could see that for at least a couple of miles I had a downhill with good tarmac ahead of me.
What is it about body's of water? Cycling seems so much more enjoyable when you're cycling alongside a lake or the sea for some reason. I was really enjoying myself but I knew I had to stop for breakfast fairly soon as I didn't want to burn out. I stopped at a little village called Humbo. It was a standard cafe and with no English spoken I went for the safety of dabo and tibs. Meat and bread basically, they gave me injera as well which I only had a little bit of and they constantly kept walking up to me with different spices and powders, I think they were trying to ruin my insides!
After breakfast the good cycling continued but it didn't take long before I was delayed by roadworks. If you think English roadworks are annoying, you haven't seen anything until you've been to Africa. They don't close one lane and work on the other, noooo, the whole road has to be taken up and turned to rubble and dust and this can't be a section at a time either, this is 5 miles at a time!
Rubble and dust is not ideal terrain for a heavy Nigel so my excellent progress was slowed to almost a walking pace. I made about 40 miles until the road works and I carried on for another 15 until I started to feel really rough. I don't know whether it was just tiredness, heat, dodgy tibs or the constant bumps but my stomach was aching a lot and I began to feel very dizzy.
I chose to have a rest in the shade, I was 20 miles from my destination so I thought a nap may sort me out and it was best I tried to avoid the 2 o'clock heat. Unfortunately for me I was in baboon and hyena country and as I sat by the bushes on the roadside I saw a huge baboon strutting out from the undergrowth. It was probably not the best place to hang around but I really didn't feel well. It seemed my stomach issues that I rested in Shashemene for, had never really gone away and my course of pills that I have finished didn't actually kill the bug, they just made it sleep a day.
After 5 minutes of laying down I threw up. I threw up a lot as well and once again all the water that I have been so careful to take in to stay hydrated was now splattered on the roadside. A couple of minutes later it was the other end, at least my body times its exits consecutively and not simultaneously! One solid, one slurry, 3 water, all in the space of 10 minutes. It took around 15 minutes for me to turn from tired cyclist to the living dead. I collapsed roadside again, I've been here before I thought, it was the Sudanese desert all over again!
Weak, dizzy and surrounded by bodily fluids that attracted a multitude of rare bugs I have never seen before, I lay exhausted on the roadside. To their supreme credit, every car, van and lorry driving past stopped to see if I was ok. One man got out with a bottle of water, I couldn't guarantee that the water was safe so he just put it on the back of my neck. That brought back memories of getting a footballing injury when I was a kid. Didn't matter if you had broken your arm (which I had) na, just put a cold sponge on the back of your neck and get back out there.
I welcomed the water but turned down the offer of a ride to Arba Minch. I knew it was less than 20 miles so I thought if I rested a bit then I would give it a go later and see how I was. I couldn't rest, my stomach was cramping and I couldn't get any water in me because it only resulted in two more squats. I decided to start riding and it became immediately apparent that there was no way I was going to do it. My legs were like finished toilet rolls, weak and hollow and I couldn't summon the energy to lift my head let alone push pedals. I got off and began to push Nigel up the hill. The heat still beating and body shaking, I didn't know how long I was going to last so the next pick up that drove in my direction was getting flagged down. I wasn't far from Arba Minch, this had to be done.
Luckily for me, only 5 minutes had past when a Toyota pick up with 5 guys in pulled up. The driver, Wendimo was going to Arba Minch and kindly let me jump on the flatbed. My ride is called "a ride for their lives" and what I didn't know was that the next hour would be a ride for my life on a completely different mode of transport but just as memorable.
The remainder of the road happened to be all roadworks, that meant rubble, potholes and dust for 15 miles or so. Wendimo turned out to be an Ethiopian Rally driver champion or at least he thought he was and I found out a few interesting things about surviving on the back of a flatbed on African "roads." If I was worried about the possibility of following through due to my lack of strength and unstable bowels then I had a little more to deal with as Wendimo literally took off over some ramps and skidded his way sideways around corners.
I started sitting and holding on but for fear of shattering my coccyx into bone particles, I adorned the "spider" or "crab" position. This lasted for as long as my skinny arms could handle the G-Forces for, about 5 minutes. I then evolved into the "frog" position which worked well until cramp set in and the bumps almost busted both knees on impact.
Mid way through, Wendimo stopped in a small town for some fruit where the truck was completely bombarded with kids and women with bowls of mangos. I collapsed exhausted in the back of the truck and despite my apologies of "no money" that didn't stop about 50 locals basically climbing onto the truck. Two very kind women just gave me a mango each. I've never actually eaten a fresh mango and so it took a while for them to explain that I don't eat the skin. After mastering this, I was all set for the next stage of the rally of Arba Minch but now I had an extra task - trying to eat a mango.
Wendimo looked back at his rear view mirror and gave me the thumbs up before we pulled away again. I guess this was as if to say, "you still alive? yeah? good, not for long!" I gave him the thumbs up back and tried to find a comfortable position where I could complete all tasks in hand - surviving and eating.
As if holding on for dear life wasn't hard enough for me, I decided to try and eat officially the most stickiest fruit I have ever had the pleasure of eating on the back of a truck. At least with all this going on, my mind was taken off the possibility/likelihood of soiling Wendemo's Toyota.
So, frog position it was with foot slightly jammed under one of Nigel's wheels to prevent him from slipping around. One hand on front roll bar and one hand to manoeuvre a ridiculously sticky piece of fruit around my mouth. What's with the stone in the middle? By the time I had ripped the skin off with my teeth, I had about 5mm of fleshy goodness before I came up against a stone the size of a cricket ball in the middle. The mango flesh stuck to it like a sea anenomie so to save time and messy fingers I just shoved the whole thing in my mouth and went hands free from the fruit so I could concentrate on holding onto the truck.
My knees couldn't take too many more massive hits as we collided with every pothole with the upmost precision, so I resorted to standing and ducking behind the cabin when the dust got too much. I figured if we crashed or flipped then getting thrown from the vehicle was probably better anyway and I would just try to relax on impact to reduce the amount of broken bones I would sustain. I felt like Charlton Heston riding an African chariot and if the locals gave me funny looks previously when I just cycled through their village, imagine what they thought when they saw a dusty, hairy faced man riding on the back of a Toyota whilst sucking on a huge mango!
I felt rough as anything but I had to laugh. This would be my Christmas parade through the streets of southern Ethiopia as I waved my mango hands and smiled my mango face at the locals. Amazingly they still asked the same questions, "where you go?" As we got into the town centre of Arba Minch I got some very funny looks, one in particular from another white man that must've had so many unanswered questions for me. I jumped off and checked everything was still attached to Nigel and that all my limbs were still attached to me. I have learnt a lot from that brief truck ride. Firstly, Wendimo is a mentalist. Secondly, mangos are less messy and more effective when they're juiced and thirdly, my legs make exceptional shock absorbers.
We stopped by a hotel so I gave Wendimo some money to say thank you for not going the whole hog and actually killing me and I staggered over to the hotel. I have not had much luck with prices recently and when you are tired you don't really care what they say, you just want to lie down. I was yet again in this all to familiar state but I needed a toilet for sure so opted for the 2nd best of the three options that gave me a toilet and shower.
Previously I have paid more for the "luxury" of a shower and toilet but neither had had water so the shower didn't work and the toilet didn't flush. In the past I have let it slide and moved on but today I wasn't really in the mood for the constant excuses and false promises that the Ethiopians love to give. I changed some money and walked to the pharmacy to get more pills and toothpaste. This was a mission in itself and whilst spirits were high I caught my reflection in a car window and I could've easily been an extra in Dawn of the Dead. "Dragged through a bush backwards" didn't cut it, I looked positively zombiefied which actually made me laugh more than cry.
I returned back to my hot, sticky, smelly (granted it was my smell from the toilet but the fact the sink stopped the toilet door from closing didn't help contain the smell) mosquito infested hotel room where I collapsed for a few hours on the trade mark comfy bed. After a few hours I felt a bit better and had a few gripes with the manager that had promised the water would be on soon.
Today I was not going to let it slip, today of all days I was going to let this manager know exactly what I thought of overpricing, lazy, false promising, discriminating Ethiopian Hotel Managers that I have had the displeasure of meeting recently. "If there is no shower and no toilet, I am not paying twice as much" I said, making it very clear to him that I had enough of having to pay extra for a utility that doesn't work. "It will come on in a few hours" he said, yeah that's great, ill wake up at 1am to have a freezing cold shower I thought! "If there is no shower and no toilet, I'm not paying twice as much" i repeated myself just to be sure he understood. "why?" he said. this man was really trying me. I packed up my things as he tried to run around to fix the shower. Hotel workers think its perfectly fine for you not to have something for hours and after you've complained and waited for so long that you've given up caring about it, they'll turn on the tap and say "see, working!" They don't believe in refunds so I was never going to pay him from the start unless I saw water come from the tap.
I got Nigel packed up and despite it being dark outside I had to follow through with my decision to leave. The manager had the cheek to stop me and try and charge me for the 4 hours that I stayed in his room waiting for him to sort the water. I pointed over to his best rooms, "how much are they?" "365" he said. "And how much do you charge the Ethiopians?" I said. He stupidly told me, "240." "Well I will pay that then for one of them" I thought that was fair considering the trouble he had caused me and he was trying to charge me 200 for a room with basically a bed and the bonus condom wrapper that I found down the side of the bed as I left. "No, you are not Ethiopian" that was the nail in the very tired and fed up coffin, I had to leave.
I knew there was another hotel over the road, I was just praying they still had a room as all the truckers had arrived. Thankfully they did, the truckers were all in the good rooms so I was given exactly the same room as the last hotel but this time it did have water and it was cheaper.
An eventful ending to an eventful day. Ethiopia is starting to get on my nerves if I'm honest. Well more specifically, illness in Ethiopia. I'm pretty sure the illness never really left, it just lay dormant and the dodgy tibs I had for breakfast just rekindled the flame as I have never thrown up before today.
Its best i rest a day and see what happens so my target for Christmas has taken me a day back to another town closer which maybe just as good. At the end of the day, I haven't a Scooby Doo about any of the towns in Kenya so I can't really be annoyed about not making it to a certain one for Christmas, its not like I'm meeting anyone!
I will stay one extra day in Arba Minch, I have 5 days on this medicine which WILL get me to Kenya and whether or not these ones work, at least I will be in another country!
I'm always happy at the end of each day when I'm safe and Nigel is ok but it seems recently I've been surviving and not living. I just want to live a day and enjoy the ride instead of ride a day and enjoy surviving!
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