Distance: 104.8 km
Ride time: 6:31:45
Average: 16.1 km/h
Max speed: 50.4 km/h
Total: 47460 km
In the early morning hours I was crossing the bridge over the beautiful Luangwa River. It had been a great stop down at Bridge Camp, but now it was time to climb back up towards the 1000 m plateau that makes up much of Zambia.
I waved to Steef and Jasper from last night as they passed me in their jeep. They would make it to Malawi in slightly more than three hours. For me it will be a three day ride to the border. Still, I wasn’t too envious. I like the speed of travelling by bike. A hundred kilometers a day is not too slow and not too fast in order to take in a country!
The road out here is very new with a wide shoulder and everything. Without much traffic this made up for some very comfortable cycling where you could listen to music or podcasts at full volume without worrying.
The great road lasted until just before Nyimba where the road works started. Pretty satisfied with having cycled my 100 km while climbing 1500 m, I enjoyed a typical local meal consisting of nshima, beef, and spinach. Since I had been camping the last two nights, all my equipment was out of battery. Therefore I was pretty disappointed when I checked into my very local guest house only to find out that the power was out.
Sometime in the middle of the night the light suddenly came on and the fan started to turn. Time to quickly plug in the electronics and go back to sleep…
Do you run out of battery charge all that often? I take it your Garmin would be of higher priority. 🙂
I looked up Nshima on Wikipedia… very interesting!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nshima
In Africa I typically only sleep in my tent one night at a time, so I almost never run out of power on my phone and GPS…
Yes indeed Scott, very interesting. I didn’t know the maize was introduced from the Americas but there we go. There surely are a lot of maize plants around here. Great to know you are following along. Best wishes from Tanzania. Too bad I can’t be at Dayton this year, but hopefully next!
Thomas