Day 313 / 78

Date: 19 February 2023
Sleeping location: Half finished shop 20.0053S 32.4295E, Zimbabwe

Distance (km today/total/total Part 2): 97 / 19184 / 4347
Estimated climb (m today/total/total Part 2): 1400 / 167800 / 49800

Wind direction: undecided

Day in three words: Gravity vs time

On waking (quite late) it was raining heavily, which encouraged an excessively relaxed morning to the extent that by the time it cleared I was already well behind a normal schedule. In a sense I was also trying to extract some extra niceness from the nice place. Eventually I left at 10.45, a little after Sarah, confident that I could still make some big distance as there was a net height loss of close to 1000m to around where I’d end the day.

This started with a 10km descent back down the river valley, which was nice but frustrated a bit by a headwind. The wind was mischievous all day, blustering at me from every angle with no apparent consistency of direction. From the bottom I had a 10km climb back out to the main road at Skyline Junction, but it was mostly a nice gradient so I just sat and spun calmly upwards, enjoying the peaceful pine forest with little sound except the swirling wind. Up at the top were monkeys, some huge views and, inexplicably, a crab. At 1700m above sea level and hundreds of kilometres from the sea. Maybe it was on holiday?

Down the other side was a series of very very fun, fast and sweeping descents down the side of the mountain, through more empty pine, then eucalyptus, then deciduous forest, followed by a climb up out of the final bowl. All the while I had wonderful views off to the left and almost zero traffic of either the human or vehicle kind, and in fact hardly any sign of human activity at all. It was a fittingly beautiful end to my Chimanimani experience. At the top of the bowl there were suddenly people about and the landscape changed to a mixture of forest and farmland, then I had another descent, briefly passing through an area which reminded me of Shropshire before the landscape changed again to acacia and lush grassland. Halfway down I stopped for lunch at a lovely quiet and shady spot by a dry stream. With all the descending I was making good time and offsetting the late start.

Across the grassland I had a long and gradual descent with a tailwind/crosswind/headwind even though I was only going in one direction. At a junction a man attempted to greet me by saying repeatedly "hello James". The only real response here is "my name isn't James" which appeared to completely befuddle him. 
After the junction I turned into* a wide green valley full of banana plantations. People (or monkeys??) had left peels all over the road and I had to use experience gained during all my time playing Mario Kart to avoid them. After another short descent I finally arrived back into classic hot and dry African savannah. The variety of landscapes that I experienced within around 75km of riding was remarkable**. 

After a long gradual climb I came up onto a ridgeline and saw extremely heavy rain across the entire horizon, right in the direction I was going. The wind really picked up, lightning began to flash all around and it was clear a big storm was imminent. I decided to stop a little early as trying to put up a tent in these conditions was not going to be ideal, so I asked at the next village if there was a place for me to camp, thinking that I could shelter from the storm whilst it got dark and still have a safe spot to sleep. This worked out much better than expected as I was very quickly shown to a half finished building that I could sleep in. Just after I was safely installed it began raining violently and didn’t stop for half an hour. My rain avoidance streak therefore continued and is now up to four days. The villagers were the perfect amount of friendly, talking with me for a bit before leaving me to my own devices. I picked up a couple of cold beers from the shop (one advantage of urban camping) and made sardine tomato spaghetti, which wasn't bad with the addition of reams of hot sauce.

*As in entered, not became

**And my excuse for why I have gone on about them so much