Day 331 / 96

Date: 9 March 2023
Sleeping location: Sobantu Guest Farm, 26.1356S 31.2154E, Eswatini
Distance (km today/total/total Part 2): 85 / 20468 / 5631
Estimated climb (m today/total/total Part 2): 2400 / 182200 / 64200
Pink Floyd album of the day: The Wall
Day in three words: The biggest day

I packed up and heading off into bright sunshine again, beginning with a steep climb through more pine and eucalyptus with the odd monkey about. After a few undulations and some more climb I arrived in a world of huge, open, extremely beautiful views taking in forested peaks, grassland peaks and hazy blue peaks off in the distance. The road then snaked its way from mountainside to mountainside, rising and falling gently, and there were absolutely no cars and very few buildings to break the wonderful peace and natural beauty. It was an absolutely fantastic stretch of road. 

This area has some of the oldest rocks in the world and I stopped at a few information boards along the official “geotrail”. The first one was at the "painted quarry" where there are rocks 3.24bn years old, which I thought was pretty old. The old rocks were all swirly* as they've been around for so long that they’ve been pushed around by plate tectonics. This was usurped by some "black chert" which was 3.3bn years old and a sedimentary rock, which means I was essentially looking at 3.3bn year old microbes, which is quite something. But the best came last, the "pillow lavas" which were up to 3.57bn years old. The difference of “0.33” vs the painted quarry looks like a small number but is 330 million years. The dinosaurs ruled from 230 million years ago to 65 million years ago. These are some profound timescales. 

My first sight of Eswatini was a lovely view down into huge valley. The border itself was a doddle and over in about ten minutes as nobody else was there. A short steep descent took me down into Bulembu, a sleepy quiet hillside town where I had an early lunch. Initial impressions of Eswatini were that it seems quite wealthy for Africa, but not as wealthy as SA. After lunch the road decided I’d had enough pleasant riding and turned into an absolute horrorshow. The surface changed every 100m, varying between loose dirt and rock, smooth dirt, smooth looking dirt that was actually bumpy, dirt with massive gullies and/or adverse camber, actual rockfaces, crumbled tarmac and a few inexplicable sections of near perfect tarmac. If I didn't like the surface (which was usually) at least a different type would be along quickly. Add into this a series of terrifyingly steep climbs and descents and it became a real fight - all in all the 18km back to tarmac took two hours. The views were uniformly excellent but it was hard to appreciate them because I was trying so hard not to crash.

Battered and knackered, I arrived into Piggs Peak and the intersection with a proper road, the MR1 (All the big roads in Eswatini are called MR(X), so in my head I called them "Mister 1" and so on, and I am going to write them thusly even if it only serves to entertain me). I stopped at a supermarket for a second lunch, eaten in a park, and was so thirsty that a 2l bottle of lemon drink was gone in minutes. Even on the Mister 1 the surface was terrible and inconsistent, and a stretch of potholes followed by an unexpectedly aggressive speed bump led to one of my panniers flying off and being dragged along behind Maggie, sustaining a fair bit of damage. Eswatini had not been kind to me so far.

 

The road was still very hilly, but less beautiful as the open forest had been replaced by bare hillside with track and houses everywhere in random places. There were also lots of people out on the roads for the first time in a while, including large groups of schoolchildren heading home. Most stared, some said hello, some shouted things that I didn’t understand and one older girl smiled coquettishly and told me I looked nice, which was weird as I am probably the same age as her dad. Lake Maguga jazzed up the landscape when it appeared, shimmering far below me as shafts of sunlight broke through the clouds. At the bottom of a big descent was the dam that had created it, which was pretty impressive and had a huge sluiceway disgorging a lot of water into the river below. Whilst crossing the dam I saw signs warning of crocodiles and hippos, and a mental image of a hippo using the sluiceway as a water slide popped into my head and made me laugh to myself quite a lot. By this point it was late in the day, I’d done a LOT of climbing and I was apparently slightly delirious. Standing between me and the hostel I was aiming for was a steep, hot and humid 600m climb, not much easier than the “Barberton Bastard” of the previous day.

I started crawling my way up, deep into “survival mode” from the beginning. Halfway up I heard a familiar noise and saw a pannier-laden motorbike in my mirror. It was Sarah, who was coming this way by pure chance. She had also come from Barberton, but in two hours vs my 24, and at the border she’d seen my name in the sign in book (with only one other name since - that’s how quiet the border is). She had no idea I was here, as she hadn’t had phone data since arriving in SA, and had no idea which way I’d gone once in Eswatini, but randomly took the Mister 1, randomly saw the sign for the dam and randomly decided on a whim to go that way. I told her where I was planning to stay and we agreed to meet there and catch up properly. 

She zoomed off but I still had a good 300m of climb to go, and 100m into this my body, for the first time on this trip, hit the wall. I literally couldn’t continue. I got off Maggie and ate an entire bag of peanuts and my emergency sour worm sweets, about 700 calories in total, then waited until my legs re-solidified and my head stopped swimming. Even after setting off I still felt broken and disconnected from reality and rode very slowly into a crash barrier for no reason. I limped up the rest of the seemingly endless climb to the lodge, which was of course up a super steep driveway, arriving just before darkness. Sarah had been wondering how it had taken me about 90 minutes to cover 4km. It took a couple of hours for me to recover my humanity, and I knew I needed to eat as much as possible to help my body recover its energy so I ordered four separate dishes for dinner. They clearly thought I was insane but I ate it all. In terms of climb, the biggest day of the trip**; in terms of physical effort, probably also the biggest day. 

*Perhaps attracted to the swirliness, as they are also sort of swirly, there were also hundreds of small millipedes hanging out together on the old rocks

**2400m in 85km, ending at about the same altitude that I started at, represents an average gradient for the entire day of 5.6%.