Unexpectedly tough
The day dawned calm, sunny and windless, which cheered us up quite a bit given the stage ahead of us: 120 straight, flat kilometres to the coast. With no time to lose we set off down the track towards Henties Bay, hoping to ride along happily without the route becoming too much of a slog. Little by little we make progress and clock up the kilometres. The surface is good for the most part, and the short stretches of corrugations and sand don’t bother us much.
But little by little the wind picks up and we go slower and slower. The landscape changes, and the little vegetation around us is gradually swallowed by the sand. We pass the sign marking the entrance to the Dorob National Park. Its name, which means dry land in the local language, leaves us in little doubt about what the landscape ahead will be like. This park, 1,600 kilometres long, stretches along the whole central part of the Namibian coast. Although the landscape and the track hardly change, from this point on we go slower and slower. The wind stops us in our tracks, and the monotonous terrain doesn’t help one bit.
The monotony of the ride is broken only by the odd car overtaking us now and then. One of them pulls up beside us: it turns out to be the owner of the campsite where we spent the night. He gives us some encouragement, which we really need, since our spirits are at rock bottom. The further we go, the heavier everything feels. The wind blows harder and harder and the panniers seem to weigh more and more. My hopes of riding down a track with the ocean in the distance have come to nothing: the horizon is just a line of sand. The last kilometres are torture. The slight downhill is barely noticeable, and it feels just as if we were climbing a mountain. But our stubbornness pays off and we finish the wretched track: more than 100 kilometres in a straight line have taken us from Uis to the coast road linking Cape Cross and Henties Bay.
We turn left towards Henties Bay on a road in much better condition than the tortuous track before it. The wheels don’t sink and the bikes fly.
In just seven kilometres we reach the campsite. It’s truly been one of our worst days on a bike, and at last it’s over. There was nothing interesting about it, except finding out how much our heads can take, with more than seven hours of pedalling into the wind and no incentive other than reaching our destination.
A comfortable campsite and a splendid dinner at the Fishy Corner restore us after the effort. Here I try, for the first (and last) time, a fish that’s very common off the coasts of Namibia and South Africa called kabeljou. It turned out to be a very tasty white fish, though as hungry as we are, we’re easy to please.
Tomorrow we have 70 kilometres along the coast, easy on paper. Different landscape, different climate and different towns. We’ll reach Swakopmund, a typically German town on the African coast.