19/03/19, stage 42, Singida to Game Post

I had a great sleep last night. I took a room at the motel where we were staying and abused my own personal shower beyond recognition and after that fell asleep like a block of concrete. This morning I woke up pretty well rested 🙂 Best thing was that Errol – our cook – made French toast for breakfast!

Today’s ride was quite uneventfull, with only two short gradual climbs and some very gradual rolling hills. I rode to lunch with Vikas and after him being in charge of the music yesterday, I took charge today. At lunch I ate lunch and after that I took a long nap in the shade of a tree. Vik woke me up when staff was already packing up the lunch truck. I had to cone from far and could easily have slept for another hour or so. Me waking up so late meant that me and Vik were last out of camp and that we rode with the sweep!

10k’s after lunch we got to the dirt road which we will be following for the next 4 days. At the pace Vik and me were riding it was horrible and bumpy, so I picked up the pace and made it a lot more fun. My bike is made for these kind of roads and these kind of roads are best ridden fast 🙂 And so I did, meaning that I had to leave Vik behind with the sweep.

I really enjoyed myself for the 40k on the dirt road, and so did the bike. I overtook many of the other riders and 15k before the end of the ride I made it to a coke stop where another bumch of riders was lingering. There were also a lot of little Tanzanian kids around, who probably never had seen a Mzungu before. So I asked the shopkeeper if it would be appropriate to buy the kids some candy. He said it was, so I gave him 10.000 Tanzanian Schilling, which is about 4 dollars, which is about 3,5 euro, and asked him which candies the children liked best. He replied that the kids like sodas so we started handing out sodas to the kids 🙂 The result was that other kids in the direct surrounding of the shop saw this and came running as well 🙂 We ended up handing out sodas to about 30 kids, ranging from beginning teenagers to a little girl that bearly started walking 🙂 The bottle of fanta she got was almost bigger than she was 🙂

We opened the bottles and all kids started drinking their sodas. The smiles on their faces were just unbelievable. The joy that Coka Cola spreads around the world! I never had so much fun and brought so much joy for only 3,5 euro! No pictures of this scene though. Some things are just better storred in memory amd can’t be captured by a photograph…