Up the same piece of lovely tar as Sunday, I stopped at the end of it and looked at the dirt. Storm clouds with a blue sky hole hundreds of kilometres in front of me which I was pretty certain I would be under at about the same time the hole was no longer blue but would have rain pounding out of it.
I had retuned the valve timing to the setting I had on the way to Kitwe, Smugly was a lot easier to ride.
Villages on the dirt road were regular. What wasn’t, is a government building, abandoned, in the middle of nowhere
Or big bridges
And then I rode into Kasempa. O.k, I shouldn’t be here I thought, I wasn’t real sure where I was, but I knew Kasempa was the wrong place to be. I made a u turn and headed back up the road looking for Kolomboshi.
Turns out I had ridden straight past it and the turn off I was looking for.
The Kolombashi school had lost its roof off a classroom some months earlier, I stopped and talked to the school headmaster and teachers about their predicament.
Showing them the crude hand written instructions I had been given, they all agreed that I was heading in the right direction. So after an hour of conversation, they waved me goodbye.
500 metres beyond the school, the two tracks in the grass I should have taken the first time were found and smugly was turned up them. There are zero road signs in Zambia, basically everybody knows where they are going as they only do the local area. If people are travelling through unfamiliar country, they ask for directions, much the same way Australia did 50 years ago.
The blue sky hole now indeed was black. With lightning strikes killing people weekly at the peak of the wet, you don’t stay outside, so when it did start raining I sought refuge in an abandoned building.
Turns out it was a church.
The last 80km of the ride was wet. When it stopped raining, we pounded along in wet roads, mud and water depth going from tyre depth to footpeg height, power lines down across the road that were navigated with care and concern and finally on the tar again 15km south of Mutanda. By now, once again, the wind was howling, I was flat on the tank, throttle wide open, had gone back to 3rd gear but Smugly’s speedo was still winding itself backwards. I made it Mutanda as the rain really kicked in and dived under a verandah for shelter..I was on my own as everybody else had disappeared.
I waited it out for an hour. Finally the wind eased off, the rains abated and I ventured once more onto the road in the rain and wind for the final 40km home. This time there were no living beings to dodge, but there were trees down to manouver around. It was a bit like a slalom.
It rained all the way back to the security checkpoints at the site entrance. Normal procedure is stop, show your I.D. go 20 metres to the next one, blow into the breathalyser, then proceed. I had to laugh, both sets of gates were open and I got waved through them as the guards were not getting out in the deluge to breathalyse some crazy muzungu on a motorbike in the rain.
800km in four days, hardly a big ride, but in this area it isn’t about the distance, its about who you meet and the adventures along the way.
