Cycling Tour d'Afrique 2019: 19/04/20, stage 66, Maun to Baobab Bush Camp

The comming week is a big week, which makes most riders a bit nervous. We ride 5 days from Maun to Windhoek, covering a distance of 839k, which is an average distance of 168k per day. We also have our longest day of the tour this week, which is 208k. I don’t like all the talk about “the week”. I just want to take it day by day, because that’s how I got as far as I am now. I like looking at the map to see how far we’ve already come actually, because that’s a real confidence booster for me :-)

So a 157k ride today. And we’re riding into the Kalahari desert! Scenery was not that great though, very similar to the bush that we’ve been seeing since we entered Botswana, although our surroundigs are slowly but steadily getting more arid again.

I felt pretty well rested this morning, and despite my air adventure yesterday I felt re-energized and fit. I started of riding by myself. Easy always does it, especially on long days like today, so I took it easy. Luckily we had the wind our backs! After some 30k I was overtaken by Pete, Elaine and Jerome and because of the monotony of our surroundings I joined them in their train! And we ran it with precission and accuracy, and before we knew it we made it to lunch. And after lunch we made it quite easily to camp. And we camp bear this old big Baobab tree, which is just amazing :-)

Normally I don’t like riding in a train, but this week, with these monotonous views and with these distances, it’s quite comfortable to be part of a collective. I think I saved about 30% of my energy today, which is good!

So a good day today! Lets see what tomorrow brings!