Geoff Jones

Day 25073 – Biking Namibia – Seeheim to Keetmanshoop

Sunday 20 Mar 2016

A nice easy ride of only 33 miles and a steady continual climbing of 1,247 feet. Which was just as well as I had a terrible night’s sleep at the Seeheim Hotel the room was very stuffy and the fan very noisy. The breakfast, however, was more filling than last nights dinner. I felt quite sorry for the owner running a pretty big hotel down a dirt track with no mains electric etc.

On arrival at Keetmanshoop I went straight to the station and discovered that since it was Sunday the ticket office was closed till 4.15pm so I wandered around town trying to find a place to hangout. The Canyon Hotel was totally soulless so after a drink I moved on to Steers the burger / Pizza bar 🙁 the best place I found in the end was Central Lodge Hotel . At 4pm I returned to the station and read the other notice which said due to Independence Day tomorrow the train tonight was cancelled 🙁 🙁

So back to the Central Lodge where a party of Germans was unloading from a coach, fortunately they had a single room available cash only! and WiFi that works.

Unbelievably Picasa uploads also started working again creating new directories OK so maybe it was just a glitch in the changeover at Google.

The Strava is here

and pics here

Day 25072 Namibia cycling Aus to Seeheim

Sat 19th March 2016

I’ve now given up on the route described by Thomas Anderson in his excellent blog. Basically me and my bike can’t hack the dirt roads or more precisely the sand -(

So today I sped along the gorgeous tarmac road towards Keetmanshoop. A fantastic 104 miler comfortably done under my own steam and easily in daylight! (7.30 to 4.30 including stops). I had booked into the Seeheim Hotel otherwise I might have done the extra 40km to Keetmanshoop.

I had a fabulous farewell from my SA farmer friends as their convoy overtook me hooting & waving. The road was pretty well deserted the rest of the day only an odd car and truck. No wind and slight downhill for long periods as I dropped from 5000 feet to 3000 feet.

Towards the end of the day as you get closer to The Fish River the hillsides became clothed in a fragrant yellow flower (Double Kiss in Afrikaans) and greenery started to appear.

A good day’s riding 106.4miles in 7:51:50 Moving Time and 2,139ft of ascent The pics are on Google here

Day 25071 185 miles in a Toyota Landcruiser

Some might say sanity has returned others may say why choose to go on a mega family outing with 6 adults and 7 energetic young kids 🙂

I decided to take a day of, Abrie & Ilze-Marie offered to let me tag along on their tour of Kolmanskop, Diaz Cross & Luderitz. Tomorrow a whole convoy of them are doing a 3 day dune driving experience.

I can now see why they drive so fast! It seemed to take ages even though it’s only 120km.

Kolmanskop is an amazing ghost town that was once one of the wealthiest places on the planet. Around 1 ton of diamonds were literally picked up out of the sand! Once depleted and a new source was find everyone just upped and left 🙂 So the place has been left for the sand to encroach & destroy. I wonder how much of Germany’s wealth came from places like this.

We then went for a walk to Diaz Cross which is on a peninsula jutting out from Luderitz. Fascinating to see pink flamingos just wandering along the beach’s and to see the unbridled energy of 7 kids roaming the rocks.

In Luderitz we found a Spar which unbelievably had yellow bananas etc etc plus I stocked up on Amila sachets as well as finding non chocolate coated energy bars 🙂

Tomorrow looks like another long day – the closest hotel seems to be at Seeheim. Although it appears there is a 40mile downhill stretch 🙂

Day 25070 Biking Namibia – Rosh Pinah to Aus

Thurs 17 March

Today was always going to be hard as the 105 miles between Rosh Pinah & Aus there is precisely niet. A couple of business guys at the hotel said they would arrange a lift on one of their trucks but of course no call came. So after wasting way to much time on trying to get Picasa to work (You really have to question the brains of the Google leaders) I set of.

First stop was the garage to buy 4.5 litres of water and some energy bars (why are they always coated in chocolate that turns into a gooey mass?). Then it was straight into the lovely tarmaced obligatory hill. This was a monster a 2600 feet steady climb over the first 25 miles. 🙂 My wonder sachets of Amila certainly helped as they made the warm water drinkable and kept me going.

……so the seemingly endless kilometres passed on more or less straight roads, wind never deciding if it was going to help or hinder me. Overall I think it helped 🙂

As the day passed it was pretty clear I was going to run out of light, not stamina. At the 40km post I managed to get a signal so rang the hotel saying I was going to arrive late the owner kindly offered to pick me up! At the 30km marker I met him and we bombed back making it to The Bahnhof Hotel in Aus just before dusk.

The hotel is excellent, run with Teutonic efficiently I managed the first decent dinner in days!

Strava says I biked 86.7mi and rode up 4,358ft of hills. So a pretty good day which I could have biked the remaining 19 miles if I had left at 7am instead of after 9am

Uploading pictures in bulk is turning into a total nightmare! The Picasa uploader has now finished as obviously Google has disabled the ability to create new directories 🙁 Flickr drops out as it always did. Smugmug wants to upload the full file sizes which is impractical on such slow connections. All in all a mess. Google seems to be begging folks to use FaceBook…

The observant ones may wonder why day 25070 in the title. I rather liked the way Thomas Anderson used the number of days he has been away biking the world in his title. I thought I would use the number of days since I was born 🙂