SAND bikepacking route Segment 2 – part 1
The small town of Nieuwoudtville provided a break for 2 days. We cleaned stuff and rested on the first day and rode a 70km loop recommended by Ulger our host on the second day – a busman’s holiday I guess you could call it. It was nice to spin unladen on smooth roads with no wind to purge the memory of our slow arrival into the town. We saw quiver trees, a waterfall, a fence load of tumble weed and more.
Next day we headed west towards the coast and the start of the 2nd segment of the SAND route we were following (mostly). Brunch at the roadside Bagdad cafe and dinner at the largest winery in the Southern Hemisphere (Namaqua) bookmarked a tailwind day on tarseal – just a pity about the lack of a shoulder and the large number of magnetite toting trucks bearing down on us. At dinner neither of us could finish the two half litre carafes of wine that came with the meal – and it was not really suitable to take and fill our water bottles for the next day.
At the coast we enjoyed a lovely fish and chip lunch the following day and fun coastal tracks to Strandfontein. Here we camped for free at the municipal campsite on the beachfront (for some reason they didn’t want payment). We had damp coastal clag to the resupply town of Lutzville. The town was humming and the supermarket crazy busy (like Wanaka used to be at Xmas with only one supermarket) as I bought supplies for 3-4 days. My neighbour in the looong snaky queue informed me benefits were paid out the day previous.
We have food down to a ‘T’. Breakfast is tea, coffee, gingernuts, muesli and rehydrated fruit, lunch is cheese & crackers, dinner is pasta/fish or pasta/baked beans plus we have a new item on the menu – 2 minute noodles & peanut butter. Snacks are peanuts & raisins and the odd snickers. It is simple and seems to work between towns.
Loaded up with a nights water we had a good ride to a wild beach camp surprised at our fast travel. Next morning we resupplied water at salt evaporation works before the tracks turned to sandy s**t and we were on and off our bikes trying to ride as much as we could as pushing the bikes was hard. We ended up pushing a lot, maybe 10kms, with the uniform flat scrubland and track extending kilometres in the distance and heat making for a tough day. The highlight was a good campsite and dips into a rock pool at the end of the day. We were surprised at how much water we had gone through but nearby seaweed harvesters kindly gave us a couple more litres to get us to the Namaqua National Park entrance the next day.
At 4 in the morning our tent was slammed with strong wind, so along with even softer sandier tracks the 14km to the park boundary took us 2 and a half hours – the gale force head winds adding insult to injury. At the park the we considered options. What we had ridden was not even noted as sandy on the trip details so the even sandier sandy tracks coming up on the route through the NP coupled with gale force northerlies meant we were not going much further that day. The park ranger assured us of accommodation and food 3km up the road so we battled there and spent the rest of the day in a sheltered verandah waiting and hoping for the owners to return.
By 6pm we had cooked dinner and 7 were in our sleeping bags hoping they didn’t return, to find us camped out in their entranceway. Next morning the winds had died and we left a thank you note and tracks in the sand of their property to tell of our prescence.
We were running low on food so we rerouted to Garies, a small town on the edge of the N7 which is the main highway north from Cape Town to Namibia to save us the heartache of the notoriously sandy tracks through the National park. Instead we headed inland on, at times horribly corrugated gravel, but the scenery was changing. Granite outcrops topped small hills and the background mountains had large granite domes.
We had another problem to sort as well – the charging port on my power bank was stuffed meaning it was useless. The backup had also decided not to work. The dynamo on my front wheel is the third backup but with the slow speed on a lot of the roads meant I was left with little ability to charge on sections between accommodation.
It would be a week till we got to the larger town of Springbok but then we discovered that the ‘Chinese’ shop in the little town of Garies sold powerbanks – Aliexpress in realtime – and only $22 for same capacity. South African load sharing is a euphemism for power cuts. There is a schedule for knocking out power for up to 4 hours at a time all through the country. With the recent elections they had stopped the practice and it was yet to start up again as the new coalition government was still forming. Because of load sharing, power banks were a more common item than you might expect. Our (minor) power crisis had been averted and I could still keep taking photos!
From Garies we can stay off the highway and meet up with the route again before the end of the day. Next update Springbok!
