Day 37 – Efeson to Dessie ( 128 km)

04.02.2012

Jules writes:

After passing quite restless night (Shan had to put in ear-plugs in order to sleep through my dads snoring, and I had managed to to make a semi-comfortable matrass by pushing two narrow benches together and sleeping on them), we reluctantly started packing our bags and putting them on the bike. Finally, all good to go, Shan and John started their engines, and then Dad said those all-too-familiar words “Jules, you’re back tyre is flat".

Seriously!!!

So off come all the bags, out come the tools, and we go through the whole schpeel of changing the tyre, a task that is very time consuming, even after having done it five times already on our trip. Eventually, the task was completed and we put all the bags back on the bike, and were ready to depart.

Except that my bike wouldn’t start, sounded like the battery was flat. SOOO, we had to push start the bike, managing to get it started after only three attempts. Considering that I had been feeling decidedly unwell for the previous day or two, this was not the best way to start a day.

At this stage, we had descended to the floor of the valley, and the roads dipped and curved round hills, the ultimate biker terrain, regularly interspersed with quick stops for a photo-op or two. As lunch time came around, we found ourselves driving up some steeply winding roads, climbing over 1000 m in under an hour, up to the town of Dessie, which had been our intended stopover point for the previous day until the fuel debacle had thwarted those plans. We found a restaurant called Tossa (heehee) that the Lonely Planet guide had heartily recommended. We enjoyed a delicious roast chicken meal and thick Ethiopian coffee, and then climbed back on our bikes…

“Jules, you’re back tyre is flat again”

SERIOUSLY?!?!? That is now five times on this trip, more than twice as many as all the rest of the groups punctures combined. But what can you do? Sulking and moaning won’t fix the tyre, and so all you can do is get back on the horse and find a place to fix it. As it was now 2:00, we decided to put enough air in the tyre to find our way to a local hotel and fix the tyre there. As in the previous town, many of the hotels were fully booked, but eventually we managed to find a great place called the Qualiber Hotel, where we checked into our rooms and then started work on the bike. The tyre was generally wearing a bit thin, and so we decided to put on the spare tyre (that Shan has been carrying on the back of her bike since day 1, much to her joy) and with some difficulty, managed to get the new tyre on. We have definitely come a long way since that first puncture in Malawi, which took us about four hours to change, and eventually was done by a local mechanic. Go Team.

As always, Shan attracts lots of attention from the local gents, and so we have decided that the easiest route is for her to just say that we are married. What is amazing, though, is the number of guys that will still tell her “I need you”, even while I am standing right there. I think I need to give some of them a lesson in stealing someone else’s fake wife, bloody hound-dogs.