Day 64, 2011/07/04 Marsibit to Moyale

Day 64,  2011/07/04 Marsibit to Moyale

Day 64, 2011/07/04

The knee feels a lot more painful the night after the day before. However, it was not going to prevent me from pushing onto Moyale. After a quick breakfast, I am on my bike by 6:30 am. The initial 30 km are actually lovely dirt, and am able to ride at 70 km/h very easily. Approximately, 30 min out from Marsibit,the road turns ugly. Well I guess I have too define ugly. It becomes very rocky and pebbly. So one is affectively riding on marbles. This would be ok except for the fact that the tricks and buses,who frequent that road, have dug huge big trenches in it. That together with the fact that, the terrain either side of the road is nothing but large lumps of volcanic rock mean that,you have no alternative but to ride in these trenches. On the bright side,these pebbles are easier to ride then thick sand would be. I decide to ride most of the time standing up on my foot pegs, trying to prevent any unnecessary falls like the previous day. The pebbles persist for what appears to be an eternity, well 100 km to be precise. At times I thought it would simply never end! Eventually I arrive in a small town called Torbit, which contains a small community of camel herdsmen. After a quick coke and some water, i get reassured by locals that the remaining 120 km to Moyale is nothing like the pebbles I have done and, is infect a stunning road. Well, was I to be disappointed! They of course were being relative, to the road i had just done and not to the quality of dirt roads in general! Needless to say, i was subjected to a further 120 km of corrugation for my sins! So needless to say, i was pretty exhausted by the time I managed to arrive in Moyale. It was already 15:30 by the time i rolled into town, and I was really not looking forward to camping. 9 hours of that kind of road demanded some luxury, i was pointed in the direction of a hotel in town.the building was really something else. It was a big 5/6 story building. Everything was tiled and really looked like the Tagmahal relative to the rest of everything else around it. It turns out to be on R125 a night, including breakfast.