Steve's Cycling Blog

I managed to get off to sleep after a while last night, but I didn’t even need my sleeping bag liner at any stage it stayed so warm and muggy through the night.

Sharita didn’t have such a late night last night getting a route sorted but the fist part of it was so complicated that they didn’t try and provide route notes or flagging, but instead grouped us up with a crew member who had the new GPX track to lead us through.

Thankfully they also posted a Dropbox link to that route which i was able to download to my phone, transfer to may laptop and then load that onto my Garmin and those of a number of other riders so that there were more of us with the route than just the crew as while the first stage is the most complicated later parts are different from the tracks we already have.

With such a short distance for us, but a longer route for the trucks it’s expected that we’ll be at the hotel before them, so there wasn’t going to be a lunch stop, instead we made some packed lunches to take with us.

Why giraffes?

We left with the first group at just before 0730 with Tom as our guide – unfortunately Tom doesn’t actually have maps for Senegal on his Garmin, so though he had the track to follow, he had no way to correlate that with roads so in reality it was as much me as it was him leading our group.

Quite how they had worked out the route is a mystery to me – it made use of partially developed subdivisions, farm tracks, roads, lanes, construction sites, and a while mix of other options to get us through – no wonder the original plan had been to ride down the beach.

Once we got through the worst of the initial stages and onto the new pavement the faster riders broke away from the rest of the group with Canadian Kevin and I leading Kevin, Mateo, Paul, Erwin and Italo.

On the new road we were comfortably sitting at 30+ km/h up to the point that abruptly ended with a half-built bridge. From there we were mostly on smaller local roads with increasingly more traffic as we headed further in to the city.

Though Max had done his best with the flagging it would have been hard to follow without the route on my Garmin, so I was leading our group through to the hotel – in the end I only missed one turn and that was as much to do with the traffic and the road layout as anything.

By 1000 we were at the hotel which is a great way to start a rest day, since it gives us almost another whole day! While we waited for the hotel to be ready for us to wash our bikes off (before storing them in the hotel conference room!!) I went to find some cold drinks, locating a very nice looking coffee shop, Sweet Coffee, and a decent Auchan supermarket in the process.

Back to the hotel I washed my bike by which time Australian Kevin had the key for our room for the next few days.

We also needed to change some money as we need 70,000 CFA (a bit over €100) to hand to Max by 0700 tomorrow for our Guinea visas. I’d located a couple of bureau de change online last night which were on the route in to town but they hadn’t been open as we came in. We’d also seen a couple of others, so began to retrace our route to see if they were open – amazingly the one 100m up the road was open and offered us a very good rate, so in the end what looked like it might be a bit of difficult mission was over and done with in 10 min. Phew!

We sat in the shade outside the hotel while waiting for the trucks to arrive with our bags – somewhat reminiscent of waiting for the lunch truck to arrive with my permanent bag on Silk route rest days.

Next stop was a shower and shave, before handing in our washing – at 2,500 CFA per kg (about £3) it might prove to be a bit expensive, but hopefully it’ll get washed properly for the first time in the last few weeks, and more importantly without significant input from me!

I’ve got seriously behind with my blog over the last week – a combination of the tiring days, hot conditions and limited power, mixed in with quite a bit of ‘can’t be bothered’, so I made a start on getting caught up. For the first couple of days I’d done the writing, but it was a matter of getting that uploaded, along with images, captions, galleries, riding data etc, etc.

Dan joined the four of us to head to Sweet Coffee for lunch – the food proved to be great, but the service was very slow which turned the process into something more of an ordeal than ideal.

I took the long way back to the hotel which included heading back to a Casino (French brand) supermarket which I’d seen on the way in. It’s a very good version of itself and it was nice to have some sparkling water for a change – I was tempted by the sparkling wine as well, but that worked out at about £70 a bottle, so that was a no 😉

Some more work on my blog before meeting up with some of the departing riders for a few farewell drinks.

Ray and Caroline joined the four usual suspects to head out for dinner – another group had been to a place up the road for pizzas for lunch and reported that they were excellent, plus there was also ice-cream by the scoop so that sounded like the perfect dinner destination!

Back to the hotel and it was time for bed after a pretty tiring week – we’ve got plenty of time to explore Dakar over the next three days while we wait for our visas to be issued so there’s no hurry!

View from my tent

This one isn’t worth photographing – there’s a wall about 1m away outside our hotel window and that’s all we can see!

Selfie of the day

Check back next week!

Riding data