Day 3 on my big ride.
Wow today was tough, it's 8.15in the evening and I can barely keep my eyes open. We are staying in a guest house just outside the town of Clarens, for those who know, it is a beautiful part of the world near the Drakensburg mountains. Today we basically rode over the Northern Drakensburg up a pass I forget the name of and through the Golden Gate National Park. I have some great photos by still do not have access to the Internet except for an iPad, which cannot upload photos on to the blog. Anyway if you have never been to Golden Gate in the Drakensburg, google it, it is really a special part of the country. As i said it'a National park and on occasions we were riding and enjoying watching herds of buck, zebra and wilderbeest. At one stage it seemed like they were attracted by us and 100's of animal ran in the same direction as us for a while, the general view of the riders is that they were attracted to the warning flags or our bright yellow jersey's.
Back to the tough day, we started in the early mist and soon were gunning along enjoying the magnificent scenery and the crisp morning air. We stopped for breakfast on the side of the road then set off to climb what is called the "Mother in law" climb, you can work out for yourself why it called that. The climb over this pass was the most difficult I have ever done, much worse than day one, and harder than anything I could have imagined. For those of you know about hill grades the maximum we rode was 20%, which is 8% higher than the hardest hill I trained on up in Sentul in Jakarta. At one stage it was impossible to peddle and I had to walk 300 or 400m, some of the others did as well thank goodness. At the top we were 2100m above sea level and on top of the world..
So summary so far is we have completed 300km, climbed at total of 3500m and donated close to 30,000 USD. My legs are sore, we have 145km to ride tomorrow and I must thank a friend of mine who recommended I buy a Brooks saddle, they are amazing.