The night wasn’t completely mozzie-less after all. There was a few flying around and biting like mad. I have used repellent on all of my exposed body parts plus most of my clothes I was wearing so I was kind of OK. Tanja however doesn’t like repellents so she wanted to put up the tent. I refused since it was long after dark already and I was in quite a lot of pain from the broken rib so I could barely move and my foot was giving me quite difficulty walking too. Needless to say that Tanja wasn’t impressed and at the end resorted to wrapping her entire body into a quite warm sleeping bag. Remember that even the nights here are around 27 C!!!
Today we arrived at an intersection leading to another over 400km long track without any towns along it. There was a warning that the road is opened to a high clearance vehicles only which scared me a bit since I am currently not handling difficult surface very well thanks to my injuries. The other option was to ride through Mt. Isa, which would mean at least 700km detour. Tanja didn’t want to do that so I hesitantly subdued.
It really wasn’t too bad except of a couple of river crossings (wheel ruts in mud and the river still flowing accross) and few places with bull dust (a kind of a fine sand/dust that the bike dives into like into water). At one spot I had problems with my heavy back again and while trying to stop my fall to the side with my leg I hurt it against the right pannier. This time it is only going to be a bruise though.
Before the sun set we found a nice camping spot among a few surrounding hills. The way to this spot was through a few ditches and since my broken rib hurt a lot when the bike went over those I was trying to go as slow as possible. That lead to my bike stalling in the middle of the last ditch and I couldn’t manage to prop it with my hurt leg so it fell. While waiting for Tanja to come to help me lift it back on its wheels her bike stand slumped into the soft sandy ground and fell as well. Now we had to stand up two bikes – an operation that gives me hell through my broken rib…
(250km)