14 February 2019, Potfontein to De Aar, 58,1km
Karoo Fountain Luxury Guesthouse R390

Mwahowrrrughrrow = the sound you make when you have bitten off more than you can chew!
Our wonderful hosts got up early enough to serve us coffee and rusks, and fried eggs on toast, before our 06:00 departure. After breakfast, we stepped into a morning cool enough to be labelled “chilly”. And climbed, admittedly almost imperceptibly, for the first 35km of this long ride, which promised 40km on dirt and 18km on tar. (Extraordinary to put “climbed” and “35km” into the same sentence just two weeks into our trip.) By 09:30, when we had been on the road three and a half hours, but with just 25km under our belts, the heat came out.
The road had been graded fairly recently and more often than not in the early stages provided us with a narrow section of hard-packed earth easy enough to cycle. But 10 to 15km before we hit tar at a T-junction, the road became treacherous with soft sand that caused Charl to drop with his weighty bike, and forced us often thereafter from our saddles onto our feet. It was not much fun pushing our bikes, stubborn and heavy, through retarding sand in the heat.
The only bit of “excitement” in all that slog was a length of wire unseen by me which was picked up by my back wheel and had wrapped itself a couple of times around my rear cogs before I could bring my bike to a stop.
When dirt finally met tar, it had taken us SIX HOURS to ride 40km and we still had 18km to go, 14km to De Aar and another 4km to Karoo Fountain and our pre-booked room.
We were hugely grateful for a 6km downhill run, then had to grin and bear a multi-km climb beside a sun farm, solar panels angled into the sun in long rows banked up a long hill in a field protected from thieves. Then past the abattoir and cemetery and a Rastafarian in a wheelbarrow under a shady tree, and under the railway bridge into town.
First order of business: food - so into Chicken City for chicken and chips and ice cold Coke.
Exhausted.

For today's route see below photos
For overview route, click on ROUTE tab above…