Desert Biker!

For the first time in this trip I have stayed more than one night in one place. Travelling with Keith is probably good for me at the moment. He's on a four month tour of North Africa having already been on the road for a couple of months. It means he rides slowly, goes short distances in each day and stays to enjoy a place.

I'm unwinding rather than treating each day as a challenge to conquer and it has altered my goals too. Perhaps I don't need to ride huge gnarly pistes every day and doing the occasional touristy thing is ok.

Today we ditched the bags at our lovely campsite/auberge and headed out to do a circuit of Erg Chebbi. Neither of us had any sand riding experience before so today was an opportunity to put theory into practice on the small stretches of sand on our rocky track.

In case everyone is not up to speed with sand riding theory it goes like this: when you hit scary, nasty, front wheel wobbling sand that is try to pitch you off, the trick is to nail the throttle and stand up. Not exactly intuitive...

We paddled our feet, wobbled and ate our hearts a fair few times but by the end of the 50 mile route we had learnt skills and gained confidence. It had also been a big rush, maybe some of the touristy thing will have to wait after all... Check Flickr again for more pictures.