Thanks Flippie

Steyn farm - Aranos - Halfway to Gobasis - back to Aranos - Bosduin farm

The travelling today was very cautious after our newfound respect for the Kalahari gravel/sand, Flippie's leg was even trapped by his won bike deciding to rest on top of it.  With about an hour left before sunset we made it to Aranos with only the 40km out to the farm left, which we even described with confidence to be great timing. I even discovered here in Aranos that my starter was working again although it was at the expense of my headlight.

Now to put this next piece into perspective I need to tell you that I had been doing all the navigation so far, which wasn't something to brag about until today.. We were visiting a friend of Flippie's so obviously he contacted him to ask which road we should be taking to get to his farm, after the quick phone call we saddled up and were on our way, at 47km into the supposed to be 40km ride(which you must note is about 45min on the scoots) we stopped at a farm house to ask if they could give us directions, at which point we realised we were wrong, see in Nam everyone knows everyone, and when the girl failed to recognise their 20thousand hectare farm name we knew we had to be way off. Thanks Flippie!

This would not have been such a big problem with 20mins of daylight left but with no light this night might still get very long seeing that we now didn't know where the farm was.  With 20kms left to Aranos darkness struck but we also witnessed the most beautiful sunset I had ever seen. Somewhere along the road we found cellphone signal and the ever-kind Kobus de Jager(our host for the next two days) offered/agreed to come and fetch us in Aranos. But this still left us with 20km's of gravel at night.  We managed to reach a speed of 40km/h with Flippie riding 45degrees behind me in the lane on my right, the system was working beautifully although after about 20mins I realised my eyes were getting very dry and with the slight burn we decided that we weren't blinking from pure concentration.

That was one of the most rewarding rides of the trip for me as it was such a challenge so we rewarded ourselves with a tall brandy at the Aranos hotel while waiting for Kobus(we later realised his mother had phoned the whole town asking whether someone had seen two crazy kids on scooters passing by).

We loaded the scooters onto the bakkie and in our excitement of finally reaching the farm we even managed to break Flippie's key off in the ignition.

That night we spent laughing at the navigational mastermind Flip had turned out to be on the three roads that Aranos posesses.