Did a very hard 88km today. If ever any of you poor bastids find yourselves around Sofala with a bike, make sure you ride out on both sides of the river. One side has to be just about the steepest hill anybody's ever tried to tow a caravan up. The other side would have to be the steepest and longest. My the graph from my hrm made for some interesting reading though. Never knew being lazy could be so tiring.

Now for the real eye opener of the ride though. Thinking about it for a while made me about the scardest I'd ever been on a bike. Not long after heading out on the Sofala road, I hear this big banging and scraping sound behind me coming up at a rate of knotts. Just something about it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Of course I didn't look around since nothing you can't see can hurt you, but I saw what was making that hideos sound soon enough. It was a flatbed truck. You know how a lot of those trucks have a box under the tray on the passenger side of tools and ****. Well the cover of this box was only attached by it's bottom edge, making the rest of it (about 2 foot's worth) stick straight out to the side of the road. The side of the road I was riding on. It was banging on the corners and the bumps, and luckily the truck past me on a right hand corner so with him hugging the center line, he missed me by a bit. But I could see that as he travelled up the road, the cover was scything along over the very path I was about to ride.

Now thinking about this freaked me out. Getting run over by said truck I can almost handle. Should be quick. But getting a leg amputated by that bludy cover, then lying by the side of the road bleeding to death... **** that.

It's scary how much riding on the road seems like a lottery sometimes.