We were riding along a fairly rough dirt road with some pretty severe corrugations. His bike was a pretty standard sort of MTB, I think with front suspension, loaded up pretty normally - rear panniers and rack bag. I think he first noticed the front wheel had gone wobbly, so we stopped and counted 7 broken spokes. We then took all the weight off it, and he continued slowly, and broke another 2. It still rode fine apparently, if a bit wobbly. The funny thing was when the bike was lying on its side, there were places you could actually step through the wheel

Anyway, the next day he had the spokes fixed, and then managed to break another 2 on the return trip. The weird thing now that I think about this is that it was the front wheel - you normally think of the rear wheel when spokes break on tours. But I guess once you break one or two, the rest go pretty quickly.

Steve