19th October
Not the best close up picture of the bike but I'll take better as we go along. Very robust, extreme Yamaha engineering, like their motorcycles. Certainly the one's I've had were unbreakable: YZF R1 4 x around the world, Tracer 700 I rode to Mongolia, Tènèrè 700 around the world, Super Tènèrè XT1200Z I rode the length of the Americas and now it's time for the Wabash Gravel Electric Bicycle to take a bow.
You sir are going to be ridden around the world.
From Wales ...
To Saudi Arabia ...
and soon beyond ...
The road is clean and has dignity, off it is dirty. Wherever people stand for long they open their hands and drop something. It never goes into a bin. Well, how can you put more plastic and single use cardboard cups into an already crowded garbage can. In this part of Arabia the litter of people just falls to the floor when people stand still.
The reason stuff is not immediately expelled from a moving vehicle is because the outside air vibrates with a heat so dynamic it sucks your cool air conditioned comfort right out of that window and yes you could slow down, and people do to create their personal small hillock of wet wipes and crap stiffening in the hot afternoon for me to ride past.
And yet so devout are Saudi Arabian people , so kind, so safe and so welcoming you forgive them this display of displaced consumerism gone made. At a prayer hut I grab 15 minutes of shade when people come to prayer. Their devotion to a God is boundless and makes my understanding of post humanism meek.
Back on the road truck vortex’s bring me close to a standstill as they approach me charging without mercy pushing a head of hot air until it hits me with a thump as I grab an intake of breath whilst most disipates around my body then deflects off nearby stones.
Rich outcrops sneak up at 90kms to go. They are always there, but I’m looking at the road, focusing, focusing, sometimes all I see is the ground, each pedal push a heave and a pull repeated a thousand times more before finally I enter the city of Ha’al.
Map of the Day
Postcard from Home
Another memory from home. Doggies on the chair in the living room at my cottage in Wales. Visiting friends Tania and Lesley, wife Caroline on camera!
Long way today Nick! Good one. Do they have no other colour than white for their cars?? It occurred to me that maybe they go and pray after they've dropped a load of rubbish to seek redemption. At least they pray....over here in Blighty they wind the window down, out it goes...and that's that. Such a blight on the countryside where I live...maybe that's where 'Blighty' comes from??