Naturally, I can’t talk about day four with out talking about the night  of day three.  And what a night it was.  While I was writing the last blog post and having a shower, Lee, Terry and JJ were ensconced in the lounge drinking a lot of wine so when I turned up everybody was pretty merry already.  Kandi (and I have to point out that I had done Kandi a deep disservice by spelling her name as Candy which isn’t nearly as germanic as “Kandi”) took us to our table and we proceeded to have a riotously funny meal.  Terry told very very funny stories, we butted in with stupid comments and we all laughed and laughed. 

The food was um germanic.  Erhardt is certainly a “master of german cuisine” (with all the baggage that comes with that title).  The wines were generally good and certainly copious.  The desert wine was not good but by that point we were so busy laughing that we really didn’t care.  Erhardt redeemed himself by bringing his “Fennel Tea”.  This was rocket fuel.  We found out later that it’s Bacardi 151 with some fennel seeds in it.  For those of you who don’t know, Bacardi 151 is 75% proof alcohol and it’s also the only drink that the manufacturer fits a “flame retarder” to  the bottle. 

Finally we retired outside so I could have a cigarette.   No one else was smoking.  Just me.  We put a dent in a bottle of Glenmorangie which I had been carrying around and drank and laughed under the stars.  How fun it was.

The following morning was a bit less fun.  You’d think that a group of successful, intelligent men who had combined experience of over 200 years on this planet could work out that truly excessive drinking and energetic sports don’t really mix.  We’d started out with the intention of doing the Mt Washington part of the route.  This involved a fair bit of climbing and a fair bit of apprehension from the team.  I got a bit confused since we were actually going up Mt Everett to get to Mount Washington which isn’t actually a mountain but is a little tiny town.  Mt Everett is the highest mountain in the Taconic Mountains.  Or something.  However, it’s a long and gruelling climb especially with a head ache and (in my case) a rather sore knee.  We made it and then did the nice descent to the Bash Bish Falls.  There’s a great view over the falls into Connecticut.   It was also an opportunity for us to laugh at JJ’s sunglasses.  They’re Oakley "Thump glasses.  Sunglasses with an MP3 player built in.  Sunglasses with an USB port.  Sunglasses so stupid that they’re already being offered at half price on eBay.  The sound quality is reasonable but as Samuel Johnson said about women preaching “it’s like a dog walking on its hind legs. It’s not done well but one is surprised to discover it done at all.”. 

Then we did a few long rolling roads and a quite a long way on the train tracks which have been converted into bike paths.  It’s a great idea.  Trains can’t do very steep hills so the grades are easy and there’s no traffic.  However, there are some other cyclists which one has to be careful about.  JJ ran a 6 year old cyclist off the road but it was only fair because he wasn’t going very fast and his bike didn’t have a carbon frame.  I mean, what does the kid expect?

Ultimately we ended up in Kent which is a small CT town with a great Pizza place where we ate Pizza and drank beer and reviewed the day.

Now I’m in the Virgin Lounge at JFK thinking back over the trip.  There are lots of observations I guess:  cycling in the US (or at least where we were) is good.  The roads are generally quiet and the drivers are generally very careful passing cyclists.  Most of the roads we cycled on were well paved and well signed.  People in general are very friendly as usual.  The foliage at this time of the year is stunningly beautiful.   The food portions are huge and it’s impossible to go into a calorie deficit no matter how much exercise you do.

Surprises?  Apart from the overwhelming saltiness of Erhardt’s sausage stuffed veal for me anyway (and maybe for JJ) it was just how amazingly rural the US can be.  We were no more than 2 hours from New York or Boston at any time but there were huge tracts of primary forest.  Remote hamlets, houses on their own.  Very low population density I guess.  As a consequence of the low population density, the mobile phone coverage is absolutely crap.  Just nothing.

Finally, a huge thanks from me to Lee, Terry and JJ.  Lee for arranging all the logistics.  Hotels, restaurants and, of course the fabulous Carlos who drove the car were all down to Lee and it worked perfectly.  Terry for doing the routes which is about the most important thing in a bike trip.  The routes were judged perfectly and allowed us to really enjoy the days.  JJ for flying all the way from the UK to even up the numbers between the UK and the US contingent and also for sharing his deep knowledge of the life and times of W H Auden with us on a number of occasions. 

But of course the main thanks just goes to all of them for making the trip so much fun.  I honestly don’t think I’ve laughed as much for a long time.  To spend four days with three  smart, quick witted, informed, funny and rude guys was a real joy.  Thanks.

Photo Album as usual.

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In November, Trish went to Rumphi in Malawi.  We’re funding a branch of the microloan bank that the wonderful Microloan Foundation is setting up in Rumphi and this was Trish’s first opportunity to see how the initial set up had gone.  We were really pleased that loans are already being made and the team on the ground in Rumphi (and everybody involved with the MLF that Trish met) are superb. 

We’ve uploaded a photograph album of all the photos that Trish took.

Rumphi is in northern Malawi.   Here’s a satellite picture.

Here’s a great picture of the sossusvlei area and the dunes surrounding it.

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Finally here is the last photograph album from the africa trip (posted from Windhoek airport).

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5am start again!  There is a big issue here about “seeing things at sunrise” which is good once you get there but it is pretty rough when you have to get up.  We were driven by very chatty German/Namibian woman from the Namib Sky Balloon Safari company to the launch site which was about an hour away.  When we arrived there were three huge hot air balloons inflating slowly.  Each balloon takes 12 people and all three of them were full.  We were in a balloon with a couple of quiet families but the other 24 places in the other two balloons were filled by some very loud Italians (of which more later).

The ballooning is good.  It’s not all “silently gliding through the sky” since there’s a huge gas burner about 2 feet above your head which roars every two minutes and in some way it’s much more scary than being in a plane.  There’s something about the open basket and the relative immobility that makes it a lot like standing at the edge of a big cliff.  However, that being said, it was an outstanding experience which is impossible to describe.  So here are some pictures.  We took hundreds to try and capture how magical it all was.  The big advantage of being up with two other balloons is that you’ve got something to take a picture of…

Enough of the balloon photos.  We got an extra long ride in the balloon because they couldn’t find a good place to land but when we finally got close to the ground, Willem the pilot landed the balloon right on the back of the truck.  Pretty impressive.  We then had the slightly surreal experience of sitting down to breakfast in the middle of the velt with 24 amazingly loud (and happy) Italians.  August is the “Italians in Namibia” season and many of the tour guides speak Italian because it’s so popular.  They certainly enjoyed their balloon trips and there was a lot of wild gestures and…well…italiany things going on.  We breakfasted on Willem’s special croissants, bread, Ostrich pate and home made smoked Zebra.  It was wonderful.

We had a trip in the most rattly old jeep in Africa to get back to the lodge.  I honestly could have jogged at about the same speed.  When we got back, Trish and I decided we needed some exercise to work off the breakfast and went for a 3 mile walk out to the Conical Hill.  It is the conical thing you can see in the right hand side of this picture.  It doesn’t look far but it is and it doesn’t look high but it is when you get there.  It’s a long hot walk at noon when the sun is overhead and Trish was doubting my wisdom in even attempting it.  It’s a very obvious landmark in the area and it is formed by a tiny cap of incredibly hard black limestone about 4m thick and about the size of a tennis court.  This cap of rock has slowed the erosion of the softer rocks underneath which gives it the conical shape.  Once the cap of limestone disappears, the whole thing will erode away pretty quickly.   We saw a very rare Red Rock Rabbit on the way up the slope.  They’re so rare that naturalists don’t even know how long they live and the thing just jumped out of a hole in the ground in front of us.  It wasWe didn’t linger long on the top since it was so hot that the band around my hat was melting.

In the afternoon, Trish and Hannah went out on another drive and Isabelle and I decided to go quad biking again.  This time we were a lot faster and the guide took us up into the dunes.  It was amazingly and awesomely cool…err maybe I’m turning into a teenager.   The quad bikes can go just about anywhere although Ronney the guide was very careful to make sure that we only went on the sandy parts of the dunes and never went across vegetation since the vegetation is the only thing that holds the dunes together.  We had a very pleasant sundowner as well.  Since Isabelle is flouting so many laws by riding a quad bike under 16, I thought I could probably risk a gin and tonic and still ride the bike. 

This is our last night in Sossusvlei mountain lodge and actually the last night of our trip.  Tomorrow we fly from here to Windhoek in another tiny plane and then from Windhoek to Johannesburg and then Johannesburg home.   24 hours after leaving here, we should be getting into Cambridge.  Travel is a wonderful thing.