The Road to Iten

So then I headed off back along the nice paved highway Id ridden North on... and then I turned off onto a smaller paved road that went for an hour or so... and then there was another turn off onto an unpaved but well groomed dirt road... My GPS seemed to know where all the roads were and how to get to the destination I wanted, but still Im always cautious and use my judgement as to weather to follow the suggested directions... In this case the road seemed pretty good so I followed along :)

The road turned to dirt but was still pretty good... to start with!

 

And so by slow degrees things deteriorated... but never to the obvious point that I should not proceed (My guide line on that is that I am prepared to continue along the path as long as I feel that I could turn the bike around at any point and ride back the way Id come in... I learned this the hard way on my first ride through Mexico :)  )

 

Anyway, after an hour or so of the slow degradation I found myself cautiously making my way along a rather steep and very rough and rocky mountain "donkey track" at about walking pace...

 

 

And that continued (up hill and down dale) for about another hour and a half,,, with things getting slightly better and then worse again, but never serious enough for me to turn back.

And then the mountain track finally ended and I found myself on an improving packed earth track in the valley bottom... But I was not out of the woods yet (literally)...

 

I came to a bridge over a small river and there were a couple of local motorbike riders on their little 150cc bikes with big loads of cargo coming up out of the river bed onto the road way, and they said I should turn off the road there because it was washed out a bit further along...

 

So, off the road and back onto a muddy/sandy "gout track" through the river bed and the thickets etc... It lasted another half hour before I made it back to a decent dirt road and then 10 more minutes to get back to pavement... Pheeeew! :)



Past the locals houses... mud and thatch huts.

A big (50cm long) tortoise that had been harassed by the local kids and had a damaged shell... he was trying to cross the paved road, so as usual I stopped and helped him across to safety/

 

But ahhh what a nice paved road it was... It climbed back up into the hills with all sorts of lovely twists and turns, and nary a pothole or obstruction on the way and hardly even any traffic in either direction. 

But the light was fading so I stopped short of my intended destination and found another crappy hotel in a mid-sized town for the night... My motorbike got to spend the night indoors too.

 

 

The next morning I continued on to my destination of Iten... The road was fantastic for the remaining hour :) I was told later that some big politician came from the area and the road work was as a result of that... Makes sense because there was no way that it should have been of theat high a quality with the amount of traffic it got (it was a non arterial road)... Anyway, the road was the best motorbike enjoyable road Ive been on in Africa so far :))