While studying, I experienced many different forms of exhaustion - lack of sleep, physical exhaustion, mental exhaustion. The last week has been tiring, and it's the accumulation of so many weeks of hard exercise whilst sleeping in a tent. It's more of a complete exhaustion than anything singularly identifiable. It's getting harder to get out of my sleeping bag in the morning and my legs actively ache. Yesterday, cycling into Maun, I was able to keep up with the faster groups for the morning but coming out of lunch with them became hard work. After a few kilometres, I dropped off and struggled to maintain a decent speed.

The long, straight and relatively flat road here is getting boring now. When you're fresh it's fine but soon into the day it becomes a mental slog of merely counting down the kilometres. Yesterday was one of those days and the final twenty to thirty kilometres into Maun added a beefy headwind. Still, there were a few moments which rescued the day - a red car drove past with the windows rolled down - I counted four pairs of hands clapping.

Maun is a touristy town and not the capital of Botswana (in fact, this is the first country we're travelling through where we won't pass through the capital). It's quite pleasant though, the taxis are cheap and there's a few things to do around town. I've discovered that there's free wi-fi at the airport and so I've been here for the last three hours uploading photos, planning my summer of cross country racing and just generally gleaning information from the internet.

It took a while this morning but Jason and I eventually found a third person (Jeff) to accompany us on a hour long scenic flight over the Okavango Delta. It was awesome fun going up in a light aircraft again - slightly unsettling on the stomach but well worth the expense. The landscape is as flat over the Delta as the roads have been and it was intriguing trying to spot game - elephants are well disguised as bushes (and vice versa) while giraffes are often unmistakeable trees.

Not much else has happened this rest day - in a bid to avoid having to pay an extortionate price for breakfast, I prebought cereal and long-life milk. When I woke up this morning, it was raining heavily outside, so for the first time I took my bowl out and ate breakfast inside my tent (normally my tent is packed away in the truck by the time breakfast is out). Luckily no milk was spilt and it was a wonderful new experience. When I eventually left my tent, I discovered that the hotel continental breakfast was the same price as my cereal and milk and for an unlimited buffet of bread and cereal. Oops.

Now it's time to get some food, pick up my laundry and clean my bike. Oh how I'm sure I'll easily forget these rest days.

We're at our second last bush camp of the trip. This is almost ground breaking (no shovel pun intended) and I am already nostalgic. I remember the first night we camped in Egypt at a desert camp on the side of the road - the excitement at finally being out in the wild, confined to just what we had brought with us and remote from any hint of civilisation. The sky in Africa is wonderful - endless and beautifully patterned, littered with clouds both soft and hard, colourful and stark against the varying terrain. It's usually in the bush camps that the sky is prettiest - unobstructed by buildings and fences. At night there are no lights to dampen the brightness of the stars.

As for this bush camp, it's hot and damp (it rained several times earlier - a storm was headed for us but the wind pushed it around). There are ants everywhere in the soft sandy ground - this makes it easy to dig a hole but harder to find a place suitable for digging (you don't want ants climbing up your trousers!). It is a genuine bush camp - there are many bushs - and amongst the bushes are many thorn bushes. Walking into camp earlier I had to stop to pull thorns out of my socks.

The last couple of days have been long (155km yesterday, 182km today) and I've taken it slowly. Yesterday I accidentally left camp late when a call of nature resulted in returning to the truck just after the rest of the riders had already left. Resigned to cycling solo, I got going with a new saddle (borrowed from fellow British rider Jerry) which wasn't correctly adjusted. I didn't realise this was sucking my speed down much until today when I raised it slightly and consequently found the whole day rather slow. This was probably helpful though - my saddle sores have resurfaced on the rougher tarmac to a painful degree - riding slower seems to stop them getting much worse.

After about forty painful kilometres on damp tarmac (it had rained heavily the night previously - unusual for Botswana and probably evidence for climate change), I caught up to Dave and rode with him until lunch. We discussed our plans for a competition between the riders - the Tour D'Afrique Decathlon. I'll describe the competition in more detail in another blog post but the basic idea is for 3-person teams of riders to complete tasks over the course of ten riding days - these include eating a PVM bar as fast as possible (these are the extremely chewy energy bars given to riders) and drinking a soft drink as fast as possible. That afternoon, I rode with Jacob into camp, nice and slowly.

Today was similar slow and I rode with the fast peloton for about 20km at some point in the morning. Riding in a group usually pushes you to go faster than you're comfortable and I was definitely uncomfortable. I dropped off and rode the remaining distance into lunch solo. After lunch (which was next to a GIANT baobab tree), I rode the afternoon with Ruben, Jason, Paddy and Erin and it was great fun. Riding with the right people seems to make these long, flat and straight days roll by easier.

We stopped a couple of times to take photos with a giant model of an aardvark next to the side of the road and to eat the most delicious Rolo icecream. The currency here is roughly 10 to 1 with the British pound which makes conversion amazingly easy. At the same time though, I've been astonished at how expensive the drinks are, nearly a pound for a can - comparable with our prices back home.

The Tour Cook is away on vacation this week and coincidentally the meals have been excellent - although this is more down to the increased availability of good food. A quick listing-
Sunday - Spaghetti Bolognaise WITH GENUINE CHEESE
Monday - Mushroom Stroganoff + Mash (Memories of the Fitzwilliam stroganoff came to mind)
Tuesday - Tofu + Veggie Burgers + Pumpkin filled with feta
Wednesday - Curry
Today we were extra lucky because they made dessert - a mix o biscuits, custard, caramel and dessicated coconut. Through some delightful turn of fate, I found myself in the kitchen twice (and armed with a spoon) when they were about to throw away cans or wash bowls used to make the dessert. Hopefully I made it slightly easier to clean their cooking apparatus :-).

The first of the last stretch that will take us into Cape Town began today - a long day but this is going to be the normal distance from now, 162km. We were given an explicit warning this morning about how we should act if we encounter elephants. In the past, according to Tour Director Paul, riders have been chased or charged by elephants.

I rode fast with Paul, Lynne, and Tim (we also picked up a sectional rider, Andrew) across the flat Botswanian road. It is fairly straight and pretty monotonous, occasionally switching between smoother and rougher tarmac. It was advantageous having the draft but I suffered in the larger group, having fewew opportunities to stand up and relieve my discomfort.

There was a delicious smell coming into lunch and the staff had made burgers for us - a first for lunch! Wanting a burger, I stopped and ate. The others, racing the day, carried on and skipped what was one of the top three lunches so far (the other two were when French toast was served and when they fried eggs for us).

I rode the afternoon by myself but will probably reconsider riding in a group based on a conversation I had with a passing motorist. A white pick up truck pulled up next to me and the driver rolled down the window, 'You're crazy! You left your group way back there.'. I laughed and shrugged. He asked how much further I had to go today and where we were ultimately going, fairly standard questions. Then he continued, 'You're crazy! Everytime I've driven on this road I've seen lions. Last time there was a male on the left and two females on the right - I think he was chasing the females.' My plan is to ride with a group of slower riders so that if such an encounter happens, the lions will be occupied with the riders who are left behind whilst I can get away (just kidding).

We camped at another bush camp, when I arrived the camp air was full of butterflies, bees and general flying insects. Luckily there was no attack by the ants and my tent remained a safe zone. Certainly, when it started to rain lightly, I was happy for the dry refuge.

It was meant to be a fairly short (82km) and hence a fairly fast day into Botswana but fate obviously had other intentions. As we raced out of camp on the dirt driveway for over a kilometre, we made our way towards town and looked out for the left turn that would take us to the border. Unfortunately there were many left turns and ours was not flagged (as they usually are). Four kilometres past where the turn should have been, we stopped and asked for directions and were send spinning back towards town - adding an extra eight to the day and voiding any purpose to riding fast.

Further down the road, I heard a strange noise and all of the sudden the road became very rough. Looking back, i noticed my back tyre was flat and dropped off the fast group of three we had. Normally the first step in fixing punctures is replacing the tube - were we at home, I would have had a nice new tube to swap out. Unluckily most of my new tubes have now been spent and my spare tube was patched. The valve on the patched tube was also bent and this was my undoing - when unscrewing the pump from the valve, the mangled core came out too. Moving back to my original tube, I spent some time patching then pumping it up. By this time, Michelle, the sweep rider for the day had caught up and I was probably delayed by about forty minutes (including time for the detour).

Pushing on, I blew straight through lunch, stopping only to fill my water bottle and pump up my tyre fully. At 72km (or 80km with the detour) I reached the border and scanned out. Spending my remaining kwacha, I bought lunch (two mandazi - the fried bread / donuts that are common in Africa) and two ice cold (literally frozen) Fantas. After this, it was a quick exit stamp at the border and then a short ferry ride into Botswana.

As soon as we entered Botswana there was a clear smell of elephants, none of which we could actually see. The smell was likely coming from the turgid piles of dung which are littered across the road. Our campsite, just a few kilometres from the border, was dusty - a complete change to the grassy Zambian and Malawian campsites. I wondered where the grass had gone and could only conclude it had something to do with Botswana's large elephant population.

Our first priority in any new country is to get some local currency - Dave, Dan, Jacob and I cycled down to the local town to use the ATM. After managing to withdraw some money (others weren't so lucky), Dan and I looked for local sim cards. After asking around at a few shops at the mall, the only place that actually stocked and sold sim cards was a clothing chain called CP (something similar to an African version of Gap) - bizarre but useful.

I swapped bikes with Dan on the way back to camp - his bike is heavier but SO MUCH more comfortable. The saddle was a sofa-like experience and I advise any future riders to seriously trial out as many saddles as possible.

That afternoon about half of the riders took a river safari cruise down the Chobe River. Scrambling for a 'window' seat (a misnomer because there were no windows - the entire boat was open), I picked the wrong side. Apparently boats here also drive on the left hand drive - don't sit on the right hand side! We were promised lots of game, mainly by other riders/staff who have been on the cruise before. We saw a fair few elephants, lion, some buffalo and a tonne of hippos. Something about the higher water level here meant that there were fewer animals on the waterfront because they're able to find water further inland. In any case, the river was beautiful and it was an enjoyable, if muggy, afternoon.

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