Freedom Challenge RASA day 18

FCRASA day 18

The ride from Rouxpos to Montagu is fairly straight forward and uneventful. We found the first turn-off without any problem, but a little further down the road we had to find a track after passing the farm house. It was still dark and unfortunately we went to far left. The narrative stated that we "had to cross a large riverbed". After a while Johan asked me weather I could remember this from when I did the race in 2014. I said no. We looked at the map again and the direction we were going, and decided that we must be on the right track. we amble along for another 15 minutes and looked at the map again. We then realised that we went too far left and the we were in the Buffelspoort river bed! We saw that it runs parallel to the track we should be on and continued along. The boulders were big and progress was slow. We conferred again and after a little debate, we decided to turn around and go back to the farm house. There we very quickly found the right track and stated making good progress. When we passed the point where the river meets up with the correct track, we noticed that there was a rather large pool of water. Just as well we decided to retrace our steps?The rest of the tide to the public road went without incident but the track was rough and had a number of sandy stretches where we had to push our bicycles. Once reaching the district road, it was easy and pleasant riding up to the Anysberg turn-off. The road through Anysberg had some nice stretches and some very corrugated sections and at times the going was difficult. We had a "self help" lunch at one of the chalets and we quickly on our way again. The ride up to Hoek van die Berg also went off without a hitch. After a short break we decided that Johan, who is quite a bit faster than me, will continue along and that we will meet up at Die Bos, our sleep over in Montagu, again. i arrived there at 17:20.