Fat bottomed bikes… a ride in Namibia
Text and Photographs: Bill Fleming and Piers L’Estrange. Article from the December 2014 issue of Ride Magazine.
Far, far away, in a land filled with snow and malamutes, lives a bike nut named Bill Fleming. One day, he persuaded “Mr African” Mannie Heymans, winner of the inaugural Absa Cape Epic, to arrange a little ride across some warm sand.
How I found myself riding my fat bike across the mind-bending dunes of the Namib Desert is at least as entertaining as the actual ride itself. It started last December, in the bathroom, with a smartphone – a place where many good stories start. Before getting too far into this story, it should be noted that I live in Alaska for a reason: the wide-open landscapes and wild tracts of nothingness appeal to me. Are there other places on earth like Alaska? The digital age, love it or hate it, allows a curious person to look these things up anywhere, anytime.
The long and short of it is that I stumbled across a map of Namibia and a long, 500km desert coast immediately struck me. After a quick Google Earth flyover, I was a man possessed. By the time I had flushed, I knew this was a trip I had to do. Having done the heavy lifting part of the trip in less than eight minutes, only a few trifling details remained. For example, how to talk my wife into joining me, and perhaps how to stay alive in a desert environment. These were all minor obstacles I was confident I could figure out.
This was supposed to be an unsupported trip, but after a few discouraging emails from local bike shops in Windhoek, the capital of Namibia (“Do not attempt this trip. You will die!”), it was clear this fat-bike mission was going to need some assistance at the local level.
Fortunately Mannie Heymans, owner of Mannie’s Bike Mecca in Windhoek and a three-time Olympian, did a little background work on fat bikes, and suggested such a trip might be possible, but some modifications would need to be made. After Mannie teamed me up with his buddy Leander Borg, owner of NatureFriend Safaris, all of the details began to fall into place.
The only problem was that the details of this fat-bike journey had a whiff of adventure to it, and people began wanting in on the action. The more the merrier, said I, and before I knew it, we had lined up seven additional riders and four support vehicles.
Because the southern part of the Namibian coast is an active diamond mining area, it’s completely off limits. My original idea of cycling from Luderitz to Walvis Bay was not going to work, so we had to modify my initial plan. Leander suggested we make a traverse of the Namib Desert to reach the Atlantic coast. Once we reached the ocean, we would head north along the Skeleton Coast until we reached the small community of Walvis Bay. All in all, it was shaping up to be a six-day ride through a remote corner of the world.
Day one started inauspiciously. I was clearly the runt of the litter. “How do you know Mannie?” I asked Francois Theron, who looked just old enough to shave and young enough to be my son. “We raced on the pro circuit together for three years.” Well, that’s nice. I like racing too, I thought to myself. Among a bunch of heavyweight aerobic monsters, I was merely heavy and out of shape. At least I could hang with my wife, or so I thought…
We started the adventure from the remote Beta Camp entrance to the Namib-Naukluft National Park. As we prepared our fat bikes for departure, even the dry air seemed exotic to me, and I was staggered by the stark beauty of this dusty landscape. This was the adventure I was looking for, and I felt oddly at home in this very foreign land.
That it was 34°C at the start didn’t strike me as significant, despite the fact that these temperatures are never seen in Anchorage, Alaska. Sure the pace was a little faster than I anticipated, and yeah, I probably should have been eating and drinking more, but no worries, I was taking part in an authentic escapade.
By the time we stopped for lunch, the magical moonscape scenery was lost on me. I was in a deteriorating state, and I knew it. Shortly after lunch, the wheels came off, and I slowed to a pace that guaranteed I was never going to make camp before dark.
After suffering from heat exhaustion, cramps, dehydration and nausea, I was rescued by Guy Jennings, a South African I met while competing in the Iditarod Trail Invitational (ITI) in Alaska last February. Since Namibia was pretty much in the neighborhood for Guy, I’d invited him along on the Namib expedition. It proved to be a wise decision.
I had helped Guy out in a minor way during the ITI, and in a strange twist of karmic something or other, he rode back to assist me. After towing me to our camp just after the last light had left the
This place is drier than a three-year- old cat turd. No wonder no one lives in this country
sky, I slumped dejectedly into a chair, wondering if I was even going to be able to finish the ride. My wife, Sheryl, was not impressed.
What an asshole, I thought. Who comes up with a killer idea for a ride, invites people to join in the fun, only to be that guy who can’t hang? Around the campfire that night, I felt pretty sheepish about the whole affair. The only consolation as I headed off to bed was the night sky. Huge and overarching, I had never seen the Milky Way so bright and so magnificent.
After forcing myself to eat and drink, I awoke the next morning fully recovered and had no more problems for the rest of the trip. On day two, we rode further into the desert, and the low, vegetated dunes gave way to towering mountains of sand. With the exception of ostrich grass, what little flora existed disappeared, and this wild spot of terra firma revealed itself to be a very dry and barren land. This place is drier than a three-year-old cat turd. No wonder no one lives in this country, I thought.
One thing I learnt on the second day is that ostrich grass is a vile weed, and it grows in the low spots between dunes. I jokingly dubbed it al-Qaeda grass, because riding through it was terroristic and resulted in multiple stab wounds. It was often unavoidable, and the needle-like blades of grass easily penetrated skin, resulting in small droplets of blood forming on hands, arms and legs.
After finding a comfortable campsite on top of a random dune, I lost myself to the setting desert sun and the rise of unfamiliar, southern constellations. I was surprised to wake up the next day, the third day of our journey, to cloudy skies and cold temperatures. Surely it wasn’t going to rain, right? This was the desert after all. Nevertheless, shortly after we left camp, a cold rain began to fall and a vicious wind kicked up. It was cold, and conversation seemed to ebb as we concentrated on piloting our fat bikes over and down the dunes. No sooner had the rain started than the sun began to poke through the mist, and as we rode deeper into the Namib, the warmth returned and the clouds receded.
Towards the end of the third day, we could hear the waves pounding the coastline in the far distance. We were getting close, and the anticipation of reaching our halfway point was at an all-time high. After arriving on the beach, the scenery stunned everyone. I looked around, and without exception, we were all dumbfounded, grinning from ear to ear like adult kids in a very special candy store.
Here the colossal dunes folded themselves into the ocean, and the big Atlantic rollers come straight against them. It was a battle of sand versus sea, and we had a narrow strip of no man’s land to ride until it opened up enough to make another camp.
On the fourth day, we travelled inland through old, abandoned diamond mining towns, and the golden dunes gave way to a broad plain of parched, white gravel. Small stacks of stones and dried-out wooden ruins marked the toils of a bygone era, and with gale winds pushing us from behind, the bikes flew through this area on our way to Conception Bay.
After reaching our camp spot on the fifth day near Sandwich Bay, we ended the trip the next day with a short ride across the salt flats to Walvis Bay. Our desert journey was complete.
How did the fat bikes ride in the desert? Coming from Alaska, I was surprised how familiar the sand felt under the tyres. The sand was easier to ride in many respects, almost like an endless landscape of crust snow. You could go anywhere you wanted. No need to be limited to a narrow snow-machine trail. Riding up the dunes was no problem, and the leeward side, almost always just shy of 45 degrees in steepness, was soft and easy to descend.
I was surprised to find the beach so much softer and more difficult to ride than the desert dunes. Despite abandoning my original idea of riding the long coast from one small community to another, I was grateful that things had turned out as they had. The Namib Sand Sea turned out to be the best part of the trip.
My mind has since gone near crazy thinking about the endless possibilities of fat-bike travel. In many ways, desert fat biking has a lot going for it compared to its cold winter cousin. One thing’s for sure, the fat-bike world is limited only by your imagination.
Bill Flemming has been riding endurance bike events for longer than he can remember, and runs the 9:ZERO:7 fat-bike empire from Chain Reaction Cycles in sunny Anchorage, Alaska.
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