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.
