September 5, 2015
Adventures in Haiti: Three days to go
It was an absolutely lovely morning as we cycled together on the nice quiet road, looking at trees and spotting kangaroos. Well, Dea was spotting kangaroos. She saw six and I none, giving her a lead of 70-56, a lead which would ultimately prove unassailable with Gold Coast just a couple of days away. We also passed the time by throwing Kevin the koala up in the air and trying to catch him as we cycled, a game he described as “fun, but cruel” and by singing Dea's song. As she had done in Laos, Dea had written another song to remind us of this next part in our journey together. She taught me the words, although once reminded of my limited singing talents she may have regretted this.
| Heart | 1 | Comment | 0 | Link |
One moment of high drama occurred when we stopped to take one of our legendary banana breaks and Dea was almost attacked by a leech. It was crawling menacingly up her sock and was surely about to unleash a furious assault on her ankle when it was spotted and the sock hastily removed. This was far from the end of the incident, however, for the leech had taken quite a considerable liking to Dea's sock and would not be parted from it. We tried all manner of things to remove the leech, from trying to coax it off with a stick, to trying to flick it off with a stick, to bashing it with a stick. Every time that one end of the leech was removed the other end stuck like glue, and it seemed like nothing else was as tempting for the leech than the sock, with its warm, pungent sensation of Dea's feet. In the end, however, I came up with a solution. I realised that the only way the leech was going to move from the sock was if it had something even more pungent to attach itself to, and so I selflessly offered a pair of my old underpants towards it. Knowing a good thing when it saw it the leech quickly jumped ship and the underpants and leech were thrown to the bushes, Dea's sock returned to its rightful owner, and our journey could continue.
Our onward journey took us unexpectedly through a landscape of sugar cane fields more reminiscent of Central American or Caribbean lands. We pretended we were in Haiti and marvelled at the great variety of different landscapes and scenery we had encountered in the past two months. Next we got to a small town called Coraki and sat by a river with parakeets above us. Beyond that more back-roads, and the sugar cane replaced with more traditional farmland and hills. At the bottom of one of these hills we arrived at a T-junction with the intention to turn left just as another touring cyclist, only the second we had seen since Melbourne, whizzed past from left to right. He hadn't seen us and was now heading rapidly downhill in the opposite direction to us. A chance encounter just missed, I wondered what stories he had that would now never be known to us.
Soon after it started to rain and we stopped at a little nature reserve, where we pulled out the tent fly-sheet and hung it over our bikes to make a temporary shelter. Once the rain had passed we walked around the nature reserve which had a circular trail that we could follow. The information boards around the trail wrote all about koalas and so we strained our necks walking around hoping to see some. It felt like it was going to be a fruitless search until eventually we spotted one high up in the trees. It was an old, tired-looking koala. It looked like it had been here a long time, probably since the days when all of this land was covered in trees and there were koalas everywhere. Now there was just this tiny little nature reserve, surrounded by roads and treeless fields, his final bastion.
Rather than trouble ourselves with any more cycling, we decided to just make camp in the nature reserve as it was a lovely spot to do so. I walked around again, hoping to see some more koalas but being disappointed, whilst Dea offered to make dinner and ended up making two holes in the tent. We were inching towards our goal. Just three days to go.
Today's ride: 48 km (30 miles)
Total: 47,114 km (29,258 miles)
| Rate this entry's writing | Heart | 4 |
| Comment on this entry | Comment | 0 |