Monday morning dawned, and I had a decision to make - hang around and have another malaria test in Tamale before I set off to make sure that all was OK - thus delaying my start by at least 3 hours, or set off anyway, and trust that the medicine had worked.
The last thing I could afford was for malaria to flare up again when I was somewhere remote, but on the other hand I had a long way to go, with no real options for accomodation before getting to where I had to go, and the road ahead was going to be the first real test for Meryl and myself, as the dirt road to Mole was reputed to be very bad.
By this time I was pretty keen to get moving again, so I decided to take a chance and head off. Turned out to be a good thing too, as my normally trustworthy Michelin map (My bible so far as accuracy goes - the ITM map had proved to be pretty inaccurate and basically useless) had the distance to the turn-off completely wrong, and I had further to go than I thought.
Luckily I had a stonking great tailwind, and averaged about 20 kph to the turnoff, which helped considerably. Then, onto the dirt road, and almost immediately my favourite form of riding - corrugations!!! For those of you not familiar with corrugations, let me explain - they are ridges of dirt running across the road, formed by cars and trucks accellerating, and they make life on a bike hell - they occur at exactly the right frequency to violently shake you and the bike, and there's no speed (which you can manage on a bike anyway) at which they become bearable.
If you're lucky, you can stick to the very side of the road, which has been trodden somewhat flat by people walking to and from villages etc, or you can switch from one side of the road to the other in search of smoother terrain. However, when things start getting really remote, the only bits that you can feasibly cycle are in the ruts where the cars have been, meaning that you can't avoid the corrugations.
Anyway - most people who've done much cycling on dirt roads will know about this - the only thing you can do is grit your teeth and get on with it, which is what I did.
About 3 hours later, I had just decided to stop for lunch , when who should I see coming the other way, but Brigitte and Franz!!! After missing them in Tamale I'd thought that they had gone ahead of me, and that I therefore didn't have a chance of catching up with them again.
It turns out, however, that the had gone round the top of the park anti-clockwise (Navrongo, Tumu etc.) using a mixture of tro-tros and bikes, and were now headed back to the main road I'd just come from. I was really chuffed to see them again. We sat down and had lunch together for an hour or so, discussing road conditions etc. (getting worse ...) and talking generally. In the end we had to say goodbye and press on, but it brightened up my day meeting them again.
I finally got into Damongo that night at about 4:30, pretty knackered to say the least, found a rest house, and had a good wash. Turns out Damongo pretty much shuts up soon after dark, so when I went to get some dinner I was lucky to be directed to a small restaurant that was still open, and had a beer, two eggs and a plate of rice (there was no meat left).
19 votes 
