Day 2 - Mboyti Lodge to Hole in the Wall - 136 miles

Two choices of road today, high road route all on tarmac and a low road option taking in many technical sections and a few river crossings. I opted for the low road option which involvd some steep climbs as we travelled through Port St John and Poenkop. By now, we were deep in the Transkei region with stunning scenary.

The technical sections were mainly linked by mud roads, which have a light dusting of gravel. This makes for tricky riding, as on the straighter parts 60mph was easily reached but with the many dips, blind crests and bends it was easy to go into a bend way too fast. This led to a number of incidents during the day. The yellow team was making good progress until we came round a sharp down hill S-bend. One of the blue team was waving us down and as we came round the last bend, there was poor Michael on the floor and his bike in the hedge! People gathered to offer assistance and see if he was all right heard him ask the doc for his rucksack. Asuming that he had some medication we grabbed his bag and started rumaging about, but Michael stopped us and said he wanted his camera so someone could capture the moment! We later found he had broken his collarbone and Michael was given the Spirit of the day award at the evening gathering.
Later that day, the yellow team managed to get split in two with the majority attaching themselves to the blue group and a splinter group of 8 including me and the team leader actually going the wrong way! Following an hour trying to track down the rest of the group, we eventually got moving again, but way behind the rest. Big Dave, the yellow team leader said he knew a short cut with a small river crossing if we felt OK doing it. We all agreed and set off. The drop down to the river crossing was tight twisty and steep and should have prepared us for what was to come! Not the river crossing, that was small as Dave had said, but the near vertical rock face we had to ride up to get back out again! It took a huge effort from the whole group to get everyone up but we managed it and made our way along mud roads to the overnight stop.

The evening awards saw one of the Royal party awarded the Dick of the Day trophy. Arthur decided that it would be a great idea to put as much of his gear as possible on the luggage truck until that was, he was stood next to his bike in flip flops and no body armour! Doh!!