Day 4 - Pooh 70 kms - 2,500 metres ! " The Wall" or "Self Induced Torture !

I'd battled through the days intense heat and ingested more than my fair share of choking dust but standing at the turnoff to Pooh (4kms) I may as well have been standing at the foothill of Mt Everest, totally spent, dehydrated and with a pretty damned good case of heat stress - all I could do was watch Pete & Graham ascend the steep road while I waited for the imminent "Vulture Wagon"!

Our expedition had got away well enough from Kalpa with a steep 12 km descent to the valley floor on our newly. fitted hire bikes, mine though about 1 size bigger than a circus bike !

The next 15kms were on a road (if you could call it that) of dirt and bone jarring rocks filled with traffic and an assortment of road side workers, some using high end equipment like jcb's others simply filling potholes with broken stone from rock that had been manually broken !

At one point Graham had just cycled through an area with our guide Shabu when they heard a loud crash behind them from a falling overhang - only a few minutes later Pete cycled through the same area highlighting how dangerous this cycling thing could be !

Finally on bitumen the going was not much easier as the altitude, the 35 c temperature and the climbing gradient all conspired to make our first day of cycling pretty tough !

As it was Graham and Pete collected " hero" points by cycling the last 4 kms into Pooh up a steep road and maintained their ream of becoming EFI-ers (Every Fu.K.ng Inchers) !

Day 1 - knackered already !

Road widening !

Pete makes a habit of scoring the best accommodation !