Getting Stuck in Muddy Tanzania

Well it looks very beautiful behind me but on the other side of the road where I'm going there is a massive storm that I'm about to ride into and I think this is going to be like this for the next three four days all the way until I get to Rwanda. I'm in Tanzania right now and so I've buttoned down. I've got everything watered tight ready to go but it's just going to be slow going. I'm averaging about 35 miles an hour at the most right now. These roads are really perilous but this is the adventure that I've been looking for. I think this is the most difficult road I've ever ridden in my life. About I don't know 20 or 30 kilometers north it's just dirt, mud, gravel, sand and so now we've got rain to go with it. It's going to be an amazing ride. At the beginning of the day I thought this was going to be a beautiful ride. There was no rain, the road was dry and things just looked amazing but then just like that the first drops started to fall and it started to get really really wet. Later in the day the sun came out, things started to clear up and I thought I was going to avoid the rain altogether but my luck just didn't hold out. In fact not only did it rain harder but the wind started to blow across the road and I had to crawl through this storm for hours and hours and hours. Well I've made it to the dirt section of this journey. I have a few hundred miles of this kind of road and maybe this actually is not so bad. It's graded but yesterday it was raining so hard. A lot of this is going to be washed out and rutted and a lot of mud if it rained as much in the north as it did in the south and all the weather reports say it did so I'm really excited to see what today has to offer. I got up early. I was on the road by about 7 30. I really want to try to make some time so it's going to be it's going to be really fun. Here we go. This ride was actually one of my absolute favorite rides in all of Africa. The turns were blast. I loved zipping through the villages and waving at the people. The roads were nice and dry and the dirt was just perfect. I was able to really pick up a lot of speed and it was well it was a blast. Things were going absolutely great. As I rode I gradually started to see things change. Little ruts started to show up in the road. I started to see more construction. I saw where plows had come and tilled the soil and so things were getting a little bit more dangerous. In fact as I started to ride into the mountains I could see where the water had created ruts along the road and I could see the evidence of the rain. The rain that I didn't know I was about to run into. As I was riding I started to get a little bit hungry and I was approaching this village and I thought I'd pull over to get a snack and that's when I experienced one of my absolute favorite things. I was challenged to a dance-off with one of the villagers. They don't like cameras here. We had a good time here. Crazy. It's about two o'clock in the afternoon and I'm in a little bit of trouble because there are storm clouds rolling in and this road is about to just be washed out with mud and there's nothing for over 100 miles so I'm gonna have to ride. It's still passable. If it's not I have to find some place to camp but as you can see there's just there's nothing. There's nowhere to camp even so I've got to figure this out really fast because I think in about 10 minutes it's going to be downpour. Yeah, nobody's hurt. Are the roads better or worse? I didn't realize what kind of trouble I was in until this moment. I suddenly realized that there was water everywhere not just on the road but off the road. It was running down the road. The mud was getting thicker and heavier. It was starting to attach to my tires and my wheels. I wasn't sure I was going to be able to go any farther but then again I didn't know if I could turn around and go back. This road is just mud. It's very very thick mud. I'm going about five miles an hour trying not to let my bike fall over. I won't make it if I keep on this road. I gotta get I gotta get past this without falling over. And there it is. The bike is over in the mud. I've crashed over and over and over and the road I'm on right now it's got about two or three inches of just thick mud that's clay. Sorry, it's mud that's clay and the bike just the wheels get packed full of clay and it turns into just ice. So I have to turn around. This is not something I can do by myself. If I had somebody with me every time the bike fell over I could have them help me pick it up and we could just edge along but I'm alone so I can't pick the bike up anymore. I've picked it up about five times already and I've had to unload everything just to be able to do that. So I'm gonna turn around and go back. I have gotten the bike off the ground again. I've loaded it back up with all my stuff. I was an idiot. I thought I'd just ride up the road with nothing on the bike and then I'll carry the stuff not realizing I'd ridden like a mile maybe a mile and a half and it was too much stuff for me to carry so I had to basically walk a mile and a half come back walk back so I've done I don't know miles so now I have almost no strength. So at the top of this hill is where this mud stops. I think that the weight on the bike was actually helping me get some rear tire traction so I'm just gonna crawl and that's what I was doing before so I'm just gonna crawl along and see if I can make it to the top of this hill and then keep going back to get up to a village get some water find a place to shelter I got a tent and stuff hey too muddy this way it's too muddy I'm gonna go back okay you want to go back yeah it's too bad don't worry let's go back maybe if that mission is even more important I thought I'd made it out of the mud and everything was going to be great but as I continued to ride south I realized that the storm that was behind me had flooded the roads that just hours before I had been flying down at high speeds now these same roads were covered in the same mud that I'd just been struggling to ride through I realized that I now had days and hundreds of miles to ride on wet muddy roads after hours of riding through the mud and the rain I finally hit a patch of asphalt that meant that the village of Impanda was just down the road that meant shelter and food and I didn't have to put up my tent I could get some rest and more energy to face the long ride the next day and what a wonderful detour it was when I got to Impanda some locals invited me to go out and join them drink beers and watch the home team win the national football championship I'm in Cotiba National Park I've got about 50 kilometers of dirt it looks like it's gonna rain if I can make it through this before it rains I should be in clear a car just went through here and he said that there was no mud so if I can get through this before that rain hits I'm in good shape if I get stuck in the rain this is the same kind of clay that I got stuck in before it's gonna be really bad so I gotta get going unfortunately I didn't miss the rain and it wasn't just 50 kilometers of dirt it was hundreds of kilometers of dirt in fact I had to ride through the mud and the rain all day and all the way to Sambawanga Tanzania where I was so exhausted when I finally arrived I didn't have the energy to record any more video so I'll leave you with this my ride through muddy Tanzania