Chapter 17
It’s fucking freezing this morning. Coldest day in memory. By a long shot.
The sun is bright in the eyes, blazing, the sky is absolutely spotless, yet it’s as cold as a witch’s tit.
The air's not catching any of the sun's bright rays, and neither am I.
We sure as shit ain’t in the tropics anymore...
The Shrike's not too happy to get started, but it starts.
I give it a long time to warm up in neutral, and take off.
My hands are useless.
It's only been ten clicks, and they're as good as wood.
These thin, fingerless leather gloves don’t do shit.
My finger’s literally won’t move on instruction, they’re just clawed onto the handlebars.
I’m glad the road is straight and long and featureless; I’ll be buggered if I know what would happen if I needed to use the brakes...
The shivers are constant.
A big, violent shiver, and I the bike wobbles under the force, gets out of shape, and I nearly fucking bin it.
This is ridiculous.
I pull over and run. Run and run and run. Like a loony, swinging my arms in time with my feet like I’m swimming the butterfly.
After five minutes I’ve got some circulation back in all of my fingers except one; the ring finger on my right hand is still as white and cold and useless as a corpse's.
I keep running.
Hard to say what’s going on with my feet; they're so frozen that it feels like I’m running around on wooden clogs.
That can’t be good.
Another 5 minutes, and that’s about as good as it’s going to get...
I jump on the bike and by the time I’m up to cruising speed I’m already shivering again.
That air is biting cold. When it’s this fucking freezing and moving over you at speed, it chills to the bone in seconds.
It’s almost worse after warming up; the blood has been coaxed back into the capillaries only to be promptly turned to ice again, and I feel colder than I did before.
This is fucking shit.
It keeps being fucking shit.
It never warms up, and neither do I.
Another one of Namibia’s must-see’s, Fish River Canyon - the second biggest canyon in the world after the Grand Canyon - comes and goes, a mere forty clicks to the West.
I know forty clicks is nothing - nothing at all, to see the second biggest canyon in the world - But I can’t. I know it’s ridiculous. I know it’s wildly irrational. But I never even consider it.
I ride right on by.
I take a hundred breaks to stave off what I don’t reckon I’m being overly dramatic in saying is hypothermia. And so the light jaunt to Grunau takes me to well on the other side of lunch.
Grunau’s tiny.
Small enough that it almost shouldn’t exist. A handful of nothing buildings.
Based on the size of the font that they’ve given it on the map, it would seem to be the biggest place this side of Keetmanshoop...
Yeah, righto.
Gives a bit of an idea just how much of anything there is in this part of the world...
Which makes it surprising (and delighting) that they’ve got decent accommodation that even has a restaurant.
Stoked with that.
The restaurant is shut, and I’ve missed lunch, so I go hungry. There literally isn’t a single thing to eat in Grunau till the restaurant re-opens for dinner.
I can write again.
I can write again and stay lucid, stay feeling like me.
The room doesn't spin.
I write everything I can fit. Everything I've been wanting to write for weeks. I get it all out. Everything. I don't know when I'll be able to write again...