Day 16 and 17
White Sands, Praia de Barra, Mozambique
Distance: To the beach and back … several times
I’ve been putting off writing this post for a while because it’s the last one, signalling the end of The Put Foot Rally. I don’t think I’ve ever not wanted to write something so much in my life. But I suppose, like all good things, it must come to an end.
I spent a large part of Day 16 at Barra Lodge, sponging off their internet (thanks guys!) and putting together the previous fews days’ blogs. You might ask why, given the picture-perfect surroundings and abundance of things to do, I spent it behind my computer. But with an office that looks over onto this …
… doing something that I love, I’ll argue that it’s exactly where I wanted to be.
On Day 17 of The Put Foot Rally, crews started rolling for the final checkpoint (check out all the photos here). The last stretch of road to White Sands is populated by mangrove forest and is completely submerged when the tide comes in, so timing was everything. I watched as some of the cars made their way up and over the final checkpoint.
By sunset most of the teams had made it through and the finish line slowly became a beach. We were still waiting for the Silly Buggers to arrive. Well, one of them at least. They had sold off two of their scooters quite early on in the rally, irreparable. Their two riders had been assimilated into other teams and the third was tackling an arduous, 19-hour ride at 60 km/h (the bike could not be ridden any faster) to the finish. It’s a testament to the riders’ indefatigable spirit and the sense of camaraderie on the rally more than testament to the scooters, which I can laud only for one thing: showing that despite all odds, you can make it to the finish.
The Silly Buggers pushing their comrade to the finish
In the time between, crews that had already arrived spent the late afternoon on the beach, taking in the sunset, swimming and trading stories of their journey from Lake Malawi.
I could tell you (with a slight sense of cliché-invoked nausea) that as the sun reflected off the water, I too reflected on the epic journey behind me. However we were still turning in the cogs of adventure and there seemed to be an infinite amount of time left and fun to be had (check out the photos from the Checkpoint Party here). Only now, behind a desk in Cape Town, has the magnitude and pervasiveness of the last 17 days hit home. And time, or at least the perception of it, is the only thing I can pin this newly found sense of displacement to. Trust Dan Nash, in his last Put Foot Rally post, to be able to convey a sense of time at its most African and paint a picture of Put Foot life at its most anthropic, so I will leave it there.
But you can bet your biggest piston that I will be back next year … and YOU are coming with me.
