Quad Biking!

12 April 2007

I think that might be the cheesiest photo I’ve posed for in a long time. The reason for the helmet and the desert in the background is that I went quad biking in the dunes just outside Swakopmund. (Quad biking = 4-wheeling for us Americans.) It was a lot of fun. For the first half of the ride I was with the “slow” group, which means I got stuck behind an older British lady why was not exactly riding the accelerator. But it did make me feel kind of like a rebel adventure junkie passing her over-the-top style on a dune. Let me explain. We pretty much had to ride in a single file because in a lot of places the natural surroundings could be torn up by a pack of quad bikes. There were also some serious drop-offs that the dunes hid well—and I guess it’s bad publicity if one of your tourists ends up eating with a straw for the rest of his/her life. Anyway, once we got into a ‘safe’ area in the dunes we could branch out ever so slightly. Plus the guide would come in at a big dune at an angle and drive his bike as far up as he could, waiting until the last moment to turn back down—in what they called ‘a roller coaster’. It was solid fun trying to match his tracks (since his bike was a lot more powerful than ours were). However, I had to spot the guide’s move coming a while back so I could ease off the gas and let Old Mother Hubbard get ahead of me. This allowed me to gun it at the proper distance and have a sweet ride. Then I got the idea to James Bond it a little early and pass her at the top of the roller coaster. So I waited until the next big dune and followed in her tracks until she chickened out and turned down. At this point, I kept on the gas, drove a little farther up, pointed my bike downhill and let loose. I picked the right dune because I got some serious speed going back down. So much speed, in fact, that the turn at the bottom left my back wheels sliding like a rally car and kicking up sand. And just like that, the deed was done.

After we stopped to look around, take some pics (like the one above) and grab some juice, I decided to head off with the fast group. I had originally tried to go with them, but I got stuck behind my friend Konsta (the other guy in the photo) because I thought he was going with them when in fact he was waiting to be the guide all the way in the back. Talk about your all-time backfires. Anyway, I took off with the guys who wanted to ride fast and was not disappointed. Earlier, when I mentioned that the guide had a faster bike I didn’t mention that I had the chance to get the same bike when I chose mine. I chickened out and took the automatic for fear of not being able to work the gears on the fly. Wrong choice. Even with a few stalls, the manuals would have run circles around their less complicated counterparts. I mention this because in the new fast group, I was the only guy with an automatic. So in the first half I was constantly letting off the gas to not rear-end someone, whereas in the second my thumb was getting numb constantly pushing it to the max—and I was barely keeping up. Nonetheless, it was a blast. We were going off some pretty sweet stuff. On the roller coasters, if I weren’t at the back I was the one in danger of getting half-mooned (that’s a term I just made up for getting passed over-the-top). We took a few trails that had some nice jumps, and we drove over some drop offs that were scary to even look down. On those, I felt like “The Man from Snowy River”… it was intense. A couple of times we caught up to and passed the slower group before heading off on other trails. I waved.