We were about 80 miles into the White Rim Trail which is about as far from civilisation as you can get in these parts. We had just stopped for a bit of a chat after climbing hogsbottom hill( or something like that) , which happened to be a great little loose climb with the rear of the bike sliding all over as it scrabbled for purchase. I stroll over to my bike to hop on again when I notice a significant puddle of liquid underneath. I was fairly confidant it hadn't come from me as for once I hadn't been terrified by what I was doing. I demonstrated my cleverness by asking Dave what that was. He said something along the lines of put your finger in it you simpering fool.
So having established that it was oil I did the only reasonable thing one can do under the circumstances. I panicked. I tried to wrestle Dave to the ground so I could get the satellite phone and order an evac with 2 coffees to go please.
Dave was a little calmer and pointed out that it was a trickle of oil, not the gushing well I thought it was, and in fact the bike still had plenty and why don't we ride back to Moab for a couple of coffees.
Needless to say, because, as you may have noticed, I am not the worrying type, this had no impact on the pleasure I took in the rest if the ride.
The fact that I doubled the speed and refused to stop for the next 3 hours was only because I was keen on that coffee and had nothing to do with the fact that I thought that at any moment my bike would be empty of oil and I would be stranded and die out in the desert.
So today Dave had an opportunity to impress me again with his diagnostic and fixing skills. With a bit of telephonic input from Tom we established that some annoying little turd in the KTM factory had not tightened a timing chain tensioner (don't worry, I also have no clue what I'm talking about), that was allowing oil to leak out. Not reassuring when you are about to enter the more remote parts of this massive country.
Anyway, mr fixit McMillan sorted it and all is good now. The bike was dismantled and remantled and all is good now. Daves most impressive moment was when he allowed me to do a little screw up so that I too could feel useful and manly. Excuse the pun but I promptly screwed up and dropped the little shitter into the bowels of the bike. Well if I had been Dave I would have turned around and punched me so hard in the nose. No, he calmly took the bike apart again, found the annoying little thing and wisely did the job himself. I slunk off into a corner and tried not to be any more annoying.
Luckily today was a short day and so we were able to ride the 70 miles from Moab to Green River we had planned so no more time lost.
No photos of our journey today though.
We rode a nice little jeep track that was easy after yesterday's efforts. I'm getting a feel for the sand although i did have one or two moments in the deeper stuff today.
Scenery was bleak today. If you print off a big picture of the moon and hold it so close to your face that you can't see anything else you will understand what we rode through. Green River is brown by the way, don't believe the hype.
We did see one nice herd of antelope, no idea what they were and too far(100m) to justify wasting pixels on.
Tomorrow will be an interesting day but you will have to wait till then to find out how interesting.
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