Night still clings to the desert when we stumble bleary-eyed out of our roadside tent refuge to beat the rising sun. Take every adjective and epithet used in connection with this damned heat over the last month and magnify it thousand-fold, and you will begin to approach the hellish inferno that awaits us should we linger too long in this desert, the same desert where - did we mention this already? - famed spaghetti western Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo was filmed, as several kitschy pseudo-frontier tourist stops will attest to...the desert that caught Sergio Leone's directorial eye for its forbidding and desiccated scenery. So we get up at 0530 and ride out, our headlamps and handlebar-mount lights and reflectors making a valiant attempt to bring just enough light to this darkness to see where we are going. Olive fields become more and more common as we ride on, the vegetation gets just a touch more green and lush - not much, but visibly so; we take tea in a small café, where we are told the water in the sinks is not potable...so we purchase water down the road, much nearer to the coast.
We hit the coast while it is still fairly cool out in a small yet touristy beachside town, where I promptly ride into a sewer grate whose slats are perversely both wide and long enough to easily fit my tires. We ride on through town, imagining that everything is perfectly fine; it is only once we stop at the local supermarket for real breakfast that I notice the double flat caused by this untimely accident. I spend some time swapping the tires - the rear is more roughed up than the front, so I move it to the front where the lessened weight will hopefully permit it to stay intact - and patching both tubes, then reattach the brakes and test it out; there is some wobble in the tires, so I pull out the spoke wrench and start truing the wheels as well. Despite these extensive repairs, there is an unexplained bounce in the tire on every revolution. Upon closer inspection, the tube is not uniformly inflated. Lesson learned: sewer grates are not to be trifled with - avoid them at all costs!
After this epic repair session, enough damage is repaired to continue up the coast for siesta. Given the early hour of awakening, we all insist on taking a short nap after lunch, after which we secure some ice cream from a local heladeria and charge the laptop. As we leave, the road winds up into an impressive 300 m climb; the ensuing descent is made somewhat more complicated by the insufficient job I did reattaching my brakes, so that I am forced to keep both levers firmly pressed down as I take the downhill at a crawl; but better that than the precipitous and quite possibly fatal alternative! We ride on, and the sun begins to dip down to the horizon. With no town or campground in sight, we finally decide to camp by the side of a small service road into a tilled but apparently unplanted plot of cropland. With the light quickly fading, I pull out the headlamp to perform further repairs on the bike, adjusting the spokes and brakes for a better ride tomorrow...