Ah yes, ok (a bit late, but if the ape doesn't post he's reasonably happy)
But the ape complains again. Nothing to change, but Woddel:
I'm not really happy with parts of the tour.... Not planning to check too much, just yesterday, and today I zoomed into the map again, and.
Yesterday we went over this mountain:
We came for the back, went over somewhere on the left of the picture, then straight down and over the lake, then crosscountry down to the valley.. Ok, I was pretty sure it wasn't a road the moment I saw the stage, but thought maybe a hiking track or something, which I'm not a big fan of, at least dirt tracks, maybe unrideable, but theoretically something for cars/jeeps/bikes there...but this is just pure fantasy, which of course I don't like at all. I'm not really a fan of crosscountry pure fantasy races anyway.. but in the Andes even less. It has a long history of some sort of realism. Cerro, Rasmussen and Aix as far as I know never went more fantasy than dirt tracks. Rideable ones too (I think), with which I really don't have a problem, not enough paved stuff around sometimes. But here a stage that turns out to be really pure fantasy? Ape don't like!
Then today: Zoom in the map and you see: the road and our route pass through different parts. Ok, some stuff is obscured by clouds, but a bit to the west of the cat one the clouds disappear if you zoom in. And.... switchbacks, clear road.. .while we go down straigh. Following the google map roads, that are, once again, wrong. What to do? Easy: Check with OSM. And while they are not always where they should be, or sometimes not there at all, here they are. In the visible places. Go to tracks4bikers or bikeroutetoaster, do it with OSM, then switch to satellite, zoom in too where you can see the road, and. Fits perfectly. In reality (or OSM readings at least) todays stage wasn't a series of climbs and downhills at high percentages, but simplified:
14 km a 2,x percent average , ok, one slight down km... but otherwise just slightly up, getting steeper.
5 km 7% average
6 km 3 % average
10 km at 6%. average
After 35 km first top at 3978
Roughly 1 km at 4% down, then a bit over 3 km up at 5,4%.
After that? Looong downhill 26 km at 6,1% average, then ONE climb, 3,6 km at 8,0%. Then dooooooown 44km at 6,3 average. Here a few short flat parts, 1-2 km... but no more climbs.
Completely different stage. While we go cross country again, check with the "terrain" view, clearly discernable there that the google maps road makes no sense, the actual road, or at least the osm road (in parts on satellite view no road visible, but again, unlike the google maps road where there is a road it fits, plus by checking with terrain it actually makes senes where it's not viewable) does and makes for a normal stage.
So if too much is obscured by clouds, check with OSM!
Don't plan to check past stages, but pretty sure with all those 20 20 20 climbs we had similar stuff was going on... .just hope it was like today, follow google maps instead of OSM and not complete fantasy like yesterday... might check some of the future stages... zoom in in the map... hehe. But please, let's have road or track andes, designed as precisely as possible, not fantasy andes... because then we could just forget the names of the places and make it stages from Ape Town to Roby City!