#mzanzitrophy

Cape Town to Grunau

OK. Here we go. The big off. The main one. For reals.

But, I believe we need a car for a car rally?

After last night’s instructions apparently not being a joke, and it was a genuine 5.30am meet, we bought our 4 nation flag pole (constructed hastily the previous evening using a broom) and arrived at the beach. Our first clue was a set of directions. Naturally, we misheard the directions & yardage and needed some, “cold, colder, warm, warmer” to find our buried bucket. In was the co-ordinates for our next meeting point of the day, but as our car was a current no-show, this was a bit of a moot task.

Meg & Bruno were dropped off later in the morning at the garage. Hoping the old ‘stand over the mechanic and he’ll speed up’ trick might hurry them along.  And, eventually the news was positive, and we got old Melvin back around 2pm. Hastily we loaded him up, and then spent a good hour trying to put some bags, jerry cans and tarpaulin onto my home made fence…err, I mean roof rack. AM did a sterling job, whilst Bruno & myself held bits of cord & bungees in a not particularly helpful, but very manly & rugged way. After a few tapping of watches, we realised we needed to basically get a wriggle on, and around 3pm, we started out.

Distance from day 1? Bearing it gets dark at 6pm? And we have a boarder crossing. Yep, that’ll be a simple 894km.

*eyes rolled*

To sum up how exciting this trip of the leg was, was that the sat nav’s only instructions were to turn right down ‘road’ in 692km. But, that joke never got funnier, even though the km did start to tick down.

The positive however, was that the boarding crossing was pretty easy, we’d cleverly booked a night’s accommodation beforehand, and for some absolutely unknown reason, Namibia is 1 hour behind South Africa, so we actually arrived at our destination at 2am and not 3am, so as we were getting up at 6.30am the next morning, we had an extra hour’s sleep. Oh, it doesn’t work like that does it…

I’m not going to lie to you, these were not the three most fascinating days we’ve ever spent on one of our trips, they’re not Ansbach but they’re certainly not on par with the three previous days.

We started Melvin crossing our fingers to push off to Hermanus where whales and great white sharks awaited us, we closed our eyes and turned the ignition and he roared to life without problem, whew.  We did however have a flat tire to add to our list of problems.  After stopping at a gas station and being informed by yet another person that nothing is open on Sunday we found a parking lot and tried every trick the internet had suggested to kick Melvin out of 4 wheel drive and back into a state of manageability.  We went forward, we went backwards, we steered like maniacs, nothing going, it did however seem like if the stick said he was in 4 wheel drive he wasn’t and vice versa… we decided that was good enough and chanced the 100km to Hermanus.

We made it without incident through even more amazing and unexpected scenery.  It’s a small seaside town that every winter (now) is overrun with whale watchers because apparently it’s the number one place for whales to gather in the world (I can’t remember if they were breeding or calving), there were loads, we saw 10 in the ten minutes we spent watching, we are not great watchers. 

South Africa has not discovered wifi in cafes/restaurants/hotels yet, it is an ongoing problem.

With the advent of Melvin possibly soaking up a significant amount of funds it was time to face the fact, we had to camp.  We had a new 5 man tent to put up rather than our usual popup tent, it  took an impressive 43 minutes (I had bet 46 Jonathan and hour and 15, so success). We had some BBQ and because it was dark at 6 we were asleep by 8, riveting stuff I know.

The next day it was raining so we were glad we had accepted the fact that Melvin’s well being was more important than great white shark driving and hadn’t signed up for a drive.  So we went out to garage number one.  They fixed our alignment, it took a hour they charged us ten dollars… They sent us to the next mechanic across the way for our 4 wheel drive.  He realized it was beyond his expertise to fix, apparently the 4 wheel drive was on backwards, how is that even possible?!  And he sent us off to an expert in the next city without charging us anything.  This new mechanic had no time to look at Melvin today but said we could come back tomorrow.

We found a campsite, set up, Jonathan built a roof rack on Melvin (manly stuff) and we were again asleep before 9pm.

We spent hours at the mechanic the next day, about four hours or so the mechanic then told us he couldn’t fix it entirely (he had fixed some other things) and was unhappy with the work he’d done so he wouldn’t charge us anything but we would have to go to see another specialist closer to Cape Town.