O Spanner, where art thou?
Trip Start
Apr 15, 2009
1
3
18
Trip End
May 15, 2009
Springbok,
Western Cape,
South Africa
Friday, April 17, 2009
See some pictures here .
It is about 430pm. Still far from the Namibian border, Claire and I have been looking for a campsite to spend the night on the way to Springbok, the last biggish town this side of the border. You may appreciate that driving the whole day on an old VW Fox is pretty tiring, so we stop in a little town called Garies. Being a Friday, there is a festive vibe in the air, but the local campsite is closed. Too late out of season I presume. So after buying a couple of quarts of Amstel - to wind down as soon as we find a welcoming campsite - we resume our journey only to stop again shortly afterwards because of the tire...smiling I get off and very smugly I look for the jack and the spanner. But we do not have the right spanner, now do we? I had half forgotten that we had left without a wheel spanner and counted on finding one on the way...now it would have been tremendously useful to have one and not to be so damn laid-back about this sort of things after all!
People's generosity always show up when one is in need though, and a few minutes later, my hands still dirty from handling the tire, which is also half-melting from the intense heat, a car stops and the driver ask us if we need help. Sure we do Sir. Unfortunately this Good Samaritan's spanner is not the right size either, but he offers to go back to town and fetch another one from home. So we wait with two of his passengers, a smiley man in his thirties and a little bespectacled girl who look at us with curiosity. Neither of them speaks English very well, so Claire entertains a brief conversation in Afrikaans while I reach for my tobacco pouch and offer some mango juice to the fellows.
Tire changed, we are advised to follow them all the way to Springbok, still one and a half hour away, where our chances to have the tire fixed the day after, a Saturday, will be greater than in God-forsaken Garies. We precede them at a slow(ish) pace in case the spare decides to give up as well. We didn't really mean to drive any longer after five o'clock, but we realize we'd better do, and think about finding a camp site when we get to our destination; at least we'll be closer to the border. And we are repaid by a drive that couldn't be prettier, across green land that stretches as far as the eye can see, bordered by mountains reddened by the setting sun. We drive along the N7, the main thoroughfare between here and Cape Town, a long straight stretch of tarmac that cuts this incredible landscape like a neat, dark scar. We are happy. And just as we enter Springbok, we see in the distance a promising camp ground, open, and this is where we are at now and where I'm writing from, hoping to find an internet cafÈ' in town tomorrow, so that I can share our day with you. And if you reading this, I probably did.
Stay Tuned - and ready for Namibia.
