#mzanzi trophy

[safhair]

Day 19, the Finish LIne

[safhair]

Day 2 "The name is Wereldend. It means, The End of the World"

Grunau to Sesreim (Namibia)

We woke up in our shockingly nice behind a gas station room and to our surprise we woke up in Africa.  After driving for 6 hours in the dark the landscape had changed completely it now looked like the Africa I had in my mind.

Mzanzi had sent us two coordinates today to let us know where they’d be, we knew we’d never make the first one but we had a chance for the second.  And so we set off, hearts full of excitement and joy to finally to be on our way.  Melvin was… well Melvin was less thrilled with the adventure, having spent his whole life in Joberg he was grumbling quite a lot when our road disappeared a couple hours in, inappropriate in my opinion for a 4x4.  We rode on in nervous excitement. 

Bruno invented the animal spotting game, which only lasted long enough for everyone to realize I was vastly superior at said game even after a range of rules to work to his advantage were added.  Young eyes are simply better, not to mention an American sense of competition.  But there were loads of springbocks and gemsbocks and all sorts of deer like animals, no sign of the Big 5 (5 points each) or any big cats (10 points) but I think we’re too close to the desert at this point. 

I don’t know who lives in this part of the world, but it must be a bleak existence we passed a car an hour, maybe and a house maybe every hour or two.  It’s hot and it’s dry and it’s a bit worrisome, which is why when Melvin lost all power a few hour later we were worried. 

We looked to our left, nothing.  We looked to our right, nothing.  Luckily straight ahead, maybe only 400 meters there was a house.  AM and Bruno set off, Jonathan and I made plans for what we would do if they never returned having been murdered in some gruesome manner.  They returned, the house had been abandoned long ago, we’d find no help there.  AM said the crossroads the house was at name translated to “The End of the World”, this was not a good sign. 

Luckily a load of Portuguese tourist showed up and offered to give a tow, where they would tow us to we were not quite sure but it was better than nothing.  As we scrambled to find our tow rope in our overpacked trunk a land rover of park officials was able to be flagged down.  They listened to our problem and suggested perhaps the wire attaching the battery was loose.  This seemed too simple to possibly be the case, but he touched the wire just as Jonathan turned on the engine making Melvin roar to life and giving the poor guy a shock, it was like magic.  I have no idea what we would have done if they had not rolled by but we were grateful they had.

We carried on and low and behold caught up with the rest of the Mzanzi crew, on time even!  It was time to set up tent and be shamed by the South Africans very meat heavy BBQ. Tomorrow is another day and hopefully and a Melvin incident free day.

[safhair]

Who are we? SafHair. What do we know? Absolutely Nothing...

50 days until the start of the Mzanzi Trophy, please refer to every other Hairventure’s xx Days out blog posting to know what kind of state we’re in… Do we have a car, no. It’s proving more difficult that we expected to buy a vehicle in a country we’ve never been to and know very little about. I’ve been scouring the internet daily and luckily I happened to meet a South African girl who has since returned to South African so Dante is helping us out a lot. But still, no we do not have a car, we’re hoping to in the next few weeks. Do we have any gear? No, literally zero gear. We’re going to have to do that upon arrival in South Africa. Luckily as veteran long road trippers Jonathan and I are pretty prepared for this and know what’s necessary and what’s superfluous. Though surely we’ll buy some superfluous items. There of course will be fancy dress and a mascot. Do we have a clear understanding of what we’ve signed up for? No, I actually have very little understanding of what we’ve signed up for. Some kind of race… There will be some challenges. It’s unclear what kind of challeneges they’ll be or how they’ll be presented. This is the first time this particular event has been done so we’re guinea pigs, which should make it more interesting. Do we know where we’re going? I do, but I can say with near 100% certainty if you asked him Jonathan could not name you all 6 countries we’ll be visiting. But this is not usual, sometimes he tells stories of past trips and thinks we were in France when really we were in Finland. Anne-Meike is on top of things as well. Lonely Planets and maps have been purchased and highlighting has been done. In short, we’ve paid the price of admission, we’ve got plane tickets, a team name, a logo, a theme song and now a website and surely these are the important things, right?