#mzanzitrophy

[safhair]

Day 1 - proper

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…

Anyway. We have a car. It has a new axle. It’s apparently no longer f*$ked, and we will be hopefully catching up with the rest of the teams tomorrow afternoon/evening. Readers. Keep everything crossed for us…

[safhair]

Days 7-9 It's Sunday nothing is open on Sundays...

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.

We decided to stick with the plan and stay in wine country for two nights but to be honest the rain and the state of our vehicle put a major damper on things so we pulled into the adorable village of Franschheok with heavy hearts and can only hope tomorrow will be a more successful 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?