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…













