Namibia Part 2

15.05.2010 - 30.05.2010 22 °C

Wednesday May 19th, 2010
Brake Line Drama
Stay: Solitaire Guest Farm, Solitaire, Namibia
After breakfast we have a quick AGM (Svenska: överläggning) and decide it’s time to move on today. We’re going to drive to the one-bakery / one-horse town of Solitaire, only a couple of 100km’s away and so we don’t leave until after lunch. The scenery in Namibia is spectacular and constantly changes again as we drive inland once more and leave the coast behind us.

The sun is beginning to lower in the sky and we’re driving along the gravel road about 50km from our destination when Joakim applies the brakes just as we come over the brow of a hill. Low and behold, we have none (breaks that is). Despite the bad gravel roads and no breaks, he manages to bring us to a stop using the handbrake.

A quick scan underneath reveals a significant leak in the break lines going to a rear wheel. One of Bob’s little flaws is that the break lines to all four wheels are on the same system, so even if one line leaks, all four are ineffective. McGyver Rapp mulls this over for a little while and within a matter of minutes, the break line is removed and I find myself lying underneath the car with my finger plugging a hole. Joakim removes the screw end from the now defunct break line, fills it with plastic padding and then uses it to ‘blank’ the end of the break line. I think I jinxed us this morning when at breakfast I made an observation, for the first time all trip, how strange it was that we haven’t even had need to break out the plastic padding yet!
Roadside repairs

Roadside repairs

And so with Bob now running on 3 good brakes and the sun setting behind us, we’re back on the road again. As we drive over the brow of the hill where our brakes had first failed, we quickly realise how lucky we had been. There’s a steep descent into a canyon and some nasty twists and turns on the way down. A car wreck at the base of the canyon is a stark reminder how easily fortunes can change.

When we arrive at a guest farm in Solitaire which is beautiful and really tasteful and we set up camp for the night, carefully observed by Bocky the pet springbok, who has a demonous streak and some very sharp horns. (A now have a crotch-less pair of jeans to prove it!) The best thing about this farm is the family of (almost) tame Meerkats who are waiting for us to get up the following morning and hence the weet-bix have to go a lot further this morning. I am now looking for a pet shop that sells meerkats if anyone knows of any. By far, the coolest pets we’ve come across all trip.
Unexpected dinner guests