Houstan! We ahhh… We have a problem.

9:38 am. Whats this? I have some spare time in the middle of the day to write a blog entry. How unusual. Oh wait, it’s because we are broken down in the MIDDLE OF NOWHERE. Hahaha. Not a major problem, just minor, but big enough to delay us too much and cop maximum lateness all day. Which is a shame, it was going to be another day on beautiful gravel roads for 700 k’s and 10 time controls we will miss. Which means about 5 hours of penalties 🙁 we won’t hold our glorious 31^st place tomorrow.

I was driving along, and noticed the front right mudguard was wet, and i thought to myself “hang on, there are no puddles in the desert, how is it wet??? Shit….. our radiator has a crack in it.” Only a very small crack on the side where the solder had started to split. Smaller than a pin hole. So we dried the area up, and pushed silicon gook all over it, put more silicon gook all over it. And voila, no more leak. Now we are just waiting for the gook to go off and dry so we can plod our way down to Ai-Ais tonight. Everything else? Fine!

8:15PM. By Poseidon’s Trident it was hot today. We were in the worlds oldest desert and it was scorching hot! Pushing 40 degree’s C. Not very ideal for tyre life and engine heat. Reports from other drivers are that lots and lots of people got flats or de-laminating tyres, from the intense heat and gravel roads, the tread just working so much harder it was literally falling apart on the lesser quality tyres. We couldn’t make up the time we lost this morning for two reasons; our engine was getting too hot when we pushed it, and we were just too far behind from our radiator problem. Even taking shortcuts and more direct roads we only made the final time control 30 minutes before maximum lateness. But still drove 700k’s on the same beautfil gravel roads.

700k’s on roads like this takes so much energy and concentration, especially a giant car like that at respectable speeds on the gravel, i’m exhausted, but i am getting fitter from doing it hahaha. Only 2 more days to go. Then a bit of a rest!

Namibia is beautiful, almost entirely desert but there is something about the rugged-ness and just how old this place is. The canyons, and rock escarpments and sand formations are just amazing. Our SD card reader is currently broken, so no photo’s until we can buy a new one in Cape Town sorry. And so so dry. The amount of water we drank today was phenomenal. More sand in places you didn’t think you could have sand in as well haha.

Pulled into a lonely servo – 300k’s from anything else that had any signs of life – and jumped out and heard a hissing sound. Then i had a bit of a chuckle thinking the poor fella next to us had a flat tyre. Wrong! It wasn’t the poor fella next to us, it WAS us. So we changed another tube today, not quite as formula one fast as yesterday because it was hot and we didn’t need to rush, but still changed it out in 15 minutes or so, ready to hit the road again. Just another one of those “brilliant, no spare wheels remember, dad! Remember what happened to them?!”

ANNNDDDD our starter motor kinda broke today as well (our good luck must slightly be wearing off). Not a big problem, we will push start tomorrow and when we have more time tomorrow night we can fix it, just a bolt snapped. No biggy.

Animals:

-Some giant deer kind of thing, with no horns,  the size of a horse, oval shapped furry ears a bit like a rabbit, and pale grey all over. No idea what it was.

-and a mongoose. A few of them actually, so plural of mongoose would be Mongeese? Mongooses? Mongi? Who knows, but we still saw them.

-Ostriches

-and some more warthogs.

James