Day 8: Losing our marbles
Whew. Was this trip
really only half way in??
I think the first thought on each of our minds on waking up this morning was to check if Gav was still alive.
Happily I didn’t have an extremely difficult phone call to make to his wife! It seems we weren’t the only ones thinking that way. A flotilla of ladies from the village had arrived to inspect him, led by a few Himba tribeswomen. Unfortunately I only managed to get this shot of them departing. I think perhaps the message had got out that he had a broken leg and was going nowhere, and perhaps some of the more eligible single ladies came to check him out for marriage prospects?
Camel was the real early riser, and this was the sight that had greeted me as I crawled out of my tent at 6am:
Apparently a broken body wasn’t our only problem. It looked to be one of those ‘everyfuckingthinggoeswrongatonce’ days. The 690 had started coughing and spluttering like a hamstrung carthorse on the road in to Onjuva the previous day. Likely culprits were the fuel injector or the fuel pump, but the injector was easier, so we started there.
I’d seen a Youtube video from Norah Horak’s round-the-world trip, where he posted a trick for dealing with blocked injectors on the 690. You just take the injector out, reverse it, and blast all the **** out backwards… so we tried that, but there was no fuel pressure. Bugger.
We’d been carrying a spare 690 fuel pump since Angola because they’re a known weakness on this bike, so that was the next line of attack. It’s a ***** of a job - you have to empty the tank, undo the lower tank bolts, lift it up, and strip the pump assembly out. KTM, in their wisdom, made the molded hose just about impossible to remove or refit. I left Camel boiling water with a black look, and decided to go fetch the other stranded 690.
Negotiations with the local bakkie guys were going badly - they wanted R4k for the trip back to the Marienfluss, and at this point we realised we’d pretty much run out of cash. Dave saw our predicament and stepped in, offering to take us back. I think he liked the idea of a bit of adventure, but honestly, as if they hadn’t done enough for us already!
He’s a fascinating character, with a colourful business past, and the trip back with Midge, Dave and I passed quickly. Lots of game around - again I was sorry for the lack of a long lens.
We’d left an X on the GPS, but the bike was a lot further south off the main track than any of us remembered. Shows what adrenalin does to you! On the map you can see a green line of our intended route - I guess we were 10km or so south of the main track when we found it under a tree, safe as houses.
I guess it’s not like anyone was hot-wiring a bike in these parts. She started at the flick of a starter button, and I rode her out. The Fortuner was moving a lot quicker than she had with a patient onboard the day before, and Dave was handling her like a rally car in the rough stuff. Sensational.
It was hot as blazes, and waiting around in the sun was hard work, but it seemed best to stay together. We didn’t need any more drama.
About 2km south of Red Drum, the 690 suddenly cut out. I thought it had run out of petrol, and set her up on a rock to drain the front tanks into the main tank, but I couldn’t see any level in the transparent part of the tank. Surely someone hadn’t drained the fuel out??! The car eventually caught me, and I looked at them with a worried look. ****, what now?
Eventually I thought to open the front tank caps and they were actually full of fuel! I hit the button and she coughed reluctantly back into life and eventually started running smoothly.
“Right, there’s something not lekker here,” I told them. “I’m going to just gas it home - we’re only about 40km out now - and see how far I get.”
Temperature was ready 45 degrees on the car thermometer, and it wasn’t lekker out baking between the rock faces. Everything was fine again, and I pushed the bike quite hard over the rocky terrain for about 10km and then suddenly, nothing. Dead as a door nail.
Bugger.
This time I opened the rear tank cap, and a sudden rush of air into the tank revealed that something was up with the pressure. I flicked the starter and she burst into life cleanly. Obviously there was a breather problem on the tank. I hammered on and the ritual repeated itself every fifteen minutes or so. Eventually I got back, and as I pulled in to Marble campsite, we heard the sound of a chopper in the air.
It was about 1pm, and help had arrived. We scooted down to the clinic to welcome the crew.
Gav had already been carted down to the clinic on one of the bikes, and the paramedic was checking him out. We seemed a lot more concerned than Gav did, but he’s tough like that.
It took surprisingly long to lock and load the patient:
They had this crazy stretcher where they suck the air out and it clamps him in an unmovable position:
Then it was stand back, and wave byebye!
A chopper makes one hell of a lot of dust taking off from a dirt patch.
Dave and Midge had finally returned - they’d slashed a tyre to bits on Joubert’s Pass. Damn - not like a good turn deserved that! It was all smiles though - Dave and Thelma extremely generously offered to take Gav’s extra stuff back to Hermanus, and then got the hell out of there, in case anything else went wrong. I couldn’t blame them!
Absolute saints, these two lovely people!
It’s a horrible feeling, losing one of your tour party like that! Just horrible. There was a sinking, miserable feeling around camp. Camel was anxious about his bike, which didn’t seem to be coming right very fast. English had discovered a hole in the Suzie’s radiator, and I was just feeling down and stressed about all of it. Midge was walking around trying to distract everyone by showing them the pretty birds fluttering around the river bed next to camp.
Thomas spotted a moment of weakness and decided to try and offload Kitty ***** with a game of ‘strike the bottle’.
Even at about four feet I couldn’t hit it. Midge had a moment of assassin-like accuracy and was out first. He retired to the veranda and gloated, offering endless chirps of useless advice.
After about six hundred fruitless throws between us, Tom finally knocked the bottle off the pole and I was the pig in the middle. Bugger. And my day just got better!
We decided to try lift everyone’s spirits and take a ride to see the purported marble quarry from where the campsite got its name. We also had to test out Camel’s bike, which was now back together, although he wasn’t looking too happy about it.
My god - the place is spectacular. Huge slabs of marble disappearing into the mountainside, massive blocks carved out with these incredible straight cuts. How do they do that?
Tom succeeded in trapping a baby goat without its mother, and in a misguided escape frenzy it fell about five metres down a marble face. Shame! I was feeling terrible for the poor bleating animal, and at the same time thinking of goat meat skewers for dinner. Is that wrong?
The Camel machine was running like a filthy, nasty, stuck pig. Farting and burping, refusing to idle or behave, and cutting out constantly. I felt a sense of rising panic. We were heading off into probably the most remote wilderness of the entire trip with this?
I told Mike to try Gav’s bike, which at this stage was feeling hundreds, but even that one had question marks around it after all the cutting out this morning. And there was another issue at stake. Whichever bike stayed behind was being left in the loving arms of Exit, the camp manager, in the hope that some plan could be made to get it back to South Africa. Bearing in mind we were sitting some two thousand kilometres north of the border in one of the most remote desert areas on the continent, this wasn’t exactly a thrilling prospect. I could tell my brother was less than eager to leave his darling behind - badly behaved ***** that she was right now.
Tension was rising faster than a river in flood.
Night fell, and as we climbed into our sleeping bags, the camp was illuminated by the streaky torchlight, clanking and regular swearing of the Night Mechanic!
Things were not looking good for Team Cape Town in the rugged, uncompromising northern wilderness of Namibia!
