Good morning! Beautiful sunshine, warmth and butterflies everywhere! It felt good to be back on the road. I sat drinking my morning coffee while the curious butterflies fluttered around and gently landed on my arms, legs and shoulders. Gone were all the bugs from the night before.
We decided to drive through Maun so we could make a loop into the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. Bob Marley was blasting happy tunes over the growl of the engine and the whirring of the knobby tires. There were cold Savannas in the fridge too, thanks to the new 40L Engel fridge that was quietly humming away. Life was good. No, it was grande!
This moment of jubilation clearly could not last. In horror I noticed the temperature gauge slowing creeping higher and higher. At 105 degrees Celcius (20 degree above normal operating temperature) the needle hit the red. More four letter expletives emerged than I knew existed in my vocabulary. The music had also been changed from happy Bob Marley to not-so-happy Angus Young screeching Highway To Hell. But I was even robbed of this small joy when the iPod began continuously crashing.
We slowly pushed on to Maun as we needed cash and gas, and from there I would be able to phone our friends in Windhoek. On route, the smell of petrol started filling the cabin. We pulled over and I tracked down the culprit – the carburetor was leaking like a sieve. The bolts had rattled loose and the carburetor was now acting more like a percussion instrument than a clever device which mixes air and fuel to power the behemoth Chev engine. In Maun I realized that although I had charged my cell phone the night before, the battery was dead. I tried to use the inverter in the truck but soon found out that it had packed up and was only illuminating a red fault LED. And the thermometer had stopped working as well. But I knew it was hot. Damn hot.
I managed to get a hold of our friend Nelson in Windhoek a little later on and told him our good fortune. After a few moments of disbelief, he walked me through a series of things I should check; many of which I had already done. As it was getting late, I would do the rest in the morning.
We stopped at the Maun Rest Camp for the night. It’s off season now, so we had the entire camp to ourselves. It’s a clean and quiet camp. The toilettes are clean and the gas showers hot. We chatted a while with Simon, the friendly chap that ran the place. The friends with whom we traveled with at the beginning of the trip would get a kick out of this – the wife of Simon is the very same tour guide that reprimanded us in Moremi for driving off the main track at the Hippo watering hole! What are the odds?