The next morning Michael cooked us all scrambled eggs, and we headed off to drive through the Namib Nauklaft Park (above) to Keetmanshoop. We didn’t make it to Keetmanshoop. We had an amazing drive- families of warthogs, baboons, ostriches (all with babies!) wandered along the car and a herd of springbok raced us down the road. Then, five km’s from the main road, a giant rock stopped us in our tracks. We pulled over and a pick up truck behind us (conveniently filled with BP employees) pulled over to help. They spoke Afrikaans mostly, but managed to tell us our petrol tank was leaking. We began to follow them up the road to a service station and got a message that the engine was overheating. We were having a breakdown in many ways. Our BP friends said they would go and get a tow truck for us, and we waited on the side of the road. We were all in a panic, stranded on the side of a Namibian road now covered in petrol with an overheated engine. The police came by, and I felt a bit relieved. Our conversation went something like this:
Police: You have to move it to the side of the road. Big trucks come down here.(I won’t insult them by putting broken English down, but communication was far from entirely clear)
Us: We can’t turn it on, the engine is overheating and it’s leaking fuel.
Police: You must push it to the side of the road
(efforts ensue to put car in neutral, which is not possible in this model without turning on the ignition, which we assumed may make the car blow up)
Police: What are you going to do?
Us: Some fellows said they’d bring back a tow truck.
Police: I think the only tow trucks come from Windhoek.
Us: They said Rehoboth.
Police: Oh, well.
Us: Maybe you could call someone for us? Our cell phones are South African and don’t work here
Police: Oh. I hope someone comes.
Us: (Look aghast- as if to say: HOPE?! WHAT?!)
Police: I’m sure someone will come.
They drive off.
The relief was unwarranted. Shortly after, a single fellow (white and English speaking) pulls over in a pick up truck hauling timber. He consecutively tried to fix our gas tank with bar soap, drove us to town in the bed of his pick up (the three of us who were most afraid of the car exploding while the other two followed in the time-bomb car), called the BMW dealership, and offered to house us at his farm (we refused). The engine started to heat up again on the main road so we pulled over, but just in time to meet up with the Afrikaans fellows from before and a tow truck they’d brought. They couldn’t take us all the way up to Windhoek because the tow truck didn’t have lights on the back and couldn’t legally drive main roads, so the goal was to repair it enough for us to drive up to the BMW dealership there. It started to get dark, and we knew we couldn’t drive up that night, so we made reservations at a local B&B (what I mean by that is a nice guy at the garage-didn’t even work there, friend of the owner-called and made reservations for us). We were still really afraid in the situation, but by this point we had gotten in touch with Quinton (our program director) and the rental car company. The mechanics and their friends took our meat and drink orders and had an enormous braii for us in the parking lot of the shop. The guys loved hearing about the US (especially George, who had an obsession with old American westerns and Native American history) and telling us about their background. There were coloured (‘basters’ in Namibia-not an offensive term, they took pride in it), black, and white men working there, and they told us all about racial dynamics and language use. Finally, they took us to our B&B (Budget dropped off a replacement rental and picked up Simba, our prior car), where we stayed the night. We drove to Windhoek in the morning, worked things out with Budget, and Brigid, Sara, and I flew back to Cape Town while Michael and Sean drove back. To close with a cliché- it was a trip I’ll never forget.
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