My goodness this whole car saga has been long and draining, in theory we should have had our car over 4 months ago, but due to certain changes things didn’t quite work out that way … but that is another blog in itself. On Saturday morning we woke up bright and early (about 5am) to take the 3 hour drive down to the SA border to collect our car ... this part of the trip was a breeze and was quite pleasant (the smell of our petrol sitting in the back of our friends car could have helped with this feeling). We employed an importing company to do all the stuff in relation to getting the car through immigration, this we felt would save us a lot of pain and heartache at the border ... which it did ... notice I said nothing about time though. We waited in the border town of Beitbridge (which has very little in it) for about 5 hours before we finally got to pick up our car and start our 3 hour trip back home. We couldn’t believe it … finally we had our car and we were on our way back up to Bulawayo … a bit of a long wait in Beitbridge, but no real dramas … what a relief. It was about 10 klm out of Beitbridge that our friends car which I was driving (it has 17" low profile wheels) suddenly started swaying to the left ... I pulled over and hopped out to the sound of shwshwshwshwshwshw ... the two left wheels had blown ... not good. We jacked up the car and started to take the back wheel off so Jodi could take it back into town to find a couple of spares ... the first 4 nuts came off fine, but when we got to the fifth we noticed our nut loosener/tightener did not do anything useful ... we needed a nut key. We called our friend and she advised that she knew nothing about it or where the key could be hidden (she had only imported the car 2 weeks earlier). Only in Zim .... Only in Zim. Jodi went back into Beitbridge to see if she could find any flatbed trucks to take the car back to Bulawayo with absolutely no success. It was only because our friend in Bulawayo knew of the only tow service in Bulawayo that we were notified that in about 5 - 6 hours an old flat bed truck would be here to assist. 5 hour came and went .... 6 hours came and went ... it was after 10 hours that the truck finally arrived (at about 3 am on Sunday morning … 20 hours since we woke up to start this journey). Now when we heard the truck was going to be old we though maybe a truck that was build in the early 80's ... this truck looked like it was build in the early 20's ... it had apparently broken down half way and he had to try to jump start the old thing. After 1.5 hours we got the car up onto the truck and we thought we would finally get going again ... no such luck ... the truck would not start. We decided that seeing it would only be another 2 hours until daylight it would be better to have a rest and try to start the truck and drive home in the daylight. Daylight came and we had the assistance of some young men whose car had broken down also (these guys had been waiting on the side of the road for about 4 days until their diff was fixed) to push start this truck. The engine started and we were off. To conclude, basically the truck broke down again in the same town as last time and he was able to start it again and finally get back to Bulawayo at 9.30pm on Sunday night ... our friends car is still off the road as we try to find two new tyres or 4 new rims which will be better suited to Zimbabwe roads (lots and lots of pot holes) ... I was able to celebrate my birthday like never before ... on the side of a road with some local Zimbabweans ... and the good news ... our car works really well and is a pleasure to drive.
No comments:
Post a Comment