DAY EIGHT-TWO After a tasty breakfast of fried spud, left over from last night’s meal of spuds, peas and frankfurters, we hit the road about 7:30. First stop was for repairs to the truck in a largish town, which took about an hour and which turned out to be no good anyway. The fault was in the oil pressure sender line which had a hole in it so when we stopped for lunch later on Mike and Scotty fixed it.
Later on, as we neared a range of golden sand dunes, we stopped at a wayside shack that sold coffee and Limonade (lemonade). A little old lady with a face like tanned leather, dressed in bright red and green shawls, laboriously made us coffees and fussed around about how much we all owned, all the while keeping an eye on some ragged children playing beside the road outside.
Half an hour on form the café we pulled off the road to look at some sand-dunes and got stuck!! The sand-dunes weren’t even very interesting , certainly not worth getting stuck for for, but there we were!
It took about an hour to dig and sand-mat¹ it out and it was another experience, like getting bogged in the Congo Jungle, that no African trip would be complete without.
We camped the night under a full moon a few miles further down the road.
¹Sand-mats are narrow steel panels, about two metres long and with round perforations in them. They are laid under the wheels of a stuck vehicle to spread its weight out over a greater area than the mall surface area of the tyres.
CurseOfTheTraveller 