Season 2 begins

We follow a lot of Overlanders on social media. Recently I read the final post of a guy who had been travelling for several years and he included the last lines from the movie, The Martian, in which Mark Watney says:

At some point, everything’s gonna go south on you… everything’s going to go south and you’re going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem… and you solve the next one… and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home.

Seems like very good advice for overlanders as well as astronauts.

We hit our first problem before we’d even landed in Jo’burg. On the flight from Singapore to Joburg, we realised that we’d forgotten to bring the keys to the camper part of Clancy. We’ve brought almost 90kgs of luggage and no keys. Excellent.  Actually, we’d forgotten to bring any keys at all, but we’d left a car key here with David and Marion at Airport En Route, the vehicle storage place/campground that has been Clancy’s home for the last 4 months. And from now on,the first and last items on our very long lists of stuff we need to bring will be KEYS!

It all worked out okay though. We were able to spend our first night here in an ensuite room at Marion and David’s, which meant we didn’t have to scurry 30m across frosty lawn to the toilets in the middle of the night. The next morning Greg got to work on the camper door lock and managed to lever it open, and we could then access the set of keys we’d left in the camper.

Greg re-installed the injectors he’d removed at the end of Season 1 to get refurbished, and that all went smoothly, got Clancy started without too much trouble and we’re now back to sleeping in the camper, but we’re using the nice camp kitchen here while we can.

It’s good to be back.

Clancy parked in the cold foggy morning in Johannesburg. Now we have to figure out how to break in…
Greg replacing the injectors in the 2H diesel
Unpacking everything

 

 

 

Starting to do repairs, a long list of things to do.
First nights dinner. South African Boerworst and these tiny potatoes that we see a lot in South Africa.
The days are cold in the morning but warm up and the days are bright and sunny getting over 20C
We thought about buying them but we didn’t. Bought 2 already-barbecued chickens instead

 

6 thoughts on “Season 2 begins”

  1. We always have that fear of not taking our keys to K.I. What a sinking feeling to realise you didn’t have them. Glad it all worked out.

    1. Anne, we ‘borrowed’ some cutlery from Singapore Airlines, bent the prongs of a fork trying to lever the lock and ended up using a new Aldi paring knife we’d brought with us. The knife got us in, and is still okay to use!

    1. Thanks Sal. One of the very few photos I’ve taken for the blog – Greg’s photography skills are much better than mine. But there’s one photo that I took that I really love, and I’m not sure if you’ve seen it. Greg added it to the blog after we got home
      http://www.clancyabroad.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/IMG_20190225_155553.jpg
      From this blog post a few days after we arrived in Angola
      http://www.clancyabroad.com/2019/02/28/strangers-in-a-strange-land/

    1. ah, by the time we’ve finished, I reckon we’ll have brought the equivalent of a whole Landcruiser ute in our 2 canvas duffel bags. 30kgs per bag … I wonder who long it would take?

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