When you break down, you go through the five stages of grief.
First there is denial – there are suggestions that the new whirring, squeaking or rattling sound, is just another element of the overall symphony; that sounds come and go and their arrival or departure doesn’t necessarily signify something more sinister.
Then quickly comes the anger – as the new sound graduates to a squealing or a screeching and manifests in performance issues, it is accompanied in the cabin by ‘goddamns’, ‘shits’ and ‘fuck-its’.
Standing by the side of the road contemplating the plans that are fading as quickly as the light, the bargaining begins – lost itineraries are supplanted by optimistic hypotheticals predicated on good mechanical service and the availability of parts.
Depression sets in when those hypotheticals are inevitably frustrated – first hours pass, then days and the disappointment of opportunities, sights and money lost for servitude in some hellhole takes its toll.
But eventually comes acceptance – negative reflection gives way to work, investigation and research as to how to get back on the road. Battles are waged against dodgy mechanics and their stooges, shipping agents, opportunists, Bilharzia, rust and naivety. The lack of wisdom in past decisions becomes apparent and promises are made about how things will be done better in future.
Mozambique
It was mid-afternoon when the whirring began. We were cruising in fifth and we both picked it amongst the general clattering, over the cricketing podcast. Dutifully we pulled the Badger over and began the ritual of removing all the stuff out of the back to get at the tools. We suspected the leaking front diff which we knew had been giving up oil since mid-Malawi. We would have welded it up previously, but the mechanics in Lilongwe didn’t have the right welding rods and had reassured us that topping up the oil would suffice until we could find 'decent help'. A fruitless search for the right tool to open the diff-plug led us to find ‘decent help’ in the form of Mr Stefan in the next nowhere town.
Mr Stefan reckoned he had the correct welding rods and proceeded personally to grind out and weld the hairline fracture in the diff. Even to us, it was clear that Mr Stefan was an awful welder and after a few oil fires on the Badger’s belly, we were glad to have his lacky step in and start from scratch. Whilst we weren’t convinced by the final weld (which resembled that part of your toastie where the cheese has spewed out onto the griddle and burnt) it held oil, so we pushed on.
This little pitstop at least ruled out the diff as the source of the whirring, which continued to get worse and worse. We lost gear after gear as it crescendoed into crunching, screeching and grinding. 50kms down the track, the gearbox seized completely and we were stuck on the side of the road in fading light, at dusk, far from any recognisable accommodation.
We soon learnt that in Mozambique, just like East Africa, there isn’t any ready roadside assistance, or at least none that would answer the phone. Finding assistance in Africa is all about your network and when you don’t have one, then you need to build one. This isn’t easy on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, in a country where the language is Portugese. However, with the help of Google translate and our Brazilian Kili mate Victor (legend), we negotiated an accommodation arrangement with the amazed and amused locals. This arrangement involved a handsome payment and cooking dinner for said locals, who in return offered up a rough patch of roadside to camp.
Overnight, we began building the network, starting with a fellow Land Rover owning hotelier from Mozambique Island and some diplomat friends in Maputo (1,500kms away) Katie and Zach (thanks guys!) We joined Facebook groups, sent random emails and began to get a picture of our options. To get off the side of the road, we ended up arranging for a bush mechanic to tow us to the nearest town. A grim place called Alto Molocue. I found us accommodation at the local Missionary, whilst Cam went with the bush mechanic to his ‘workshop’. Cam, still in the ‘bargaining phase’ (see above), was hopeful that the bush mechanic could fix a bearing (or something similar) in the gearbox and get us going. However, sitting in the dirt and the sand, surrounded by vehicle carcasses, looking at the bush mechanic (and co) on the bones of their arse, memories of Kampala soon jerked him right on to the ‘acceptance’ phase and he put the Badger off bounds before matters got worse.
The following day, we arranged for the bush mechanic to tow us to Nampula. Whilst this was 200kms in the wrong direction, we had gathered the most mechanic recommendations from there (including apparently a ‘Land Rover agent’) and at least we knew that there was an airport and a hostel. During the tow, my legal skills came in handy as I deduced that if you were being towed, you weren’t actually ‘driving’, therefore you couldn’t be done for ‘drink driving’. We enjoyed a few beers in the sun, enjoyed the landscape (which was actually stunning) and figured that the ‘Land Rover agent’ would have the parts and knowledge to get us on the road again in a day or two (see stage 3 - Bargaining).
When we arrived in Nampula at the ‘Land Rover agent’, we were met with an extensive and clean workshop (good), as well as a manager and ‘transmission expert’ who were blind drunk (bad) and had a boot full of live chickens (amusing). The manager gave us a ride to the hostel during which he nearly ran down a couple of children and abused a woman for actually driving on the correct side of the road, which he wasn’t. Getting out of the car, I was lucky not be pissed on by the ‘transmission expert’ who had decided to relieve himself on the back wheel. On the positive side of things, the hostel was located in the red light district of town, so at least the roadside locals were exceedingly friendly.
The following days revealed that the gearbox was completely cooked, as suspected. It also revealed that finding a replacement would not be easy or straightforward, despite being in the hands of a ‘Land Rover agent’. The ‘Land Rover agents’ were useless and days were spent dealing with their lies and laziness. Eventually, the head manager (a fat, loathsome man) told Cam that “I don’t want anything to do with your Land Rover, or your gearbox”. We went back to the drawing board and began studying the history of Land Rover gearboxes circa 1991 and auditioning new mechanics in the network. Pessimistically, we also researched towing the Badger another 200kms to the nearest port and shipping him to Cape Town, as by this stage we had met a fellow poor soul over Facebook who had had the exact same issue in the exact same place and resolved it by towing his Land Rover 1500kms to Sth Africa…
Katie & Zach and some Facebook groups had thrown up a few mechanic recommendations, so the auditions involved putting to tender a wild goose chase for an appropriate second-hand gearbox (an LT77, which, for those who are interested). After several leads and much bullshit (including the sour-faced dickhead in the photo below), one useless candidate (who had initially left me waiting in a café for 2 hours) actually led us to a bloke, who knew a bloke, who had a scrapyard with an old Defender 110. We went to the yard and found a rusted gearbox nestled in a decaying wreck.
Getting to the gearbox actually proved to be fairly easy by hand, as the gearbox’s mounts had fully corroded away. Cam got in, pulled the gearbox up through the floor of the carcass and identified that it was an LT77. It wasn’t pretty, but we figured that if the gearbox was full of oil and it wasn’t the reason the fallen Defender had ended up there in first place, then there was a chance it could work. The useless mechanic mate of the mate of the mate who had led us there said he would clean it up, open it and let us know if it was any good. Now fluent in ‘bullshit’, we insisted on being there to open it up.
The following morning, Cam was following up another Facebook lead with a Mr Johnny Chenga and I was waiting on a call from the useless mechanic about the rusty LT77. Lo and behold the useless mechanic had not called, but in the meantime Johnny Chenga had led Cam to the same gearbox. They had opened it up and it was full of the black honey. Cam was also getting a good vibe from Johnny, who was quite devout and had made a comment to the effect of “I don’t believe in charging foreigners, I just want to help”. We of course would pay him, but in our experience, an extraordinary comment to come from a mechanic nonetheless.
We gladly pulled the Badger from the ‘Land Rover agents’ and gave the job to Johnny. Just minutes after arriving at his shop, one of his apprentices (a hipster wearing a bright green jump-jacket, a serious demeanour, skinny jeans and womens’ shoes) repaired my blown pluggie with a piece of wire he found on the ground (see below). So the early signs looked good and to our extreme delight, Johnny turned out to be great!
He was one of those guys with an overdeveloped work ethic and good attention to detail. There were other things too. He had a gaggle of young apprentices (including a girl, which would not be common in Northern Mozambique) who were in awe of him and who he clearly took pleasure in mentoring. In an afternoon, they had cleaned up the old gearbox, attached it to the old transfer case and installed it by hand (picture trying to lift a 200kg lump of metal over your head into the underside of a vehicle and attaching it without a lift or crane!) They worked until after dark and Johnny would have kept going had we not stopped him.
By a miracle, the junkyard LT77 worked, with the exception of 4th gear (which you don’t really need anyway). She was rattly and a little rough, but a miracle nonetheless.
That night we drank beer, ate chicken and started resurrecting plans of visiting, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Botswana. Until of course, Facebook informed us of the tanks rolling into Harare.
Coup Country
37 years Robert ‘Dodgy Bob’ Mugabe was in power and they chose the very day the Badger was back on the road to stage a coup to remove him.
If you look at a map, you will see that getting from Mozambique to Victoria Falls involves at least an extra thousand kilometres if you aren’t going to drive through Zimbabwe (which we now did not have time for). And for the two weeks we were stuck in Nampula, we had been working towards saving our plans to go to Vic Falls, then travel down through the awesome parks of Botswana (Okavanga, Moremi, Chobe, Makgadikgai Pans). It had seemed that by some miracle, we had gotten the Badger on his paws at the very brink of saving this plan, only to be foiled by the Zimbabwean military.
At first there were suggestions that it was only a military exercise, then the peculiar statements by the military that “this is not a coup”, “we are targeting criminal elements around the President”, “the President is safe”. But of course it was a coup, though a seemingly peaceful one at that. So what to do? It seemed safe enough, but our experience in Kenya during the elections had us wary. All it takes is one rock…
We had a day to drive to the border, during which time we eyed the news, Facebook and Twitter. Dodgy Bob wasn’t letting go, the military weren’t heading back to the barracks, but life seemed to be carrying on as normal. It was like the time had finally come to put Bob (93yo) in a home, but it was a difficult conversation that could not be rushed, even though everybody knew (except Bob and his mad wife, Gucci Grace) that it had to happen.
So we just decided to go for it. In the end, we drove 900km across Zimbabwe in a day and it was delightful. As it turned out, the coup was the best thing that could have happened for us. Zimbabwe is renowned for its corrupt traffic cops and usually you can’t travel 50km without being stopped and shaken down. However, during coup time, the cops were all off duty and the military were running the checkpoints. The military were polite and on their best behaviour (with only one exception), and we were able to traverse the country unmolested, which in recent times has apparently been unheard of. This was also actually quite fortunate, because there was not a skerrick of cash to be withdrawn in the country.
Victoria Falls and Botswana
After all these Km’s and excitement, it was a nice change of pace to visit Vic Falls on both the Zimbabwe and Zambia side. We swam in the Devil’s Pool, which literally looks over a 100m metre drop in the falls whilst fish nibble your toes. With that encouragement, we also did some fishing for Tiger fish in the Zambesi. However, unfortunately we didn’t catch one, though I had a bite I can only describe has having the ferocity of a trout, with the weight of a cod. Catching one is still definitely on the list of things to do (see below)
From there we crossed into Botswana for some extended National Park Safari’ing. Despite a minor hiccup in the first 100 metres (which we initially thought was yet another wheel bearing going) seeing us head back out to find mechanical help in the refreshingly reliable form of Ken Webster (see below), we spent the next week camping out in National Parks. Bulk elephants, lion cubs, 4 wheel driving in deep sand and water, salt pans, sunset gins and braai. The photos will do a better job of describing all this than I can.
The promised land
Throughout this trip, South Africa has been held up as a bastion of home living and a holiday from the holiday. The land of reliable mechanics, good food and being able to buy the stuff you need. We had booked the Badger in for a new gearbox and a service in Johannesburg, so we entered South Africa triumphantly and cruised on down to Jozi. Almost…
About 270km from Jo’burg, again nearing dusk, the now familiar whirring sound of a gearbox giving up its death rattle wound out. So the above process began again, on the side of a stretch of road which we were later to discover was the site of a slaughter of the English 120 years earlier during the Second Boer war. Again, an English soul perished there as we farewelled the junkyard LT77.
Our accommodation on this occasion ended up being significantly nicer than the roadside in Mozambique. We were able to limp the Badger to a nearby Christian lodge where we found accommodation, mechanic recommendations and cake for breakfast. The very next day (!) we were able to get a tow to Jo’burg with a Land Rover nut named Willem, to a recommended mechanic and we didn’t even miss a day of our AirBnB. There we celebrated my B’day with cricket, lamb, blueberries and red wine.
There was the slight issue that the AirBnB was located in downtown central Jo’burg, but that is a story for another day. Suffice to say for now that we managed to escape without getting shivved #Sheppskillz.
I hope you all are doing well and enjoying the start of an Aussie summer.
Miss you,
Stuart