THE engineering works couldn’t help us until Wednesday, so we roared back to camp.
From the scattered orange peel it was immediately obvious that we had been raided by monkeys, but the damage did not seem too great and, having failed to zip up our tent properly, I had only myself to blame. In any case, remembering our experience the previous year, I had brought two sacks of oranges and they hadn’t found the second one.
We settled down to the task of fixing the rest of our gremlin-riddled equipment.
The fluorescent tube was obviously beyond redemption, so we tried out the gas lamps. Both worked beautifully – for 10 seconds. Corrie cleaned the jets and they worked for another 10 seconds. We tried the gas stove, but it only managed five. So while John fetched another cylinder, Corrie changed all the washers and jets. We eventually found one cylinder on which everything would work. It was a small one, which still had gas in it from an earlier outing and had therefore not been refilled at the same time as the others. The bulk of our gas supply was dirty.
A good fire could take the place of lights and stove, but what about the freezer?
We could run it from the battery while we were on the move, but in camp we were dependent on gas. And to clean the jet on that thing, you had to be a qualified refrigeration engineer or a demolition stunt man.
We used a lot of petrol in the next two days, driving around to keep the fridge cold. At least, when we took Samantha back to Kasane on Wednesday for the exhaust repairs, we would be able to plug into the mains for a couple of hours and refreeze everything.
Our diet became rather monotonous – chicken with everything.
Meanwhile we had met up with Bruce again. A different time, a different place and with a different pretty assistant in tow, but the same Bruce, still taking photographs and still complaining about pop music in game parks.
Wednesday saw us back at the engineering works in Kasane but, instead of two-and-a-half hours to do the job, it took them two-and-a-half days.
We hung around the hotel, drinking expensive beers, eating expensive food, sleeping in expensive beds and wearing increasingly grubby clothes. Corrie and John took a walk up to the local trading store to buy us all toothbrushes.
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