Our own P2P or points and puncture, two very long days

day 23, A very big driving day of 587 km from Namib Desert Lodge to Fish River Canyon.

Sorry we have missed a few days but the connection was bad and we were pretty exhausted.

The last few days have been fairly dramatic with some of the lead cars having major problems. The other and very fast Porsche in the event had a major problem at the rear and had to be retired, the big Dodge Coupe developed an engine problem and missed a time trial, at the end of day 23 the car park resembled a Halfords Drive in Service on a Saturday morning. There were broken cars in all directions, luckily for me Molly was not one of them, but we had had a bit of drama on the way.

I had extended my mechanising abilities and changed Mollys points, she now flew along with no popping and banging. Remember in a previous blog i had said how to drive on gravel and look after your tyres, well I should have taken my own advice. We got a puncture in the middle of nowhere. Thankfully Jose and Maria stopped and lent us their ultra low jack. I had checked that my scissor jack fitted under Molly before we left the UK. What I hadn’t checked was if the jack fitted with a flat tyre and on sand :) Lesson learned.  Gianmaria and Rosella also stopped to lend a helping hand and moral support

Wheel changed and we headed for the next village. Here we found a garage but they had no power, but the guy said he could change our damaged tyre for the new one we carried by hand, using good old fashioned tyre levers. He spent about 40 min doing all this for us while all his mates came over to take photos.  He had to use our portable pump and puncture repair kit but fixed it all and off we went.

The first drama of the event.

The accommodation at Fish River Canyon was bizarre. The hotel was arrange as little lodges scattered around a huge rock outcrop in the middle of the desert.

To make it more strange there in the middle was a perfect natural grass crazy golf course. Unfortunately we didn’t have time to try and set a course record for most shots taken but would love to come back to this place.

Day 24 A huge driving day of 620km.  To give you a flavour of this rally and the roads the first part of today’s run is on an unmapped road across the desert to the Richtersveld National Park. This leads us to the South African border, easily crossed and then a long long drive to Clanwilliam. Thankfully all the repaired cars are back on the road and make it to Clanwilliam lodge. 

Along the route were endless roadworks. The South Africans seem to like closing one lane of great lengths of road. This means you have to wait about 10-20 min until its your turn to proceed. Then the locals try to drive at double the speed limit 0f 60km, if you don’t keep up you get overtaken on single lane roads and cut up.

These roadwork chicanes were some of the fastest ands hairiest driving we have done all rally. Quite good fun except for the speed trap on the last section, luckily they missed Molly but did catch some of the others.  

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 Some homes are not so fancy, but at least they have a pub. These is a town for the workers on the vineyards.

Over the past few days we have been lucky enough to stay in some great locations and have really good rooms. Clanwilliam Lodge was the end of the fairytale.

This was a very tired hotel, with some pretty poor rooms. Ours was OK except for being at the front in pole position for listening to the car alarms going off in the night and the hotel doors banging. Back to normality :)

We leave Clanwilliam quite quickly and set off on the last day.