The dead car.
We decided to take a little hike while waiting.
We woke up at 6 am (it was still dark) and say the large and small Magellinic Clouds. (The galaxy had set.) The clouds were cool to see, but just looked like a blur, both to the eyes and binocs. I didn't recognize any of the stars -- wait, no, Orion was up. But we picked out a few southern constellaations and left it at that -- there were too many new stars to learn them all in an hour!
We hit the road as soon as it was light enough to see. The clutch, which had never been great, was getting worse. Very small inclines we could hardly get up. But, we just hit too big an incline and now are totally stuck. Good thing we have the satellite phone!
When the tow truck didn't show by 3pm we called the rental guy back and he said he couldn't find a tow truck for us! Now, this just makes no sense because we'd called several times to conform our location and he had said a truck was on the way! But no, now he said he couldn't find one. So we called around a bit ourselves, and found a guy willing to tow us, but by now it was too late -- he didn't want to do it in the dark. We started to resign ourselves to the idea of staying there overnight. So we called the rental guy back to tell him about this tow person who could tow us in the morning. But he said he'd just found someone to do it tonight. We watched some Stargate SG1 episodes while we waited.
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Large -- Medium The dead car. |
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Large -- Medium We decided to take a little hike while waiting. |
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Large -- Medium |
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Large -- Medium |
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Large -- Medium |
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Large -- Medium |
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Large -- Medium |
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Large -- Medium |
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Large -- Medium |
The truck showed up at dusk, about 12 hours after we broke down. I was somewhat horrified to realize that it was not a tow truck. It was just this guy & girl with a truck and some rope. Their truck had a trailer hitch but our didn't even have a tow point. They found somewhere to lash the rope to, and told us to ride our brakes going downhill so we wouldn't crash into them. It took about 3 hours to go the 33 km to the main road. The long rope broke a couple times in the first 5-10 km. Finally the guy replaced it with a 3 m blue nylon ropee. This rope was good in that it didn't break, but bad because it was so short that (a) Jason had hardly any time to respond to accelerations of the truck pulling us and (b) we couldn't see around the truck to know what was coming on the road ahead.
It turned out that we were able to deal with these issues while traveling at 0-10 km/hr. The real terror started when we got to the main road. The "tow" truck driver came over and said he was going to tow us to Halls Creek doing ~80 km/hr and that if there was a cow in the road, well, we would hit it.
Now, I suppose there are tailgaters out there who drive like this every day by choice (until their choice kills them.) But Jason and I don't, so it was a totally nerve wracking 1.5 hours until we got to Halls Creek. It was a great relief to get a shower and a clean bed after two nights of camping and a day of being stranded.
