Bush Mechanics

Here is my simple guide to 'bush mechanics' or how to fix your car in the middle of nowhere!

It is essential to have music on a long road trip, so adding an extra 2 hour wait to the journey is well worth it ... except when the car breaks down an hour later! In Uganda, everything can and frequently is fixed using duct tape. The skill lies in knowing which wires to cut and which ones to leave alone!

Take advantage of unexpected pit stops and tuck into the tasty home made cheesy pesto scones!

And when it gets really bad (or starts raining, whichever comes first) crack open a bottle of chilled white wine from the cool box. After all, you may as well take advantage when you have hired a driver along with the car!

To quote my friend:

"It's like a general rule of life: if something is on fire, you should wait until it cools down before touching it!"

Unfortunately, our driver had not heard such words of wisdom and decided to pour a jerry can of water directly into the smoking engine. Unsurprisingly, it backfired on him!

He was also convinced that the car would be fine after this because his 'sixth sense' told him so. But why didn't his sixth sense tell him the car would break down an hour into the journey in the first place? Not to worry, even in the back of beyond, you can find a helpful mechanic on call, ready to share some helpful tips and stick a blade of grass into the engine to diagnose the problem. We decided that we weren't convinced that this mechanic was totally bona fide, mainly for the unrelated but disturbing reason that his flies were undone, he wasn't wearing underpants and he hadn't noticed that his bits were on display to one and all.  Five minutes later, our driver decided to give up on his sixth sense and request a replacement car.

I would have thought that the simplest way to replace the diesel would be for the car hire company to reimburse us for what we had bought so that we could fill up our tank again. TIA rules here though, so we used buckets and empty water bottles to drain the fuel from one vehicle and poured it into the next, losing several precious litres in the process! 

Can you see a weird looking face in this bowl of diesel? Kind of looks like he's laughing at us, don't you think?

I would have used a tube to transfer the diesel from one car to the other . But then who am I to comment?