time for a little enumeration:
- up at 5am
- two hours drive to sossusvlei
- due to flat tire episode, schedule squeezed and emergency cash used, now scraping coins together
- all cash machines for these particular 100’s of kilometers have decided they don’t like my cards
- rather than 4x4 taxi tour around dawn, epic endurance desert walk lasting into the afternoon
- walking back out of the desert trying for the last drops of the three bottles of water
- as well as not losing the ring, didn’t lose the car keys to the desert: on goes the aircon, in glugs all those half-drunk bottles of water cars generate
- five hours drive to nearest town. gravel roads. through rain storms. over a mountain pass with boulders scraping the bottom the car.
- atm has closed “fiften minutes ago. but don’t worry, the next town along has banks and restaurants, and the road is tar from here”.
- next town is a 100+km. car can go very fast on straight, tar roads. we are _very hungry.
so its at this point, at 5pm, exploring bold new tests of exhaustion and still before breakfast, that a bridge guarded by a thousand monkeys appears as if straight out of a rudyard kipling story. one of the more surreal emergency stops i’ve ever had to do. took a minute or so to have the where-with-all for the camera to be got out, before we passed through it really was covered with them.