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.