And we begin
We are on the road north, to Botswana. We left the farm this morning after four days of working on the vehicle, watching the farm in action and spending time with our friends.
It feels like we’ve had many departures on this trip already, first our last days at work, then departing California, and now we’ve left the farm. Now that we are on the road north I suppose it seems like this is the real thing.
Though the purpose of the journey is to go “Into Africa”, as the South African’s say (as if we weren’t already here), I’d like to note the farm is just as fascinating and impressive as I’m sure many of the other sites we are about to see.
On Farming
My first visit to the farm was in 2004 when my friend Hendrick’s father, Herman, ran the farm. Then I spent six weeks on the farm, working, as Herman, Hendrick and his brother Dannie patiently turned me from seafarer to mediocre farm worker. In my experience farmers make excellent mariners, but I’m not sure it’s so consistent the other way around. My visit is a story in itself, but for now I will say I was humbled by the experience and am grateful for the hospitality I was given. Herman is now semi retired and his eldest son Hendrick, my old shipmate from years ago, runs the operation.
The farm stretches thousands of hectares and has many thousands of sheep, not to mention feed crops, some cattle, horses workers ride to heard the sheep with, and piles of machinery, most working but some not, to manage the crops. There are irrigation pivots, feed silos, workshops, mechanics, foremen and staff.
When talking to Hendrick and Drien I start to grasp a just how little I know about where wool and lamb comes from, and food generally, and what it takes to make it to market. They explained many details of the farm.
We watched grading of freshly shorn wool, where graders with keen eyes sort wool into different bins based on it’s quality, which to us all looks pretty much the same. It has been a particularly wet rainy season and the grass of the veld is high early so the lambs wool is full of grass seeds. This reduces the value of the wool, however lambs wool can fetch a higher price for it’s superior softness, but conversely a lower price when they are shorn early and the wool fibers have not grown as long. A farmer must weigh these factors (and much more) and finely judge when the right time to shear is, not only for value but also for the health of the flock. Shear them too late and with no protection cold weather in winter could kill them. Without protection of their fleece the flock is vulnerable, as happened to one local farmer nearby who lost his entire flock to a hail storm.
This is of course a tiny fraction of what a farmer and his staff must know to run a successful operation. Every time I visit I leave impressed with their resourcefulness and not only deep knowledge of the subtleties of the land, but also the nature of their animals, the economics of the wool and textile trade, employment issues, water management and the list goes on. And this brings us food and clothing, there is no other way, so thank a farmer!
Land Cruiser Love
In addition to learning about the sheep farm we’ve also been up to yet more preparation for our upcoming journey. We drove the hour and a half into Bloemfontein to run errands all day and have a few last minute creature comforts installed on the Land Cruiser.
We’ve found that keeping the vehicle organized and at least tidy if not clean is key to happy camping. On this theme we had a 4×4 shop install door pockets to hold maps and other things, a visor shelf to store binoculars, field guides and whatever else will fit up there and lastly, and somewhat guiltily, a fridge between the seats for cool drinks on the road.
We do already have a 40 liter fridge/freezer in the back, but of course this is not accessible from the cab. With careful temperature management of the big fridge we hope to have things in the bottom frozen and things in the top refrigerated, all in the same compartment. The cooler in the cab will give us a little more latitude for keeping everything at the right temperature.
Also in Bloem we made a run to the hardware store to pick up some last minute tools, pharmacy for more first aid kit items, travel clinic for my cholera vaccine. Jenny already got hers in Cape Town. We are low risk for cholera, but apparently this vaccine also protects against travelers diarrhea for up to two years, which seems great. However it does so, as we understand it, by making the inner wall of your digestive system “slick” so that cholera and other nasty bugs cannot take hold. One does wonder what negative side effects this might have on general gut flora, but I guess we’ll find out.
Back at the farm the Land Cruiser needed some attention. Mysteriously the driver’s side window had quit working and also the ventilation is stuck in defrost mode.
For the window, thinking it was a bad switch in the door, we took the door switch apart. It comes out pretty easily, and when it’s unplugged from the vehicle electrical system you can flip it over and disassemble the whole thing, at which point it explodes in a million pieces. We always try to do this sort of thing with the both of us, so that hopefully between the two of us we can see how it goes back together without missing something important. We managed to collect all the parts and get it mostly back together.
It did look like there were some dirty contacts in there, so we cleaned them up and reassembled it, minus two tiny springs that we couldn’t figure out were they came from. Yes, I know, it’s not normal to have parts left over when working on your car, and once reassembled the casualty seemed to be the window lock switch wouldn’t stay down, which we can live without.
Sadly the switch surgery didn’t fix it. So we took it apart again, cleaned it some more, put it back together again, and it didn’t work again. Of course we knew that it might be something else, burned out motor, shorted wiring, etc, but the switch seemed much more attainable. Moving on with some trepidation, we took the whole door apart and lo, we found a suspicious electrical connector disconnected. Snapped it together, put the door switch back in for a test and it worked! Cheers to small victories, and now we’re a little bit more comfortable with working on the Cruiser.
For a while we thought, well whatever, we can live without one of the power windows, but it turns out that the driver’s window is pretty useful, for paying tolls, talking to police or customs at road blocks, etc, so we’re glad we got it sorted out.
Given that we went out of our way to get a simple a vehicle as possible I’m sure some will be surprised that it has power windows at all, and we were also a little disappointed. It seems that in South Africa if you want the newer model (from 2007 or 08 onwards) with features like airbags, then one must also have power windows. Very little of the rest of the vehicle has been changed from the previous model, but that is one of the “improvements”. Hopefully it isn’t a sign of things to come, because it has power locks too.
The rest of the time at the farm was packing and organizing and agonizing over last minute details, and I began to understand the traction that takes hold and tries to derail a big trip, just needing “one more thing” sorted before we go. We understood that of course we are as prepared as we’ll ever be, and it was time to set forth.
I have more photos to post, but there is a weak internet connection here at the Khama Rhino Sanctuary in Botswana, so those will have to wait. Check out the next post here.
