One of the things that parents repeatedly tell their kids is “do up your shoelaces, or you will trip on them and hurt yourself”. Well… on Thursday morning we got up bright and early in order to catch the sunrise on Dune 45, and I stupidly popped my boots on for the shuffle across the car park to the toilets, neglecting to do up my laces. The laces on my right boot caught in the hooks on the left boot, and I hit the ground hard – VERY hard, point of impact being my right knee. I am not light, and the carpark was rocky.
After a few minutes of exchanging verbal pleasantries with the carpark, I managed to get back onto my feet and hobble around – no major damage done as I was mobile. We packed up camp and drove to the Dune, Margaret climbed up to get the photos as I was still very sore.
Fast forward a few hours of (extremely) rough driving and we got to the bakery at Solitaire (excellent Apple Pie, btw) – I climbed out of the car, and within a few seconds my knee had tripled in size and really started hurting. By harnessing the powers of foul language I got back into the truck and drove on to Walvis Bay (driving is actually OK – its the climbing in and out, and bending the leg into position to use the pedals that is the problem).
At the campground in Walvis Bay I thought things were improving – camp set up (mostly by Margaret) and beer consumed – when all of a sudden it flared up again. Off to Welwitschia Hospital I went in a taxi (The people here are fantastic – reception, nurses, radiographer and doc – apparently most tourists are sensible enough to have better reasons for a visit, like quad bike crashes). After a few hours we had a diagnosis of an enormous haematoma, plus bleeding in the joint itself – hopefully no damage to meniscus etc, but time will tell. The good news, no break, chips or cracks which was initially feared pre X-ray.
So… to wrap up, it’s now the next day, swelling has gone down a bit and the bruising is coming out nicely, I am on crutches, bandaged up and we are chilling out in Walvis Bay for a few days before proceeding north.
The campsite has an excellent playground, and is close to the beach (featuring both flamingos and pelicans). The beer is still cold.
The unscheduled layover in Durban has given me some time to investigate a charging issue detected in Morocco with our Solar solution – we noticed a sharp decrease in capabilities and had to plug into mains far more often than anticipated in a desert country. Afer opening up the back of the panels and testing with a multimeter, it appears that three out of four panels were completely dead, with the final panel providing around 0.4 amps (out of a “normal” 4.0). All is explained… Unfortunately the manufacturer of the panels has no African presence, and sending the panels back to Oz for analysis and replacement back to us here is simply out of the question, so we have resorted to replacing the system with a local South African brand. We have also bonded a 110w rigid panel to a sheet of marine ply, which we will lash on top of our roof load to provide a trickle charge when we are parked up but unable to lay out our ground panels. This panel can also be plugged in alongside the ground panels when camped. Total capacity, 320 watts. Testing here in the garden in full sun gives us around 14 amps/hr back to the batteries, a good result. After running both fridges and the freezer overnight, we were back to 100% by lunchtime on solar alone, so problem solved…
roaming.kiwi 