Mbazwana

This morning I got up at 6am, I crept upto the house and silently laid out 4 cups for the teas and coffees. I was hoping to get away with making myself a coffee first and drinking it in silence before I had to deal with Hurricane Anneka but just as I lit the gas for the kettle I heard a commotion in the bathroom.
I knew it wasn’t Pete as he would have shouted good morning to me which meant my plan had failed. Then the bathroom door opened and Hurricane Anneka came blustering out.
Obviously I put on my smiley face and said good morning, made coffees for us both and took Ellie a tea then I came back to the house and listened to the bellowing of how hot it is and how Millie kept prowling the house and her room all night. This went on for about 20 minutes and just as I’d really had enough a miracle happened.
Anneka said she was missing her dogs to much and today she was leaving. I did say that would be sad even as she was packing her stuff and then Pete came out of his room smiling as he had also heard the good news.
She told him that she was leaving, and he acted surprised and offered her a days money back but she declined that and started loading the car, then she said she was going to warm the car and once she was in it she said to Pete “ I’m to exhausted to walk back to the house, will you say goodbye to everyone for me?” And then she drove out of the gate and left.
It was only 7:30am, as soon as her car had gone through the gate the energy level in the grounds changed. It was super weird but quite a relief. Ellie couldn’t believe it when she came upto the house at 7:50. And Hilapè actually clapped and cheered when she came in at 8am and commented that she just couldn’t stop talking when we left them in their own together.
We had planned to go back to Mkhunze game park today taking the drive through the private Phinda game reserve and we left home at 9:30am. Just as we got into Mbazwani and had just refuelled, Pete slammed on the brakes at a junction to avoid a crossing pedestrian and the master cylinder that had been dodgy for the last few days popped and we had no brakes.
Pete thought we could make the journey, which does explain a lot about African drivers but Ellie and I convinced him to just take it somewhere so we crossed the junction, pulled onto a dirt strip outside a dodgy looking hair salon where there were car parts everywhere and Pete said these guys will fix it if we can get the part.
3 young black men promptly started working on the car convinced it wasn’t the master cylinder but that the brakes just needed bleeding so with one in the car, one in the engine with brake fluid and one under the car shouting pump, release, pump, hold. They set to work.
Ellie and I waited in the makeshift waiting area sitting on breeze blocks under a guava fruit tree hardly believing what we were seeing.
After 20 minutes of work they soon realised that Pete was right and it was the master cylinder so Pete ran around the corner to the spares shop to see if they had one.
Apparently they did, and the 3 guys promptly removed our master cylinder and Pete took it back to the spares shop only to find out that they didn’t actually have one but they could get one for Wednesday. So the mechanics had to refit our old one but now we had no brakes atall.
We drove back home at a much faster speed, down the sandy tracks, than Ellie and I were really comfortable with, but Pete is a great driver and we managed to avoid all of the cows in the road.
Now Karin was off the road we thought our day was over, but Pete said “ It’s ok, we’ll just take the landcruiser”. Meaning the Chuckit Bucket.Read more