“Even the best laid plans can blow up in your face”, I can’t remember what film that is from right now but it fits well with this post thats for sure. Id rested Thursday, bored stupid with the dvd/book supply all well and truly used up, to ready myself for Fridays assault on the rock. Friday dawned to two pretty devastating blows; 1. I was sick again 2. It was silly humid.
Now I don’t want to get the violins out at this stage and feel sorry for myself but it does seem like ive had some pretty average luck in the Rocklands on the illness front. Thats three times now ive been cut down with some sort of lurgy and this time the German’s had left so who knows where this bug came from? Ive either become a kind of Darren Anderton of bouldering, sick note extraordinaire, or perhaps more likely the bugs are new to me in Africa and for whatever reason my immune system did no prior reading before the trip. Similar to the freshers flu phenomenon in a way I guess.
So that killed Friday straight off. Saturday I still felt wobbly but decided I had to get out of the house if nothing else and may as well pull on rock whilst I was doing that. Up to Tea with Elmarie I went, despite me puffing and panting right off from the sit start, I did manage to match my previous highpoint of hitting the sidepull but the pump was so bad by then I was off. I think I was running purely on anger really, after how things had gone, but inevitably I did cool off and once I did the tries got significantly worse.
I think if I cast my mind back to Saturday evening I can remember feeling a bit better after dinner and thinking, “it cant get any worse” and “I still have two days left”. From these truly insightful statements I made another plan. Take some of the airplane sleeping tablets now to get in a lot of zzzz’s, feel better in the morning but take the rest and instead head out by afternoon to crush. My skin would be good, id be rested, the bug should be on its way out...I drifted off to sleep feeling more positive.
Im sure you can tell by my writing tone and the way im setting things up something is going to go wrong at some point here, its like watching an episode of Casualty. It did...on my way out to climb, just as I reached the steeper section of road you ascend to get to the boulders, the Beetle died. The first Beetle failure was easier to deal with as it was due to the brakes and we could at least get home in the thing. This time Beetle two really did just die. The engine stalled, when you turned the key in the ignition to restart there was total silence and all electrics stopped working. Some nice locals stopped, we tried to tinker with this and that, no good. In the end there was no choice but to abandon ship. I managed to hitch back (not so easy with a large bouldering mat) to my house and proceeded to sink a bottle of red.
The Beetle people do say they offer roadside assistance but decline to mention that doesn’t operate on a Sunday. Either way I knew the earliest id have wheels would be late morning Monday if they got their act together and got going early from Cape Town. Suddenly all I cared about was the exit strategy, I was due to fly Tuesday evening and CT international seemed a very long way away. Now I know this post has been shockingly light on climbing fodder but the reality is I haven’t done any for about a week. I could end it here and talk about my final perspectives but I feel I should use up a few more paragraphs to relay the debacle that was my flee to Cape Town. It allows me to vent a little and for any climbers thinking Beetles and Rocklands next year it gives you a little insight to the potential downside.
So I expected the Beetle guys Monday morning and they would have a new working Beetle to give me or fix my current one. Either way I figured maybe by lunchtime I would be mobile again and I could get a final climb in somewhere before the off. By Monday 4pm there was still no sign, climbing had gone I realised that, but were they coming at all? I hitched the 5km back to the farm office to use the phone...the news was they had just left but traffic was bad, ETA was 9pm and they were not bringing a new Beetle as they had none left that worked. By 9pm of course it would be pitch black so there was also no chance to fix Beetle two...put simply the mechanics were coming to provide a taxi service to Cape Town. I booked a hotel room in CT and told the guy I would be checking in late...midnight I figured.
9.45pm and the mechanics turned up in a kind of ice cream van without the graphics on the side of course. My luggage went in the back and the three of us squeezed into the cab, 10pm and we were off. En-route we stopped roadside to get the beetle. The guys had no torch so I helped them by holding a lighter up to the back of the ice cream van so the guys could fit a wooden triangular structure - the towing device. We were off again but within 15 minutes the bumpy dirt roads out of Rocklands had caused the towing device to fail and we’d left the Beetle in a small ditch. 20mins to push it out and re-attach and we were off again. We’d dropped our cargo one more time before we got on the main road to Cape Town but I was getting on well with the guys and now with 120km to go despite it being 1 in the morning my spirits were ok.
The guys then told me that we had to detour off the main road into CT to the coast as another Beetle had been reported with problems. Apparently it was “sort of” on the way so made sense, it wasn’t it turned out and probably added another 100km. Anyway we made it to a township somewhere near to the coast by 2.30am but it turns out the lady that reported the problems was out partying somewhere so the mechanic could not access the Beetle so we left. I was doing Sudoku after Sudoku to remain calm, I knew these guys were simply following orders and did not want to take it out on them.
By 3am we were under 100km from CT and a bed but hazard lights up ahead warned us of a problem. Turns out a lorry had turned over and the road was closed for an hour or so. Because we were now on the coastal road East there was no way round this one so we had to just sit it out. 4am came and went, 4.20am and we were off. By this stage id started to get blurred vision and this part of the journey seemed to simply fly by. Eventually, after getting lost in Cape Town centre, the guys deposited me at my hotel at 5.10am, 7 and a half hours door to door. Sleep.
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