On the night of the 25th of December, Sue, Josh, Keith, Vaughn and myself (a 6 month bump included) piled ourselves and all our stuff into Lily and headed east. The final destination Pomene, Mozambique.

Once again our trip was of epic proportions – it took us close on 24 hours to get to Pomene but we did stop for a drink in Xai-Xai. As we arrived in the dark we also lost our way to the campsite and spent an hour reversing up and down roads uneventfully except for reversing into a tree and snapping a piece of roof rack. At last we found it, we all fell out of the car and set up camp before falling fast asleep.

The next morning we were woken up bright and early by someone calling in the camp, a peer around the hammock revealed that it was a local man. It turned out that he had a note form a group of people who had got stuck on the beach at the river mouth and they wanted someone to come and help them before the tide turned. We were young and stupid then so we all piled into the car and headed off down the beach on a “rescue mission”. It did not take us too long to decided that this was a stupid idea and more importantly that if the stuck people were worried about the tide then we should be too, now the dilemma – how to get Lily facing in the other direction? It took 2 hours of getting stuck in the sand to realise that Lily works much better in reverse than in forward. From then on reverse was the gear – we managed to reverse up a dune, various repetitions of this eventually meant that we had turned Lily’s nose in the direction of home and then away we went with people hanging onto the roofrack for grim death while Vaughn beach buggyied it back to the road and to camp.

After that little adventure we were all keen to lounge around in camp and cool off. First on the menu was a some coconut which we were soon very good at getting out the shell and we had our very own production line. I would ease it off the shell, Vaughn would scoop it into the basin and Keith would it – all in all it worked really well. By 10 o clock we all roasting, while bump was ensuring that it was hot enough to not breath – dilemma. There was a brack pond on the doorstep which was cooler but no shade, we hunted around and found a shade but it was too light. Luckily Josh and Sue had brought a throw to sleep on which soon became the shade plus. From then on the daily ritual was to wake up and have a super duper Josh breakfast. After breakfast everyone would grab their cossies a crate of coolies and some fruit and head to the pond with their chairs. Into the water and their we would stay until lunch time with our floating crate of coolies and snacks – eating fruit and chatting about this and that being careful to shuffle into the shade created by the shade and the shade plus as the hours passed. Lunch was spent in camp and then we would hot foot it to the sea as by now the pond was like a hot bath. The sea would be refreshingly cold but once again we had the shade problem so we would spend about an hour goofing around a piece of concrete door lintel that had formed its own reef with tiny lion fish and corals around it, it was so close to shore we could sit in the water and watch the fish at work. Late afternoon would be spent trying to find a combination of shade and breeze in camp while trying to have a bit of a rest – the hammocks were well worked but did cut out the breeze a bit.

After a few days of settling in to the severe heat we decided to head off to the mangroves, chairs, beers and all our creature comforts included. The first problem – Josh’s chair decided to expire. It was not brack pond tested prior to being given to him as a christmas gift! An entertaining hour of duct taping and it was together again in a fashion but no longer folded up. A dip and then it was into the shade, we spent the day playing musical chairs shifting the chairs along the line and into the shade while alternating it with dips in the pond for a bit of a change. Another tough day in hot africa …

Time to replenish beer and bread supplies so into town but first Josh had to coax lily to use the tire pump. From their an exciting trip to town where Keith and Vaughn were propositioned by the brother of the coconut lady and had an option of buying a bit of time with the sister in the local market (nudge, nudge, wink, wink). Restocked we head home but lily starts getting extremely hot. We have no water in the car. She gets hotter. Still no water. No choice but to chug along to the well and fill up there. It did not take long for everyone to become sidetracked by the frogs in the well and the need to save them as apposed to filling lily with water again. The cause of the overheating – the BRAND NEW radiator had a hole in it due to the front diff smashing into it over the bad roads (the radiator people laughed at the odd shaped old radiator – well people we are 1000′s of kms from home!). Being 60km from ‘civilisation’ we needed a plan to get the radiator fixed, luckily we had Vaughn’s dad. Task one – take radiator out. Task two -dismantle the skottel to make a burner/welder/soldering machine out of it. Task three – get the old fishing weights to melt to form solder for the radiator. Task 4 – all pee on the radiator hole to form flux (the girls were booted out for this operation). Task 5 – solder it all together. Task 6 – put radiator back into car. The weld held all the way to JHB, pity about the cooked engine.