Zimbabwe Wild Dogs

Category: Uncategorized | Date: Jan 31 2008 | By: admin

We have a new project vehicle on its way!

This is a very exciting month for the project…

On the 11th of Feb, we hope to take delivery of a new project vehicle!!

This is fantastic news, because our old project vehicle ‘Steve’ as he bizarrely was known was becoming a complete pain! Steve is a Series IIA Land Rover, produced in 1972… And by his 36th year, he was really starting to give us hassles. For a start, as a short wheel base he was just too small…and if we needed to go anywhere with the team of trackers and all their kit, then it would be one heck of an uncomfortable ride…as you can see from the pictures!!

But worse, Steve was incredibly unreliable and on a few occasions got us in all sorts of trouble. In the picture above, Stephanie and I had gone for a sundowner after work at a beautiful place about 3 km from where we live called ‘Moon Rock’. To get up moon rock, we’d have to engage 4 wheel drive low range and drive straight up the huge granite kopje (outcrop). Problem is, on that occasion when we got in the car to drive home, the car wouldn’t move and made a terrible racket…

I looked down with horror to see that the universal joint on the rear prop shaft had sheared…

This was terrible news, because although home was only 3 km, we would have to walk past a waterhole in an area that is teeming with elephants and other big hairy animals. And, we didn’t have a torch. But it was freezing cold, being winter, and we were hungry. So, we made the school boy error of starting to walk home. Unsurprisingly, (and probably luckily) we only made it about 200 metres, before we heard a branch of a tree cracking nearby…which is the unmistakable sound of an elephant at supper…at which point we retreated at haste back up moon rock to our old wreck of a vehicle…

At that point, I started assuming that we were up there for a very long, cold and hungry night. Until I had an idea…

In the car, we had a piece of PVC piping that I use to store our 1:50 000 maps (that we use for pin pointing incidents of bush meat poaching on). I looked underneath the car, and placed the piping across the bottom of the car, resting on the back leaf springs. I then tied the rear prop shaft gently to the pvc pipe using a piece of old inner tube (or reken as it is known in Zimbabwe). That way, the prop could still rotate, but it wouldn’t flail around wildly. I then put the vehicle in four wheel drive so that the front wheels were engaged and gave it a try…and, to our huge relief, the vehicle worked!

We had to drive home at about 5 km per hour, but that didn’t matter…driving through that pitch black bush full of elephants just felt so much better than walking….and, as you might imagine, supper that night tasted awesome.

Hopefully, with the new pick up, those kind of experiences will be a thing of the past. They better be, because this year we will be doing a lot of our work in the vast, wild Gonarezhou National Park. And if we break down in there we will have big problems… So I think its time for Steve to retire..