Day FIVE 8th April

Nice to spend another night under the stars, we took off for God's Window this morning, 12 km out of town, 5 of them straight up again, I'm getting tired of these hills I must say, the camper does not respond well to them, I'm surprised we haven't bust a gasket yet.

Well we arrived at the parking lot expecting to find the old hiking trail still in operation, no such luck, now it's market stalls with local curios, paths, paving, inadequate signs, lookout points and all manners of fat tourists, I think I was supposed to pay as well but the gate guy was reluctant to approach the camper when he saw a hoard of dogs being disgorged. 

So we strapped on the hiking bag and took off up the path and found lots of good views but failed to find the window, ended up going way beyond the path onto the original hiking path, up to the top of the mountain, spent 2 hours in hard hiking, even got ourselves a bit lost, dogs are weary and tired, not any water for them to drink along the way except a little rain puddle, and we never found the big rock with a hole in it, where I assume 'GOD'S WINDOW' comes from, I guess it's like everything in Africa, if it's not bolted down, someone will steal it.

So back to town we end, thankfully mostly down hill, ended up in the middle of Gaskop....and lost our gears, just could not engage any gear, so we pushed her to the side and went under and had a look, had a few black okes come and look, gave all kinds of opinions from your pin is broken, you need a new gear box, new clutch cable, jeez, even I knew they were all taking crap, had to wait for Pieter to come and tow us back to Panarama, all of 2km, he wanted R600 but I got him down to R400, still a ripoff for a 2km journey, anyway got my camper back home, did get to eat my second meal of my trip at one of the 4 pancake houses, we were parked outside it, so we had a burger at the pancake house.

Back at the campsite I discovered that George, my neighbour, a senior citizen, previously from Europe, now a South African, is probably the best person to have as a neighbour a he has done many camper conversions and took one look at my camper and knew what the problem was, the CV Joint that Dev fitted had come loose, he also noted my brakes were faulty, my accelerator cable was too loose and a few other things needed seeing to, well how lucky am I to land up in the one place that has the perfect person too fix my camper, unfortunately he has a wonky knee and needs to go to hospital to get it seen to first before he can fix my baby.

So we are now spending another night here and the dogs are pleased, other dogs here may not be too happy as Pepi has it in for them, but their little sausage dog keeps attacking Lani so I don't mind if Peps gives them a hard time, the camp is quiet so no harm done. Got to sit by the beautiful pool and use the free internet to get my blog up to date.