Sept 27th – Early mornings, water, and flat tires.
For the last two days, we haven’t had to get up til breakfast (at 8)… and yet, I’ve been up before 7 both days. Damnit! I hate waking up when I don’t have to.
On Wednesday night, the water stopped. The power went out, too … but that’s back on, so it’s not much of a concern. The lack of water, on the other hand, is a bit more disturbing. We have some brought in (Gladys, who likes to think of us as her children when we’re here, wouldn’t DREAM of letting us go out without full water bottles) but showers are at a premium. Hell, being able to flush the toilet is at a premium. I thought it was a pain in the butt when we had that boil water advisory last year… but turning on the tap and getting nothing? THAT’S annoying.
The water ended up being intermittent for the rest of my trip. According to the staff, they had discovered the problem, (a broken underground pipe… somewhere) but the town couldn’t afford to fix it permanently, and even if they could, where would they get the supplies from?
Still, there are hand-operated pumps here and there, so water could still be had. Just not from the tap.
We also have flushing toilets, after a fashion. The ladies who take care of us so wonderfully get buckets of water from the swimming pool, and pour them into the tanks. Of course, each flush required another bucket of water… but I’ll take what I can get. Yep, we’ve got the “if it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down” rule.
The “run for the showers” is pretty hysterical. “We have water?” “Yes.” “HOT water?” “Yes.” *insert stampede here*
Given that it’s bloody hot during the day, and we’re often doing manual labour all day… showering is good. You start to feel pretty disgusting after a few days without a shower. A few people hopped into the swimming pool to at least rinse off, but while I wasn’t terribly comfortable being ridiculously hot, I also wasn’t going to be comfortable jumping into a freezing cold swimming pool. Yow. (Yep, the pool was cold — it’s winter, so the temperature at night dropps down pretty low, and with the shaded back yard.. it never really had a chance to warm up.)
Yesterday, we headed into the park — my fourth trip, so nothing terribly new to report, except that halfway through the day, we blew a tire. Great. 54 km from civilization (I was watching), and we’ve got a flat… we were able to change it no problem, except one of the other tires was looking disturbingly low. If that one blew, we’d be in for a long walk through a lion-infested park. And yes, we saw two more lions on the way back. The tires held. Phew.
