Malawi and the end of a project

It was back to Malawi to do the final decommissioning of the server rooms and I.T. side of the various site offices we had in Malawi for a Railway project my company was involved in.

This basically meant the final backup of all the data off the servers, then shutting them down, packaging them up and shipping it all back to our Head Office in South Africa.

So it was a journey round the final 2 site offices and consolidate all the equipment at one office and do the backups - a long slow mind numbing job watching data copy off the servers onto external NAS drives (Network Attached Storage - for those of you interested in I.T) and then returning to South Africa with the data while the rest of the equipment following behind - a task that took many months due to incompetent customs bureaucracy.

Chileka Airport Blantyre

  

First site office

Accommodations being demolished 

Foundations of demolished accommodations

Hill outside of the camp

First Site Office

Server before shutdown and packing

80 km of road to the next camp

Section of the railway line

Malawi bush

  

Baobab tree

  

Office at the second camp on my route 

  

Accommodations at the next camp

My Bungalow

View into the camp from accommodations

Bungalow"s

My palatial bungalow

Corridor to my bungalow

My "office" for 18 hours a day for nearly a week 

The highlight of my day was the meal times, this was not due to the fact that the food was so gastronomically excellent, it was a time to get away from my desk and do something different.

Canteen

My equipment is packed and i'm ready to go......

What remained on site for the final close out - three data centers reduced to a couple of NAS drives 

And now for a public services announcement:

Malaria:

If any of you, dear readers, ever get the quaint idea to travel in Africa, and by this I don't mean South Africa, speak to your Doctor or travel clinic about Malaria.

During the project 2 of our staff got malaria and died, but that was not during my time there. 

While I was there one of the staff got infected and I was treated at 2am in the morning to a first hand view of the effects of malaria, the fever and hallucinations the chap endured right through the night before I could get him medical attention. 

Now you may ask why didn't I get him medical attention immediately - well we were nearly 100 kilometers out in the bush and the medical staff on duty were not available by phone, and the roads are far too dangerous for driving at night, so we sat it out until the following morning, with him alternately babbling, sweating and shivering .

He spent a couple of days in the clinic on a drip, and thankfully survived the ordeal.

Rule Number 1: Take your malaria tablets, use a bug repellant ALL DAY, sleep under a mosquito net at night.

Rule Number 2: Take your malaria tablets, use a bug repellant ALL DAY, sleep under a mosquito net at night.

Rule Number 3: Take your malaria tablets, use a bug repellant ALL DAY, sleep under a mosquito net at night.

Rule Number 4: If Rules 1 - 3 don't apply then ..... Take your malaria tablets, use a bug repellant ALL DAY, sleep under a mosquito net at night. 

Before long it was back on the road to blantyre.

The road out at the end of the job

Small shops and villages en route

Back onto the main road to Blantyre

  

Following this sojourn out in the bush, which I have to say was remarkably reminiscent of my years doing military service, I returned to Blantyre to lay over for a night before heading back to South Africa.
I was dreaming about the nice bed and dinner I was going to experience at my favorite Malawi hotel the Mount Soche Hotel, but it was sadly not to be, I was lodged in a B&B.
I won't go into too much detail on this suffice it to say it was probably the most awful experiences of my life as the below photo's will attest, needless to say it will be a proverbial cold day in hell before I go back there.

Bed with Mosquito net

My bed BEFORE I slept in it!!

Window latch Africa style

Mosquito net

Plush deep pile carpet

Latch on my door - Do they get a lot of break in's??

Couch to relax on

More deep pile plush carpet

Stairs to my room

Stairs to the dining room

Driveway in to the property

Path to a restaurant that wasn't open

Path to my room

Guest area

Front of the B&B

                               

Road outside

Front gate

And finally it was back in the air and homeward bound.

And so too did this phase of my working life end, the project is finished, our offices are shut down, the equipment is back in South Africa, and it is ever onward to new adventures.

Jeep reborn and Storage Wars......

Once upon a time long long long ago I purchased a 1975 CJ5 Jeep, it was in 1983 to be precise.

Jeep in the Underberg

I loved my Jeep, I drove it everywhere which over time led to a couple of interesting adventures and then came the end and she was relegated to a storage garage No.85.

But before I continue let me go way back and relate a few interesting incidents surrounding her........

The Petrol Incident(s)
I drove the Jeep daily, to work to the shops basically everywhere, but it had one teeny weeny problem, the petrol gauge didn't work, so I contrived a method of ascertaining how much petrol was in the tank, incidentally this here Jeep is a straight 6 3.8 litre engine so it is a tad thirsty and I couldn't always afford to fill it up.
So back to the method of gauging the petrol I contrived what shall hereto forth be known as the dipstick method; i.e. i stuck a dipstick down into the tank to see how far up it was wet.....

Nice solution until the day (and there were many) that I got it wrong and I would run out of petrol.
Now this was before the days of cellphones (can you believe it we didn't have cell phones once upon a time) so I would foot it around until I could beg or borrow the use of a phone from a kind shop owner or householder or I could find a payphone, and I would phone my then girlfriend Pam (now my wife - she didn't learn fast that me and the Jeep were a troubled pair) to bring me a jerry can of petrol and off we went again.

The Hartbeespoort incident
Then came the disastrous day that will always be etched into the annuls of history as ....Hartbeespoort Dam day; Hartbeespoort Dam is a large irrigation and water sports dam near Johannesburg and Pretoria, well, I managed to sink my Jeep in a small river feeding the dam through a combination of stupidity and ... oh stupidity.

This incident I must confess led to great hilarity on the part of my brother in law Brian, and the burnt clutch of his brother Jimmy's car who assisted in the recovery.

The incident was made worse by the fact that every loose object that was in the jeep now became floating debris - papers, tapes (before cd's) chip packets, that surrounded the Jeep like a halo, it looked like the sinking of the Titanic, minus iceberg.

After a day of blood sweat and tears during the recover, I took the now waterlogged Jeep home parked it in the garage and proceeded to strip it down to the last nut and bolt and clean everything, and I mean everything.
It took a year to accomplish this task, and included a welcome or not so welcome small box of unnecessary nuts and bolts left over, but the Jeep carried on merrily - still with its rather consistent thirst and occasional stoppage.

The Smashed bell Housing Incident

Then there was a very unfortunate incident of the smashed bell housing.
We were dropping some stuff off at the home of a friend of Pam's mom when their psychotic son let their psychotic vicious rottweiler loose on us as we were reversing out the drive in an open Jeep (I often drove with the roof off or the doors off).
On exiting the property at excessive speed and not wanting to just storm out onto the road I did a very sharp turn onto the verge whence stood a large psychotic rock...... over it we went and smash went the cast aluminium bell housing, fortunately I was still in gear so we could keep reversing back up the road to Pam's house where the Jeep was deposited on her verge until I could find a mechanic who could do the repairs (I had walked back down the road and gathered up all the shattered pieces.
The story ends well, the local garage had an ex-aircraft mechanic who could weld aluminium, so repairs were duly carried out.

The Underberg Incident (Trip)

The Underberg incident wasn't so much an incident as a trip with a couple of minor incidents thrown in.
Friends of ours Mandy and Owen had an uncle who owned a pretty derelict farm in the Underberg (you can read all about the Underberg here) and they invited us to go down for a week, it'll be great they said, its in an old farm house they said  ...... It's GREEEEAAATTTTT ...no tents (see the next "exciting" story to come - You want me to camp in a What)

The road to the house

The road to the house

Underberg area

The road to the house

So off we trundled, (with Jerry cans of petrol and my faithful dipstick) Pam and I in the jeep and Mandy and Owen in a small Volkswagen Golf.

Once we got to the Underberg we then had to leave the main road and traverse approximately, give or take a kilometre or ten, twenty kilometers on gravel roads.
At least the roads were good, but the house.... oh my lordy lordy lordy, it was a wreck, I could have done with a tent, but the view and the peace and tranquility, it was awesome, until the incident of the snake..... dum dum dum dum duuuuuuuummmm...

We found a Cape Cobra under the porch and if there was one there were probably trillions of them waiting to savage us, well one of them chose to make the first attack so we unfortunately had to put an end to it before one of us got hurt.

Then there was no electricity at the house so we had to use gas for lights and to cook, and to wash we drove down to the river to bathe - all very rustic.

THe front of the house

The Snake

The back of the house

Views

The river for swimming and bathing, Jeep in the middle background

Jeep 

Jeep up close

And then the rains came and they came with a vengence, I must admit I got a tad concerned that the neighbors might start building a large wooden boat and start loading up animals.
But the rains stopped and we headed for home, up gravel roads that were now transformed to mud baths.
Mandy and Owen's car wasn't up to handling the mud so the Jeep towed and towed and towed until we arrived at a  tree that had fallen in the road, again the Jeep was pressed into duty to pull said tree out of the way so that the journey could continue.

Soon it was back onto the main road and onto the town of Harrismith were upon I was assailed by a debilitating migraine, Pam had to take over the driving from here on through pouring rain again, a task she handled admirably - I never mentioned previously - the Jeep is a three speed manual, with a comfortable top speed of about 110 km/hr - Johannesburg was a long way off and doesn't have auto-return on the steering so on turning a corner you have to turn the steering wheel back to centre.

Jeep in the mud with Pam

Owen & Mandy in the VW Golf with us

Our river in flood after the rains

Fallen tree

Storage Wars incident

And then came the beginning of the end so to speak......
I used to store the Jeep at my mother's house and would go and pick it up on the weekend to give it a run, but this became less and less, and then my mother passed away and the Jeep got moved .... into Storage garage No.85.....
And so she came to live out the next 13 years ensconced in the garage.

This fact caused no amount of how shall I put it...."tension" between Pam and I, we stored junk there, we stored a trailer there, we stored my mother's stuff after she died..... and  the years came and the years went.
Until the Great Storage War..... Pam threatened with bodily harm thrown in that if I didn't fix the Jeep or sell it, she would go there and cut the locks open the door and let it wander off on its own...........

Jeep is reborn

Two people were instrumental in the now forthcoming rebirth.......

Pam's nephew Roland is a Cobra car enthusiast who had a car rebuilt by a great mechanic by the name of Paul, and he said a long while ago that I should contact him to have the Jeep redone, but one thing led to another and time passed.

Then one weekend my cousin Andrew's wife Val's father Martin was chatting to me about a car he had restored by a great mechanic by the name of Paul whom I should get in touch with.
Martin duly got me in touch with Paul and lo and behold it was the same mechanic who did Roland's car - so a date was arranged and the Jeep was dragged out of its cell (Garage No. 85) loaded up onto a trailer and taken away for the first stage in its rebirth.

More to follow as we progress and the ongoing adventures of a Jeep.....

Storage complex

Garage No. 85

Jeep in its "cell"

Out in the sun and on the trailer