Dave and Dad are…
Broken down at the Cape of Good Hope.
Yeah, that’s the car being towed from Cape Point, about as far from town as you can get on the Cape’s tourist circuit. While this is going on I was risking baboon attack, walking in the twilight towards the ranger station (which turned out to be approximately 7-8 miles farther away than I realized) to get help.
But if we started at this point you wouldn’t understand how we ended up at this point. The day started much earlier in the bright morning sunlight. That is not to say the events of the evening weren’t foreshadowed. The Mercedes had been running a little rough the last couple days and this morning it was dramatically worse, struggling to shift into gear (despite being an automatic) to the point that at times no matter how hard I stomped the gas pedal, it wouldn’t speed up.
I found this troubling as I picked up my Old Man, and he agreed it was not good. It continued to be not good as we cruised through Camps Bay and then up through Chapman’s Peak.
The views were gorgeous of course but by the time we were out the other side we could’ve walked faster than that car could run. So we pulled into a gas station and the old man had the brilliant idea of having the attendant check the transmission fluid. Now I have no automotive knowledge in the slightest, and he scarcely has more but the guy found the tank bone dry. So we bought a couple liters of the stuff, dumped it in and lo and behold it ran like it did when it rolled off the early 80s assembly line.
So restored we puttered onto do the usual Cape Point tourist circuit. That included an ostrich burger for the Old Man at Olivia’s,
and penguins at Boulder Beach, (whats really amazing there is the Old Man’s hair)
(where the Old Man indulged his bizarre obsession with flattened pennies. Full disclosure: these were actually flattened disks, not legally minted coins.)
Before parking near the light house at Cape Point.
Just like when Josh and I visited, the wind was savage, so we spent little time at the top
And more time down on the (as always) desolate beach.
I played on the dunes,
The Old Man tracked a seal,
And we wrote my mom a message in the sand.
Nice Marmot!
It was all well and good till we got back in the car to go home. The damn thing wouldn’t go in reverse. Confused, and not at all pleased, we managed to get going once the Old Man pushed the car out of its parking place. Drive seemed to work fine.
And so, somewhat concerned, but moving forward we started out of the park. We didn’t make it far before being attacked by baboons. Dad was all excited by them at first (we hadn’t seen any thus far today) but then they came at us.
He managed to lock his door mere seconds before the first of the too-smart-for-their-own-good mammals tried to open it. When that didn’t work they proceeded to climb all over the car trying to find some other way in to get all the (nonexistent) food we were presumed to possess.
Cheeky Bastards.
So, I am going to blame the baboon assault, but what happened next really was my fault. Concerned about the idea of getting stuck in Cape Town traffic without the ability to reverse, and thinking perhaps that now that the car was warmed up the problem would be solved, I stopped in the parking lot of one of the Park’s visitor’s centers to see if reverse worked now.
It didn’t.
More importantly, now drive didn’t either.
Yeah, in fact none of the gears worked now. The engine just revved and then rolled backwards down the incline a little bit more. Uh oh. It was 5pm, the park closes at sunset and the visitor’s center closes now. What’s worse, I was out of credit on my phone.
So I rushed into the office of the closing center and begged a phone call to the rental guys to get a tow truck and then went back out to sit in the car with the Old Man where we read our respective books and waited on the arrival of our rescuer.
Hours went by. No truck. It got later, and darker, and we saw fewer and fewer cars heading out of the park. The Old Man was getting…restive. I was of the opinion that the truck would eventually show up or, alternatively, the park rangers would find us while doing the pre-closing patrol. But the Old Man wasn’t feeling it. So it was decided, after much debate, that I would try to walk/hitchhike to the front gate to call the tow truck again. Both of us, but especially I, vastly (I can’t emphasize vastly enough) underestimated how far we were from the front gate.
I kept up a pretty good clip for about a half hour, expecting to see it over every rise and coming no closer to anything cept sunset, total darkness and death by hungry baboon. What was worse was that the couple cars that went by didn’t even slow down for a harmless, goofy looking white boy clearly in need of transport.
Finally a car carrying a bunch of British windsurfing enthusiasts picked me up and after a solid 10+ minute drive (FUCK was I far from the entrance) dropped me off at the gate. Of course, about 2 clicks after they picked me up I saw the long overdue tow truck headed the other way. So I sat at the gate and waited for the Old Man and the Tow to come back this way.
I was idly playing the one terrible free demo game on my otherwise useless cell phone when all of the sudden a park ranger burst in the front door and started yelling at me. By name. Fairly baffled at first, as I had not seen the tow truck come up, I couldn’t figure out why she was yelling at me until she said something along the lines of “How could you do this to your father?!” “This” referred to taking my Old Man around in an ancient 80s Mercedes instead of a decent car.
Quite the kidder this one; she and my Dad hit it off quite well. So well in fact that he insisted on the three of us getting this atrocious picture, of which he is now quite fond.
Following that Kodak moment we piled into the cab of the tow truck with the driver. For the record, let me point out that the tow truck is really just a small, old pickup that seemed to be in worse shape than the Merc. And that all three of us didn’t fit in there all that well. Which kinda sucked then if you were the cat in the middle trying to keep your knees out of the way of the clutch while simultaneously keeping up conversation with the old coloured tow truck driver. It ranged from sports, to weather, to the political and racial situation facing South Africa. The Old Man, who’s always a huge fan of the opportunity for prolonged social interaction with locals outside the usual bullshit tourist contexts, enjoyed the dialogue immensely. I, who’d heard just about all these complicated racial and political opinions before, was somewhat less engaged. Especially as at 20km an hour the trip back took FOREVER.
It was hours before we came to a stop in Woodstock, where the driver lived. He dumped our car on a street spot, where we grabbed our important stuff out of the car, and then he gave us a lift to a bar near the Old Man’s B&B so we could get some long overdue beers and some dinner.
Man, you know I like a good story but this one was just all the headaches and hassle without any commensurate dramatic arc. It was aggravation for aggravations sake. AND ALL ON MY OLD MAN”S FIRST FULL DAY IN AFRICA GODDAMMIT!
But hey, we got to see the penguins. And everyone loves the penguins. Right? RIGHT!?
But the penguins were molting — not a pretty sight!
It WAS National Penguin Awareness Day, so it seems fitting to appreciate their penguinicity on that day.