African Escapade's: Day 56 - Curtain Wondervan lives on!!

Sight of the day

Seeing a forklift driven on the busy main road

Quote of the day

Mechanic talking about fixing our van: The car will be ready between 1 hour and 2 days

As the days quickly trickle and disappear, we awoke to another beautiful Bulawayo morning. The plan for today was to go to the video store and buy some more tv series/movies, then head out to Sandra Jones Centre for a few hours and lastly get some exercise by playing our ritual game of Ultimate Frisbee. Unfortunately that was all thrown out the window due to Curtain Wondervan being out of action.

With no wheels we stayed at home and just sat there. Aldo researched more about the sound system we are hoping to buy for SJC in South Africa as well as sorting out the 30GB worth of footage that we have accumulated, Ando Skyped his family and friends back home, while I just was on Facebook and listening to my iPod. It was a very slow and boring morning, so we decided to watch our new favourite tv show, Fringe. After finishing the 1st episode, we realised there was nothing else to do so we continued watching another 2 episodes.

The blog gets better, I promise!

And that's when we got the phone call from Deb that our beloved van had been fixed for $35!!!!

Turns out the only thing wrong with the gearbox was a dirty connection. What we thought would cost $1000+ only cost $35! Praise the Lord. Yusaf turned up, we jumped into the back of his ute and drove to the mechanics to pick up the van. We saw the glorious van parked and ready to be driven. Alex test drove it and we felt the great feeling of the car changing into gear 3. Satisfied, we walked through the car yard to pay for the repairs. Walking through the yard, a few cars caught our eyes; 2x BMW 318i but more importantly a Dodge hot rod, something you would see in some Hollywood early 1900s American gangster movie. You could tell it was the mechanics' favourite car as well when we saw their big smiles as we stared in awe of the car.

Finally with some wheels, the last part of our plan was still on track, Ultimate Frisbee. It was 4pm and we picked up Lisa and Senzo from school. We dropped Senzo home and to our surprise Shamiso and Samantha from SJC were at Tina's home, where Senzo stays. The girls told us that they were starting at Townsend school as well, the same one that Lisa goes to. This made Lisa very happy, hopefully having her good friends from SJC in her class.

5pm rolled around and it was time for some vigorous exercise. It's been maybe 2 weeks since we last played due to being on holidays so we were keen to see how fit we were. A lot of people turned up for this session, and I mean a lot. There was 12 on each team on a small field. We found out that one girl was actually from Teneriffe in Brisbane, Australia. What a small world. After a gruelling 2 hours, we left the game and headed home to crash. And now here we are counting down the final days we have in Bulawayo and trying to shove as many things into each day as possible before we have to leave this brilliant city.

Thanks for reading!

Jonno

Below are some more pictures throughout our time here