Winching across South Africa

Crazy hot weather starts immediately with sunrise. Bath in the Orange river is refreshing, but we are getting a bit nervous about quite wild wind which started during it. The direction is good - north, right to De Aar. Only the speed is quite fast. But the experince command us to get ready, ten o´clock will decide. Surprisingly the wind realy became calm and we are frenziedly preparing to fly. Martin, who is the winch operator today, is preparing our Mercedes in a shadow of warmed hangar, suddenly pronounces a fateful sentence: "Gentleman, we have finished!" We all get together around the broken axis of the winch, which didn't endure conditions of dusty roads. Later we realized that the accident was caused by an old bad weld. So we pack our stuff sadly and rush to De Aar, where we will try to fix our winch.

We are not all needed for the reparation, so we are trying to fly on our well-known star of De Aar's airport, which reminds us of comming Christmas. Pierre and Víťa catch in termal, Víťa reports to the radio that he has five thousand of hight. Just so he fly nice afternoon´s 170 km somewhere behind Collesberg by the way.

But Pierre returned rather tired that eveding and only later he told us he had to untwist after unwanted acrobatics. Fortunately, with 2000 meters below his buttocks.

We corrected our which in the meantime. Regarding to unexpecting northwest wind, we have decided to return to the airfield to Prieska. But the wind is getting stronger and stronger until it completely get crazy. So we are having fun in the Orange river under the sky which is full of perfect cumuluses. Our Dutch friends are going back to De Aar. But we are atracted to see wastes and basins in the center of the country and that´s why we head off to spend the night there.