ROAD WORKS

Since arriving in Tanzania, we've spent an inordinate amount of time working on the truck or watching other people do the work for us. This hasn't been without its dangers, including one short-staining incident when the truck fell off its blocks and slid sideways.
Fortunately, neither Lisa nor myself were under the truck at the time but we were on opposite sides of the vehicle and our first thoughts were whether the other was underneath.
It was in Mbeya, just north of the border with Malawi (and not far from the one with Zambia) and we had arrived two days before, spent the previous day finding parts at realistic prices and had got up early to start changing the rear leaf springs.
The old one's had sagged as they got tired and old and with the wheel arches cut down to make a flat load bed inside the truck, the tyres were touching the body on a regular basis. We had already worn out one set of tyres and needed to replace them and didn't really want to have to replace tyres every 10 000 km.
We got the springs off okay, having jacked the vehicle up, placed blocks under the chassis and lowered it carefully back onto them. While it all took some time (like most of the day!), we managed to extract the springs from the truck, dismantle them (the manual is really good at telling you how to take the springs out of the vehicle but it is less than useless when it comes to telling you how to replace the main leaf spring in the stack of springs, obviously assuming that we have done this sort of things a million times before!), put the new ones in place and then reassemble the whole caboodle.
Having put it all back together and spent the better part of the day sitting under the vehicle, we were just about to head off to buy new tyres - the tyre shop was just down the road and we were going to roll the wheels down there - when I decided to grease the spring mounting points while Lisa packed things away.
The vehicle was still on its blocks and as I squeezed the first load of grease through the grease gun into the nipples on the pivots, the whole truck slid sideways off its blocks. Both Lisa and I shat ourselves as we watched Wag 'n Bietjie lurching to her doom, panicking as she did so that the other was under the vehicle.
When she came to a stop, we checked that we were both okay and then remembered to breathe before trying to establish how much damage had been done. Fortunately, the extent of the damage was a dented silencer (but no holes) and a bent mounting point for the air compressor - we got off really lightly! Getting Wag 'n B back onto an even keel was even more hair-raising. High lift jacks are not known for their stability and, without a bottle jack, we had to raise the truck a couple of inches at a time, insert another block, ensure it was secure and stable and then repeat the whole process.
When we had it stable, I ran away to the tyre shop and borrowed some of their staff and their trolley jack to come and help complete the process before taking the truck back and getting the new tyres - which cost $200 for the pair!
During the days proceedings, we also changed the centre-bearing on the prop shaft because the old one kept popping the rubber out of the housing and making unhappy knocking noises every time we used first gear and put any torque through the rear wheels.

Cut and paste
Life has been a little "higher" since the leaf-respringing but the new tyres were still scuffing on the bodywork so when we reached Dar es Salaam, we got hold of a guy who works from the campsite (we'd heard about him from other travellers) and he took us to a place where we could get the wheel arches cut out and replaced.
He argued the price down to a point which both he and I deemed reasonable to all parties and then oversaw the whole process, pointing out where the guys had missed things and things weren't properly done or something else needed to be fixed.
It was quite amazing watching him - before I could open my mouth about something I wasn't happy with, Twiga (that is the pronunciation if not the correct spelling!) had already picked up on it and spoken to the guys about it.
For princely sum of TSh15 000 (about $16), the flat plates were cut out, turned round and rewelded and new end pieces were welded in place so that there is now significantly more space for the rear wheels to move up into.
The job isn't the best in the world and it will probably rust like crazy in the UK, but we don't have hordes of money and this didn't eat into our budget too much. And Twiga's fee of TSh5 000 was well worth it.
Standing around watching while the guys did the work was an experience in itself. There were about 5 different groups all working out of the same premises, a converted alley off one of Dar es Salaam's supposed larger streets just outside the city centre.
The alley was about as wide as a single car garage and most of the work is done on the street - which, incidentally, is just a series of water-filled puddles with occasional dry patches teeming with workers.
Fundi, the man doing the job, and his trio of assistants had a small angle grinder, a pair of shared, home-made hammers, two cold chisels and a welding machine at their disposal, plus various bits of scrap iron. There wasn't a work bench in sight and the ground served as the work surface for everybody in the area.
There was a single power point but not a plug in sight, everyone simply twisting their wiring onto the spaghetti of wires already stuffed into the power point.
While there wasn't a corner cafe or coke vending machine anywhere nearby, the fast food on offer was incredible to watch. The smooching sound which Lisa, in another market, had mistaken for lewd approaches, is in fact the advertising slogan for the water sellers, who wander up and down selling plastic packets of safe drinking water.
The other cool drink on offer is from the bicycle-propelled coconut vendors who, for TSh50 and with few deft strokes of a sharp knife, will slice the fibres off a coconut, lop off the top and give you shellful of coconut milk.
There were samoosa salesmen, mango sellers, peanut merchants and lunchbox of other small businessmen all specialising in one product. Even the workers sub-contracted bits of their work out to colleagues and friends - so when it came time to seal the last holes in the wheel arches, Fundi called in somebody else who dealt with the sticky business of silicone sealant.
Instead of buying a box full of welding rods, each welder would buy four rods at a time from a man who sat across the street and made his living from selling rods and other bits and pieces in small quantities as the workers needed them.
A fascinating and quite exhausting day! And now, hopefully, we'll have a rest from working on and worrying about Wag 'n B.