Disaster strikes.......

I fear today I am the bearer of some very bad news.

The consistent high speeds over the rough desert roads took its toll and Matilda broke a rear axle "half shaft".  This is serious.  The shaft holds the wheel to the car and is the mechanism through which power from the engine is transmitted to the wheel.

This is what a half shaft looks like:

 And this is what it looks like when it it broken (these are not the actual pictures)

Basically the rear wheel came off and Matilda is stuck!

If we can think of anything fortunate to report, it would be that the disaster struck in the middle of the Gobi Desert with nothing but camels, goats and nomads for hundreds of kilometers.  That is except for a small town with a petrol station and a grocery store which was a few hundred meters away! (I know what you are thinking - but I don't know how many goats are in this town.)  

The satellite phone proved its worth as Oupa called in to the capital of Mongolia, Ulaan Baatar, about 300km away to arrange a truck to pick them up.   At the time of writing (8 hours later) the truck has not arrived.   It is now pitch dark, the wind is howling (it is apparently blows from Siberia and is therefore very, very cold) and Gramma is unpacking the sleeping bags so that they can sleep the night in the car.

In the meanwhile, as we would expect, Oupa jumped to work and had taken the rear axle apart in the desert.  He was able to extract the inner piece of the half shaft and took the pieces over to the town.  Using his extensive Mongolian vocabulary (because no one there has ever heard of Afrikaans, or even English for that matter) he was able to locate a welding machine in a shack behind the petrol station.  

With a very friendly and conversational Mongolian, who had sufficient old oil under his worn down fingernails to earn Oupa's immediate respect, they were able to clean the shaft and weld it back together.  Unfortunately, the bearing (that holds the shaft) was also damaged when the shaft broke and Oupa will have to do some careful surgery on the bearing's roller cage to rescue it.     This is not something that he cannot do in the middle of the Gobi Desert.  Or he will have to look for a new bearing in Ulaan Baatar.  I am not hopeful, what are the chances of finding a 1948 Chevy bearing (part # Hyatt 111119, 2.4058"OD 1.584"ID cylindrical roller) in Mongolia?

Fortunately tomorrow is a rest day in Ulaan Baatar and if they can get there in time I am sure that Oupa's ingenuity will result in a solution to save the trip.

Yesterday they lost more than two hours because they stopped to help dig another car out of the sand.   I hope that that act of good samaritanship was noted somewhere higher and that luck will smile on them tomorrow - they certainly will need a solid dose of luck to recover from this.