Back to normal roads, after Death Valley...
I have to recognize it. Death Valley is a great place to prepare a trip to African dry roads. It has dust, heat, small bush to prepare small fires, some lose stones, beautiful small creeks and has Mengel Pass.
That is for real men (take your hat out please).
We’ve been three hours there to make the first 7 miles from the Geologist Cabin in Stripped Butte with our 4x4. We don’t have a huge clearance so we needed to built part of the last 200 meters of the road before the pass, move a couple of big rocks and fill some holes with stones. It was tiring but it was so nice, so rewarding to be in the other side of the mountains towards Baker’s Ranch. Then, we found the big step in Goler Canyon…
Anyway, when we finished I had to promise our Free Cockroach, our Mitsubishi L300 (Delica) 4x4 where we’ve been living during the past 11 years, that it would never go thru that pass again.
Five days later we were at the entrance of Lippincott Road from the Racetrack. The previous evening I walked a couple of miles downhill and it looked quite a piece of cake (at least compared with Mengel Pass) (I take my hat out).
The next morning we woke up early, I took out the table to write and correct some pages of the new book about black Africa, and when I was sipping my first coffee I saw the right front brand new tire: it was flat.
I believe in messages from other worlds, mainly when they came from our beloved and passionate Free Cockroach (that’s the name of our 4x4 van). She abandoned us with serious breakdowns in the Sahara Desert in Sudan and in the Turkana Area in Kenya, 500 miles from the closest reliable mechanic. We slept at 4500 meters (around 14000 feet altitude) during a trip thru the highest roads in the Bolivian Altiplano and it woke up with a frozen engine…
So, this time I said: ok, you win. You made it thru Mengel Pass (I take my hat out). You’re released of going down Lippincott Road. But remember, this summer we are going to Álaska…
It is very glamourous!!! jajaja.
