Last but not least....
First I
have to get this of my chest:
I bought
this little car (second hand Uno) five years ago (at the time it was already
five years old) and it is still going and not just going, it has been on a bit
of an epic journey.
It did not all start so well, I hardly had her
two months when the engine “blew up”, I am not very mechanically minded so
“blew up” will have to do, but I do think you get the point. Then a Garage/workshop
owner tried to convince me that it is not worth spending
Zar 6 000 (for a new
engine) on a car that is only (by then) worth about Zar 15 000. I have heard that argument before and it only
works when you have lots of money or are willing to waste a lot of money by
paying double a cars worth (with interest). If you look at it from a different
perspective and you do not have Zar 20 000 or 30 000 to buy another one cash
and you are not willing to be up to your eyeball in debt, just for the sake of
transport, the argument becomes a bit lame. The fact is I needed transport to
get to work and back, without spending half my salary on doing so, so I fixed
the little car.
That Zar 6 000
for a new engine turned out one of the best “investments” I ever made. It is
five years later and accepts for the normal wear and tear, like new tires etc.
there were very little problems and no monthly installments. If I had monthly
installments the mighty banking bastards would have taken it back a long time
ago….
I bought it
in Sedgefield on the Garden Route, that is after I rolled my old Golf. Then the
engine got replaced and the journey started. I drove right across the country
to Vaalwater (near Botswana). That is about 1 600 km’s without any
problem. Then I got bored and decided to
do the whole green/eco living mission, which meant driving all the way down to the
Eastern Cape, another 1 400 or so kilometers. Mostly no problems, accept that
the difference in altitude caused it to not want to start at times and at some
point Riaan threatened to burn it… lucky that did not happen and the journey
continued. This time with two people, a dog, a cat and a squirrel as passengers.
After the KD mission and us being very poor we went to howick, again another
800 or so kilometers, without any problem or worries about monthly payments.
But that is
not all! From Howick I drove all the way up to Hoedspruit (not to far from Mozambique)
and then back to Johannesburg and then all the way to Stellenbosch in the
Western Cape. That journey was probably well over 2 000 kilometers. This
little car is nothing short of a miracle. It is also extremely light on
petrol/gasoline and at the current price of the stuff this counts for a lot.
A lot of the travelling was on dirt roads,
which Uno’s are not built for, yet this little “mini Ferrari”, as we call her.
(It is Italian, like the Ferrari and that is where the resemblance stops), just
kept on going.
Through
thick and thin, through better and worse, starting to sound like a marriage…
