9. Angels carry fire arms

I know this to be true because I met two and saw their guns. Ok, I admit they were dressed as slightly overweight black guys in police uniforms but they were definitely angels. Probably on an exchange program or something.

The story started last Saturday morning. You'll recall from a previous blog post that we shipped a car into South Africa. Well it cleared customs quickly in the first week and was waiting for us to collect it from Durban, 500km down the road. After a number of plans to fetch it were made and changed over the weekend (and let me tell you, cheekily paraphrasing Field Marshall Helmuth Carl Bernard Graf von Moltk, no plan survives contact with Africa for long), I headed down on Monday morning with one of the other J-Life guys who needed to be there to referee an argument about a field.

By four in the afternoon I had the car in my possession, no damage, nothing stolen, no additional customs charges. Amazing. In fact the shipping agent said it was the first car he had ever seen come out of clearing with a full tank of fuel: people usually ship them almost empty, and if they don't the fuel is almost always syphoned out and stolen in the docks. Well not ours, for which I was mightily glad. I decided not to stay the night in Durban but to head back up. I should have been home by nine.

The N3 Durban/Joburg is quite a beautiful road; first it climbs constantly for something like 200km out of Durban towards the Drakensburg mountains and the 1600m plateau on which Joburg and its surroundings sit, then you cross the Drakensburg at Van Reenen's pass, which is picturesque, and finally cruise through a lovely landscape surrounded by rolling hills punctuated by occasional dramatic mountains and escarpments left over from the last period of volcanicity in the area. I'm sure the Cape Garden Route is nicer, but the N3 from Durban to Joburg sure beats the M6 through the industrial wasteland of the English midlands.

Motorways in SA are restricted to 120kmh, and I generally don't speed, so I was cruising along at 120 when a cop stepped into the road ahead of me and waved me in. I had absolutely no idea what was wrong and assumed it was a spot check as I was driving a British car. I rolled down the window and said a cheery hello, in the most polite and quintessentially British accent I could muster.

"Sir could you step out of the car, please, and look at my speed gun. You were driving at 120, see, it says so right here". Fortunately the internal gatekeeper in charge of filtering my thoughts did its job for once, and I didn't say something dumb and sarcastic. "Yes sir", I said, "I see that. Is there a problem?". "Yes there is, you are in an 80 zone".

Ahh. That'll be it then. Doing a full 50% over the limit tends to attract the attention of the people given the task of catching speeders. Nuts.

Now the problem with the police in SA is that a lot of them are corrupt. They routinely take bribes, and actually it can be quite hard to avoid giving them a back-hander because of the clever way they pitch it as an on-the-spot fine. Paying the bribe is pretty much the most pragmatic way out of the situation, but not exactly the path of most integrity, so I decided I wasn't going to accept paying him off.

"Well, sir, you see we have a problem here. Your driver's licence is British so I can't process the fine here...". At this point he leafs through his cherished Big Book Of Fines to show me I am to pay R1500 (about £130). "...so what I must do is take you to the station. But you see, sir, that is 30km away, and I think your time is very precious so you probably don't want to do that...". Here it comes. "...so this gives me a problem.", "Yes, I can see the problem. It is a shame", I said. He continued, "Your family is probably waiting for you to get home. You want to be home quickly...". I'm now just waiting for the drop. "So I will tell you what I can do for you. Because I think you made a mistake and you don't want to pay the whole fine I can right here...", crunch time, "...well, sir I have decided I will give you a warning. Please drive carefully now."

Stunned silence for a moment. "Thank you sir, I appreciate your generosity of spirit, I will not let this happen again", I said meekly, and with that I was on my way. Answer to prayer there. Nice guy. Or more likely just too lazy to drive me to the station and back. Whatever the reason I was just glad to get away with it. However he is not one of the angels. No, the angels appear later, when, for the second time that day, I end up sat in a police car.

Picturesque the N3 may be, but the government seem to have given little thought to the fact that something like 100% of vehicles using it will, at some point, need fuel. As I passed a garage I glanced at my gauge and saw I was down to a quarter tank. It would have been a bit of a manoeuvre to get across to that station so I decided to keep going until the next one. Well it turned out later that the next one was over 150km away. After the fuel light had been on for about 50km, with the next garage on the N3 an unknown distance ahead, and fearful of running out of diesel alone in a strange country with no breakdown insurance, I looked on the SatNav for the nearest filling station on a provincial road away from the N3. It found one 30km away. Remember by this point I was sure I was running on fumes and it was dark.

Basically having run out of options I took the next exit and followed the SatNav. After 5km the tarmac ran out and I was on a network of sand roads, blindly following a computer in complete darkness for the remaining 25km. I was in a state of fairly constant prayer by this point, as you might imagine. I eventually pulled into the station, and the attendant told me they had run out of diesel. Oh My Goodness. The SatNav told me the next station was 5km away, so with no choice I headed for it. It was closed. The next one was another 10km away. It, too, was closed. The next was was 21km away. It was non-existent. By this point I had done nearly 120km with the fuel light on. In desperation I punched in the next station, a BP garage 30km away, and set off once more. All of this is on sand roads in the middle of nowhere, with no lights and no infrastructure of any kind, so I was pretty scared.

10km from the BP garage the car died. I prayed that miraculously I could get another few km, and the car burst into life. At 8km it died again, I prayed again, it revived for another km or so. This happened six times until it coasted to a stop about a km from where the computer said the BP garage was, on the edge of a tiny town built around a gas works. I locked up, got out to walk, and phoned the J-Life guys just so they would know where I was in case anything went wrong. All this time I was praying that this would end up as a cool story to tell on the blog and to laugh about for years to come. Obviously, since you are reading this, it did.

About ten seconds after I put down the phone a police car pulled up and asked if I was ok. I threw myself on their mercy and asked for help. The put me in the car, and drove me into town - it turned out the BP Garage was also closed but they knew of another which was open. They had diesel. The guys running it scampered around and found an old plastic watering can which they filled with fuel, and the police took me back to the car. They helped me push my car round so the fuel lines were facing down hill, held the torch while I searched round the engine bay for the manual priming pump, phoned the police mechanic in case we needed him, then cheered twenty minutes later when the car started.

After all that they even accompanied me back to the garage to make sure I didn't get robbed while filling up. Awesome guys. Short on wings, but big on hearts.

While this saga was unfolding, John from J-Life was phoning all his contacts to see if anyone knew anyone in the town where I was stranded. He conferenced-called his mechanic to help me find the priming pump. He even said he would drive out the 200km to pick me up, this at way past ten at night. Community in action.

The cynical among you might ask, if God really answers prayers, why did I coast to a halt 1km from the fuel station. To that I would say that God does not absolve you from the need to put fuel in you car, but he might just shorten the odds in your favour when you're stupid enough not to do so. I drove 150km with the fuel light on, at times at least 20km from the nearest civilisation. From the moment the car started dying, I limped another 10km before it coughed its last. Within a minute of stopping I was picked up by friendly and non-corrupt police officers who drove me to an open fuel station and back, helped me get the car started, and stayed with me until I was on my way home. I call that answered prayer.

I think I have mentioned before that part of the reason for doing what we're doing is so that we don't hit 70 without a story to tell. Well, I'll say it again, be careful what you wish for.