Monday, November 26, 2012

Africa here we come... not yet

Lots of "help" from the neighbors
November 23rd, 10 am, everything packed, Rosana already sitting in the cab. Marc turns the key and..... nothing. Duma doesn't collaborate.
Do we have an issue with the starter motor or with the batteries ? Can we jump start it ? Duma’s battery is 24Volts and all other regular cars are 12V. We finally had some jump start cables and another car standing right next to the batteries. We’ve tried to jump started it without any luck.

How about “AAA” ??? The only thing they could do was to send a tow truck. What kind of tow truck would we need?

In the end we got a mechanic to come to the campground. He took the batteries to be charged overnight. The next day at 10:30 am, as promised he was back with the batteries. Wow, the Spaniards were finally surprising us. Later we found out he is from Venezuela. The batteries were put back and Duma was happy again.

Good news !!! It looks like the issue is not with the starter motor !!! Now we just need to get new batteries and off to Africa we go. No, wait a minute. The issue could be with the alternator and/or the regulator and not with the batteries. We need to get it checked.
Found a place to get it checked. It looks like they have the right equipment. The apparatus used actually said “alternador defectuoso”
What to do ??? Wait until Monday to go to Mercedes to double check (oh no, not that dealership again… ), then order the alternator, wait a few days, have it fixed and then off to Africa.

Nothing could be done on Sunday so Rosana decided to try her 3rd recipe for baking bread.
It actually worked this time.


Fresh bread every morning
 
Reconfiguration of the passenger's seat
to fit the new batteries
Monday 10am at the Mercedes dealer. Explained our issue (in Spanish or sort of) and we were told by Javier (remember him from the previous post???) they were super busy and he had to ask the "Jefe" (yes the same supervisor that wanders around) if they could diagnose the issue. He came back saying today was going to be impossible they were too busy. After reminding them that last Monday they had us wait the whole day and Rosana's best arguing in Spanish we convinced the "Jefe" and they were going to do it sometime in the morning.
11:30am - Surprise, Surprise, they were going to start.
12:30pm Diagnosis done ! Alternator and Regulator good. 1 battery good and 1 battery bad. Ordered 2 new batteries from a shop just around the corner.
1:30pm Siesta time and no batteries yet.
3pm With batteries handy it should be done in 15 minutes. Wait a minute, the batteries don’t fit… The iron box need to be cutout and re-welded to give another 15 millimeters of space
4:30pm !!!!! Batteries in, Duma happy!!!
5:30pm After some more trees were killed by our amigo Javier, the paperwork signed and the bill paid we head back to the campground. Tentavive plan is to leave for Morocco on Wednesday/Thursday so we have two more days in Spain to make sure the problem really was the batteries

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

25% of people unemployed in Spain, it could be worse....


Yesterday we had an early start as we had gotten an e-mail on Friday from the Mercedes Truck Service station in Malaga that the new ventilator had arrived.

 They asked us to be there first thing on Monday morning. This was our second trip to the Mercedes dealer, the first time we learned the lesson that if you do not upgrade your three year old Garmin (GPS) you are going to drive around for two hours before you find the Mercedes dealer.

Specially in Spain where the EU tax money was very well spent on building new roads (corruption and bureaucracy at work: there is a 20 km new highway between Coin and Malaga that has been finished for over a year except for the “stripemarks”, the project ran out of money so this new road is still not in use).

Anyway we arrived at the Mercedes dealer at 9am after a nice  sunrise morning drive.


Javier, the guy at the reception who helped us the first time to get the new ventilator ordered, registered our car and the three things that we requested them to do: change the oil of the gearbox, replace the ventilator and check the electronics of the dashboard.  First three printouts were made of the planned services that we needed to sign. Once signed, new forms were printed and copied and printed again for the mechanic, the supervisor (who had been standing around all the time doing nothing (as we found out the rest of the day that was his job))and for us. So 45 minutes and one tree later we thought they were finally ready to work on our car. Wrong….. We were asked to sit in the waiting area. So we did as we thought it is not 10 yet and based on their estimate it should all take about two hours so we will be out of here around noon. In the mean time we evaluated the registration process and came to the conclusion that fortunately the Spanish are so inefficient, imagine if they introduced efficiency in their workplace, the unemployment rate would jump to 50%.
Supervising...
At 10.30 Rosana went to ask when they would start working on our car. The answer from Javier was as soon as the mechanic was done with the truck he was working on. Obviously we wanted to know when he was going to be finished with it, so Javier went to ask the mechanic. The mechanic said that he needed another 30 minutes. So at 1pm he finally started to work on our car (yes right that is 2.5 hours later). Very nice guy and he seemed to be very good, not in English though. Since Marc does not speak Spanish nor is his English (or Dutch for that matter) truck mechanics vocabulary very big he had to ask Rosana to translate. So now Rosana was trying to tell in her best Spanish the things Marc could not even explain or ask in English. We felt very sorry for “Manuel from Barcelona” For those of us who do not remember Manuel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6EaoPMANQM

Anyway, so  we thought we will be out of here by 3pm. Wrong…….At 1.25 Javier came out of his office to let us know that at 1.30 everyone will go for lunch/siesta until 3pm. By that time we already expected anything, so we decided not to grab Javier by the ears and not to stuff his head in an oil drum.
In the end we left the Mercedes dealership at 5.30pm, wondering if Spain is really in Europe or is it part of North Africa.

Friday, November 16, 2012

In Spain

We have made it to South of Spain. Duma did well ... ~2,300 KM (1,400 miles) in 6 days.

We left the Netherlands on November 4th from Marc's brother's house. Patrick, Hidde, Frederieke and Florine were there to send us on our way.

It was a slow but at times beautiful trip through France and Spain. We said we would only stop for nice and warm weather, well we are still looking for it. We are now in Marbella and it has been reasonable. Some sunny and warm days but also quite some rain. On some of the pictures you can see that there was some major flooding in the south of Spain.

On our way down to Spain we ran into a couple more issues with Duma. I guess she did not appreciate being in a barn for three years. The biggest issue was that the household batteries were not being charged while we were driving. Besides that Rosana's feet were getting wet when driving in the rain, the ventilator gave out when we passed Madrid and then there were a couple of minor things. So we spent a few days with Koen of Twiga Travelcars in Spain. Most of the problems are fixed now and as a bonus Marc got a crash course in Unimog maintenance. Thanks Koen.
Koen also shared some of his travel adventures when he took his Unimog to Mongolia. We only hope that Marc will not spend as much time under the Unimog as Koen did on his trip (Well that will not happen as Marc will quickly determine that he will not be able to fix it anyway).

On the way back from Koen another problem surfaced, the dashboard lights all start to blink when we drive, like it is already X-mass. Hopefully we will be able to take care of that problem next week so we can finally take the boat to Morocco. In the mean time we spend our time on a camping with retired "Netherland" (today is Saturday so Marc will join the rest of the camping and give Duma a good scrub.....not)

Pictures

Sunday, November 4, 2012

We have Started !!!!


After traveling to 16 different cities, towns and villages in 3 continents visiting friends and family having fun, sun, wind, rain and even snow we have started our overland adventure.
Duma (our Unimog) did not like we had left her standing still for 3 years and gave us some trouble. After picking her up and trying to start the trip we had to bring her back to Twiga Travel Cars and they quickly took care of all the issues and now we are driving.
The trip started on Nov 4th 2012 from Tilburg, The Netherlands.
First day we drove about 500 km.
Here is a link to our pictures from the last few weeks.

Depois de viajarmos por 16 cidades diferentes em 3 continentes visitando parentes e amigos com diversao, sol, chuva, vento e ate neve comecamos nossa aventura sobre 4 rodas.
Duma (nosso caminhao) nao gostou muito que a deixamos parada por 3 anos e nos deu um pouco de trabalho. Tentamos comecar a viagem mas tivemos que leva-la de volta ao pessoal pessoal da "Twiga Travel Cars" (uma oficina especializada neste tipo de caminhoes de viagem) que cuidaram de tudo.
Nossa viagem comecou em 4 de Nov de 2012 em Tilburg, Holanda.
Dirigimos cerca de 500 km no primeiro dia.
Aqui vai um link com algumas fotos das ultimas semanas.