Thursday 24 November 2011

23rd November

Sophie flies back to the UK tomorrow, so I left baby Jaba and the two chickens in the capable hands of Andrea and Heidi and we headed off for Addis at 6.30 in the morning. We will stay there for a few nights as this will allow us to sort out yet more paperwork for the car and also pick up Jeremy’s residency permit (this will require a long and tedious day of queuing in the ministry for immigration and foreign affairs). The 470km drive went pretty well, although we did have a bit of a scary moment when the acceleration seemed to fail, a trail of smoke came from the car and the ‘contact the Toyota professional’ light went on. Since we were many miles away from any kind of garage, let alone a Toyota specialist this advice from the car manual wasn’t particularly helpful. Having pulled to the side of the road, opened the bonnet and contemplated the possible options, we concluded that the oil might be a bit low and that the steep incline that I had just driven up had created the problem. To be honest, there wasn’t a lot that we could do so we tried the engine again and luckily it went OK. Having driven cautiously to the garage some 30 miles away and poured in a litre of oil, we proceeded with our journey uneventfully. We will check the oil again tomorrow.

No comments:

Post a Comment