“This isn’t my battery but of somebody who asked me to charge it. It’s full. Why don’t you keep it for now so you can drive to your guesthouse while I’ll charge yours all night long? Who knows it charges enough to get you to a city tomorrow,” Eudon proposed.
We fell silent. What kind of an incredibly friendly gesture was that? And what confidence in total strangers, too. I was touched by his proposal. We reassessed our situation and adjusted the plans we had this morning.
We wouldn’t be leaving Santo Amaro and returning to the wilderness of Lençois da Maranhenses today.
Check it out: the Landcruising Adventure Tote-Bag Collection
An Exploded Battery
This morning, after we had packed and were ready to leave, the Land Cruiser hadn’t started. Coen connected the household batteries and the Land Cruiser was running again.
Technical details: The Land Cruiser runs on 24 volts thus it has 2 starter batteries. We have a second set – we call them our household batteries – for lights inside the car, charging digital appliances, and running the fridge.
Read More: The Quest for Batteries in Tashkent (Uzbekistan)
We didn’t pay much attention to it as the Land Cruiser had been standing still for some two weeks. We drove to our friends Marinaldo and Lucia (who taught us to make beiju pancakes) to say our goodbyes and chatted for half an hour or so before Coen turned the key once more.
Again, the Land Cruiser didn’t start. The seriousness of the problem started to dawn on us. These expensive, high-quality ACDelco pro batteries were only 1,5 years old. They shouldn’t have been giving us any trouble at all.
Now what? We had plans to drive deep into the outback, a vastness of trails through sand, dunes and scrub without exactly knowing where our destination, the hamlet of Bretagna, lay and of which we knew included at least one nasty river crossing that gave a reasonable possibility to get stuck.
A smart idea when not having proper running batteries?
Nope.
Read More: Batteries on Fire (Paraguay)
Instead of saying our goodbyes, Marinaldo directed us to a workshop where a guy fixed tires and charged batteries.
Here we met Eudon and sure, it was no problem for him to take a look. Now that Coen was taking a closer look he saw that one of the batteries was deformed, as if it had been inflated.
Not good.
Trying to Get the Exploded Battery Charged
Eudon charged it for half an hour but without a result. He replaced the bad starter battery with one of his own and yes, the Land Cruiser started. He could now conclude that, indeed, it was the battery that was causing the problem.
Eudon clearly wanted to help and then came with the solution of offering us another one while he’d charge ours. How kind was that? Just the fact that he offered a (temporary) solution instead of a shrugged shoulders –”don’t know, can’t help,” – makes the difference in the world in daily life, but arguably even more when traveling.
Again we were surrounded by good people. It may sound like the simplest thing in the world yet this guy’s way of working made me smile and I knew things would work out again, somehow.
He didn’t ask for a name, a telephone number, a deposit. We only had to be at his place tomorrow at 6am because he was going somewhere else for the day.
We returned to our guesthouse Solar das Gaivotas for one more night. Fortunately, our room hadn’t been cleaned yet so without a feeling of guilt we could use it another night.
The next morning it turned out that the battery hadn’t been charged at all and felt incredibly hot. Busted. We had to replace it. So much for a product that came with a 7-year factory guarantee when bought in the U.S. but can’t be bought with a guarantee in Suriname.
But for that we needed a bigger town than this. How we solved it is for another story…
Hier kun je het boek bestellen.
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