When Gear Fails, There Are Helping Hands “We have roadwork to do and will close off the road for the concrete to harden. You either leave early tomorrow or you will have to wait ten days,” a road worker told us. That was an easy one. Who would like to be stuck in a small Land Cruiser parked in a meadow in the middle of nowhere when days of rain have been predicted? We had arrived on one of the few gorgeous autumn days and had made the best of it with a beautiful hike into the Kaçkar Mountains of northeastern Turkey. However, with this weather forecast it was time to move on. The day didn’t start well. We overslept. When we got up, we spotted the workers getting ready to fix the road surface, right in front of where we stood parked. Like a bat out of hell we took down the rooftop tent, broke camp, and Coen fired up the old diesel. Within the first foot of driving, the left side sank into the swamp caused by a night of torrential downpour. Fountains of mud churned up behind the Land Cruiser and the wheels clawed deeper into the sludge. The car wouldn’t move an inch.
confidence that he knew what he was doing. He unrolled the winch-cable, hitched it to a telephone pole and set himself behind the steering wheel. He then pushed the button of the remote control, took up the slack in the winch cable and the Land Cruiser inched forward.
The purchase of the Land Cruiser, a couple of months earlier, had come with a winch. We hadn’t taken the time to check how it worked, let alone test it, but Coen exuded
Pang! The winch emitted a tiny whirl of smoke. We had no clue what just happened but that was the end of the winch. The road workers had finished their first stretch of
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