Car trouble

 This was our 'rental' car. It belonged to a local that Bernd knows. So we 'rented' the car from this guy and Bernd drove it. He liked the car, it's a Fiat but built in Turkey. The guidebooks warned against renting cars like this. The thing is they can withstand all kinds of abuse and the locals know how to fix it if it should break down and it did, not here. This was trouble of a different kind. We were driving along nicely down some country road when suddenly we approached a patch of water across the road in front of us. It was murky and we didn't know how deep it was and if the car could go through it. So, being cautious, Bernd decided not to and tried to turn the car around. There was no room to turn the car around, behind us was the embankment, in front of us was the cliff. We were 'jackknifed', I think that's the term. So Bernd went to look for help, in front of us was a chaistand and there was this Frenchman with a jeep. He came to the rescue. He said, the waters' not deep and a lot of cars have already driven through that morning.

 Here comes help.

It was scary, here we are in the middle of nowhere and we can't call triple A. After that we did drive through the patch of water, had some OJ at the chaistand, chatted with the locals who told us of another road to get out of the valley. Sophie was so scared, she was even embarrassed to take photos of what happened but here was I, clicking away. It was the same when we had a flat tire in Morocco earlier this year. It's incidents like this that make for good travel stories.
We did have other car trouble, the car had two fuel lines and we couldn't get it to go, so finally we drove into a gas station (gas stations are pretty rare, only the locals know where they are), the kids working in the station got it to work again. He said the switching of one fuel to another has caused air pockets in the fuel line. So he pumped the lines with gas and it worked, as simple as that. We would never know that.