The Code...
There exists something of a unwritten law, or code of conduct among people who frequently travel to the more remote difficult to accesss places in the land. Thir rule runs along the basic premise of "If someone you meet is in trouble or needs assistance, you do whatever you possibly can to help them out (no matter the circumstances) / If you're in trouble and need assistance ASK".
Picture if you will :
The terrain is a fairly flat very dry, very rocky and all but the largest of the rivers and creeks are dry sandy strips. Everywhere the eye can see is a sea of a dry grass about a meter high (3 feet) that is very aptly named "speargrass". There are termite mounds raging in height up to two meters everywhere. Numerous small ranges and limestone outcroppings dot the landscape and are crossed by the access roads as needed.
The whole area is very rough and very inhospitable to those who are unprepared to deal with it. There is a 2 hour drive to get through about 50km of winding rough track (that is nothing more than two wheel ruts in the meter (3 foot) high speargrass) to get to the nearest major road. This major road is still a good 10 km out from the nearest location even closley resembling a town. Even the nearest town only resembles a town in that it has a police station and a place to buy vital supplies like ice,fuel and food.
There are however, a couople of sopts in the area that one can find a nice place to camp for a night. These spots all astride the major river in the area, which hasn't dried out quite yet.
Thus we come to nights campsote.
This is a river some 50 meters wide and fairly clear flowing although slow, there are several nice flat places on the sandy high bank to set up campsites, and the water is of a suitable quality to bathe with, and after brief filtration and a good hard boiling is even potable. There's assorted types of freshwater fish, abundant birdlife and quite possibly a few small freshwater crocodiles. It's a verdent oasis in a landscape of harsh reality.
Picture arriving at this verdent oasis at something like 1500 hours, after travel ling from a nearby location that is even more remote and lacking in anything beyond a piece of ground to sleep on. You're tired from driving on very rough, winding and technically challenging roads for the last few hours. All that's really on your mind is having a swim to wash off the dirt of a couple days camping without a water supply.
One arrives and notes an established campsite; There are two people therein with a vehicle that still has Noah's handwriting on it. One does the hospitable thing and stops and has a chat with the occupants therein. They mentioned another campsite about a mile down the track and said that it was available. Durring the course of the conversation noted that their vehicle didn't have a battery in it was told that the battery from the vehicle was with the rest of their group in their boat, which was presently downstream a way.
Nonetheless, We head off to the campsite so described and pitch camp.
Soon thereafter we spot the remaining people from the other camp. They're coming back up the river in dingy with an electric outboard attached. After the usual pleasantries they head on upriver and out of notice.
This is where the problem arose.
The other camp had been using the cranking battery from their vehicle to drive their electric outboard on the boat, thus reducing the battery's capacity to actually turn their vehicle over. In this case they drained that battery dead flat.
Some hour or so later , just coming onto dark, when the bird life was massing at the river and having a great old time, I was just preparing the coals to cook dinner on and one of the people from the other camp shows up and says "Can you give us a jump start , our battery is flat".
Now, we knew that they'd done something really really stupid by using up all the charge in their cars' battery, but were still obligated by "The Code" to help them out and get them up and out of there.
So we head a ways down the track and park on the top of a hill nearby the other camp (just so that we can roll start out vehicle should worst come to worst). Take the battery from our vehicle down to them and get their vehicle started first pop. They thank us and we're on our way. That there was 5 adults, 5 children under 10 and 3 dogs (two of them quite large) all packed into a old style Toyota Landcruiser Wagon isn't really relevant except to illustrate how irresponsible these people were.
The battery gets reinstalled in my vehicle and we start up and head back towards our camp. It's now getting pretty dark so the spotlights are on and the track is really hard to see.
No more than 50meters (150 foot) down the track the rear drivers tire goes BANG and is instantly flat.
Now , while it took no more than 10 minutes to change the wheel over, the tire that went flat is utterly destroyed beyond any hope of salvatiom. That the people we'd helped out just before (because they were stupid) DID stop on their way out and offer us assistance, was comforting at the least.
This is what leads me to mind the main quandary.
If we didn't have to rescue someone from their own blatant stupidity, and drive through a rough track in lighting that was not good enough we'd never have blown a $200 tyre. Trouble is that I couldn't have morally ignored their request for help, and would do exactly the same thing should the same thing happen again.
Now, having followed "The Code" to the letter ; who should I be pissed at ?
