To better get around and get some boat work done we hire a car for a week. Richards Bay is quite modern and we don’t see any of the poverty that is evident in the rural areas. We enjoy the many restaurants along the waterfront and the ready access to fresh food. For the first time ever, we pay one of the local workers to clean our boat for us. He polished stainless, did the waterline, polished plastic and washed down the boat. All for less than $20 per day. It was a pleasure not to have to do some of the work we don’t enjoy doing. We also off-loaded some old clothes for him to take back to his family. There seems a very big disparity between the haves and the have-nots. When we can eat out for about $10-$15 for the two of us and the restaurant owner drives around in a very nice car, we have to figure the restaurant workers are not very well paid. We sent a part of the refrigeration in to get fixed, dropped off the VHF to get fixed and ordered multiple parts from the US to be picked up. We made arrangements with Frank and Karen to visit the game parks, shopped for some other spares from local businesses and generally enjoyed being tethered to land for a while. During this time, we finally had some rain. It was a torrential downpour with winds up to 45 knots. This seemed like a challenge for the marina docks as they seemed to be moving a little, we put out extra lines and we were just fortunate we had a finger on each side of us that we could tie to. It seems that these strong winds do happen often here and the dock is still afloat, but we still had the feeling that the boats tied to the dock kept it together during the big blow. The rain was a welcome relief, good for the boat and good for the locals as they had been having a severe drought up to this point. Someone was telling us he had to use the water from his pool to have water throughout his home.