Wednesday 8 April 2009 - Waking early to finish packing, I pop into work and welcome Aldo Pekeur (new P&C Officer) to the team and leave him a list of jobs - well start as you mean to go on! Bless him. Quickly I phone home to wish Mum a Gelukkige Verjaarsdag (Happy Birthday) before my lift arrives and my voyage begins.Travelling over 1000km up the African continent by my own volition, I am completely overwhelmed by the enormity of my epic trip. Mentally splitting the journey into segments, Swellendam to Cape Town, Cape Town to Upington and finally Upington to the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, I am dealing with each leg separately so I don't totally freak out.
Ben has to return a hire car to Cape Town, so after coming to a financial arrangement, I allow him to transport me to Cape Town. Stopping off at near civilisation, I pick up some essentials and Skype headset in Worcester shopping mall. After grabbing breakfast, we continue onto Cape Town.
With a couple of hours to kill before my bus to Upington, we head to The Waterfront. The working port of Cape Town, gateway to Robben Island and a hive of tourism, with shopping mall, craft markets and curio, street entertainers, together with dozens of restaurants and cafes ready to satisfy the appetites of hundreds of tourists, all this working under the shadow of magnificent Table Mountain.
Soon enough it is time to make way to the bus station. This station serving all major bus companies within SA, I expected a sprawling terminal, yet the station surrounded by market stalls is little over the size of a postage stamp as my Grandfather would say. The large coaches having barely enough run to turn.
Leaving just after the scheduled time of 5.15 pm, five hours later I have travelled the short distance to the outskirts of Cape Town, the bus air conditioning having broken down. Waiting over an hour for an engineer and his technical expertise, this being bash it with a spanner, surprisingly the air con is not fixed, meaning another hours wait for a new bus from the centre of CT. This is what I love about Africa - inefficiency!!!
The journey continues throughout the night, the bus seats reclining to almost horizontal position making sleep possible, although disturbed, as we collect further passengers along the way.
I wake to find the desert - arid land covered with rocks, just before Augrabies, the National Park where I was originally being placed. Shortly before Upington, the landscape becomes greener and the earth shimmers and sparkles in the sunshine. Now several hours behind schedule, we are stopped by the armed police and sniffer dogs, which with trained noses search the luggage compartments. Thankfully today we are clean. Second leg of my journey over, I arrive in Upington just before midday - a thankful end to a whole 19 hours on the buses!
