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January 30, 2006
Holiday Trip: Second Installment
December 23: Francistown, Botswana to Johannesburg, South Africa
Hot shower, more sardine sandwiches, and new money (the Pula) and we were back on the road hitching to Johannesburg. We started off in Francistown thinking that we might be able to cross the boarder at Martin’s Drift, but we flagged a lorry going all the way through Gabarone to Johannesburg. The guy who stopped for us wasn’t supposed to; the company he works for doesn’t allow hitchers, but he had seen us on the road in the back of Justice’s truck the day before and thought that we looked pitiful enough! He was on his return trip from Lusaka with an empty fuel truck. Because Zambia has been having a fuel crisis for about 5 months now, the Lusaka International Airport has been getting their fuel from South Africa. The driver’s name was Kennedy and he was the proud papa of a newborn baby boy. He’d be away from home for Christmas, but didn’t seem to be too down about it and wanted to talk the whole way! It ended-up being about a 13-hour trip because he could only go 80kms an hour. At the border of Botswana and South Africa we had to drop about 2kms from the post, walk through, and find him again on the other side.
The day was long and tiring, but we talked with Kennedy about Apartheid, what life was like in Soweto (one of the world’s most famous ghettos in Jo’burg), and how the country is moving on into the relatively new political make-up. Since he couldn’t take us into town on that big rig or to his workplace, he dropped us outside of town at a Shell station. We phoned the hostel where we had booked a night and waited. It was dark and all the stories we had heard about Jo’burg had scared us enough to be very on guard. Finally, after many a call trying to give directions, we were picked up and taken to a suburb where Brown Sugar Backpackers is located. That night we drank Castle Milk Stout and inhaled the local flavor that isa very metropolitan city in South Africa. We booked a trip to the bus station for the next day, hoping to get to Maseru, the capital of Lesotho.
Posted by ringo at January 30, 2006 10:54 AM
Comments
Posted by: Mary at February 1, 2006 4:01 AM