half a year in Africa

The last 40 hours has been a test of patience. 

It started with a 27 hour train ride from Cape Town to Johannesburg that turn out to be 2 hours longer.. Although this formed the bulk of the long journey, i enjoyed the time on the train very much; nice sleeping cabin, a restaurant and a bar, and the beautiful sights of the South african landscape (I will write a separate entry about this sometime). but once we get to joburg, a city famous for its fast-pace lifestyle (as cape towners put it), has been a series of uncertain arrangements and time spent waiting. 

I now write this from a COMPAQ DESKPRO computer at my hostel, which has a two second delay before each word appears on screen. At this point, i have typed a full sentence, and there would be about half a minute wait before the sentence appears. i guess this doesn't only trains up my patience but also makes me a multitasker, for i have spent the waiting time, patiently nibbling on crackers, which has been the source of my energy for the past 2days.

6 hours ago, we arrived at the Joburg station, looking forward to a good hot shower and the array of facilities it boasts in the bagpackers guidebook- pickup serive, tennis court, pool, homecooked meals at the restaurant, a bar and pool table. angie and i craved for a nice warm meal, after not having eaten a proper meal for 2 days but decided to hold of food while waiting for the waiting for the pickup. it was a test of our determination, because the pickup venue was at a restaurant which served burgers and milkshakes, and not having eaten a proper meal in 2 days, we were very tempted. but we were patient. we waited for 2 hours for the taxi driver patiently, only to receive a call that asked us to get a taxi to the location, because of the bad traffic.

So we left the station, at 6.30pm, in the dark, looking for the taxi place, with my big bagpack, a yellow tote bag full of the supply of cracker, now lighter after we consumed most of it on the train, and my black rolling suitcase. as luck would have it, the taxi driver didn't know where the hostel was. he had a map and i looked the index of streets. the street name wasn't there. i was confused, because the hostel location was supposed to have a nightlife and restaurants nearby. the driver made two stops to ask the people on the roads, and finally drove down a long, deserted road; the only things that were in motion on the roads were the raindrops splattering onto the ground and the movement of the wipers.

it was disappointing to find that the location of the hostel was not what we had expected. and it made me even more impatient that the manager seemed not to care at all about our arrival (we had to ask another resident to find him and it took about 10 minutes before he came), about where we are sleeping and what we could do in joburg. We asked about the restaurant/homecooked dinner and got the reply that we had to make it ourselves (which means we had to get the groceries, an option that is impossible when there is not a single grocery store in its 5km radius). he gave us a delivery menu, which had 3 restaurant options. the first one we picked was out because they don't do take outs, the second out because we were 15 minutes late of the last time they deliver, the third was pizzas, which didn't appeal to us at all, after having junk food for 2 days. 

And so, I am now patiently typing this entry, with the last piece of cracker by the keyboard, soon to become the last thing i eat, probably in the next 12 hours. 

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Although the trip has been a long string of waiting and unexpected incidences, i am not pissed off by these as i would have been, if this happened 3 years ago.  i will probably laugh about it in the retrospect. At least angie is here with me and if we meet at all, in scotland again, i am sure we can get a few good jokes out of this trip!