So we cruised into the mixed mashed Zimbabwean city of Bulawayo for a layover before heading back down to Johannesburg. Bulawayo is crazy little town filled with gorgeous rundown buildings, brand new Hummer H2s and untouched cars from the 1970s. We walked over to the bus station only to find out that the nice bus we are going to take was full. There turns out to be 3 other lesser known, lesser trusted services available and so we decide to take our chances. Each bus service tells us they are leaving at 2pm and that they will get us into Jo’burg at around 8am the next morning. After scoping out some busses, we choose to travel with the gang of 10 men begging us to hop on their bus. We still had a solid hour before leaving so I decided to venture out and grab some snacks and knick-knacks. This was when I run into very persistent drunk man (let me remind you it’s about 1pm). He doesn’t want any money but has decided that we have to be best friends. He wanted me meet his mother on the spot and when I politely decline he disappears after chatting me up for around 10 blocks. I think he’s gone until I come out of a grocery store where he is waiting for me. This time he is holding this huge strand of sugar cane and offers it to me as a gift. I mean I’ve eaten sugar cane before but wasn’t really in the mood to gnaw on the 4 foot piece offered to me by a random drunk man. He wouldn’t take no for an answer this time. I end of taking the sugar cane and sharing about a foot and half with this man. (The next morning when I woke up with my mouth ridiculously sore due to the fact that my previous sugar cane experiences involved using a pocket knife to peel off the hard outer casing while me and the drunk guy used only our teeth to reach the soft sugary insides. Lesson learned)
So I get back to the bus 10 minutes before we are supposed to leave. We continue to sit on the bus for an hour not moving. Usually busses in Africa are significantly delayed but reaching the 1 hour point is a tad long, so I jump out to speak to the “crew”. The driver tells me that he has called “mission control” and is waiting to get the affirmative for our departure. I’m a tad scared at this point because I’m not sure if were heading to the moon or South Africa. We wait another 30 minutes and then the crew piles on the bus as I think we are leaving. We end up driving around the block and park about half a block from where we previously were. I kindly asked what the deal was and was informed that the shack to the right of the bus was in fact “mission control”. We end up sitting there for another hour until we finally left Bulawayo for real. To be fair, one of the members of the crew apologized telling us that this was their first trip in 6 months. Goodie.
We are about 2 hours into the drive when I started to chat up one of the crew members. I noticed on the map that we will travel relatively close to a game park and asked if we were going to see some animals. (We previously had seen more animals on bus rides than game drives, so it was a fair question to ask.) This was his response, “it will be too dark by the time we hit that part but I got a dvd with animals on it” I’m quietly hoping that he has a couple of episodes of the Croc Hunter. I could really go for some Steve Irwin. So he fiddles with his dvd and the dvd player and his animal dvd just isn’t going to work. He comes back and says, “don’t worry, I have the next best thing.”
This proceeded into the best 8+ hours of TV I have ever seen. We ended up watching the entire mini-series (well the term mini-series does not do it justice, I’ll call it a mega-series) of Shaka Zulu Warrior. Shaka is apparently the great Zulu warrior who united many of the Zulu tribes. Please don’t walk but run to pick this amazing series up. I’m not sure who played the main character Shaka but he did a dang good job of not acting and keeping the same pissed off face the entire 8 hours. The story is a mixture of many Shakespeare and The Odyssey rolled into one. The epic battle scenes would most certainly rival Braveheart. I had trouble following the entire story but I did learn that Shaka is awesome.
I spent about an hour mourning the finish of such a great show when we pulled up to the Zimbabwe- South Africa border. It took about an hour to get through the queue of busses when it was finally our turn to go get our passports stamped out. We got out of the bus to see the efficient machine known as Zimbabwe had created another km long person queue to follow the km long bus queue. I’m not going to lie, sometimes things go beyond the point of maddening to the too ridiculous stage where all you can do is laugh. The ridiculously long line of people went relatively quick. Did I tell you this was about 1am?
We cross the border and kiss the ground as we are pleased to jump back into a developed country that appears to have a modicum of respect for time.
We were wrong. We had to wait another hour to get through the South Africa border. We arrived to the window for your visa right as they were having a shift change which brought more comedy. My visa stamper decided that she had to play not 1 but 3 games of free cell before she could look at and stamp any visas (she lost 2/3 games). John’s visa stamper decided that she had to spend 5 minutes dusting her keyboard. Were finally free, hooray, or so we thought.
Before hopping back on the bus the SA police decide that they have to do a “random” tighter personal check. They went down the row people from the bus and magically pick me, my 3 friends and 3 random Zimbabweans. As they were leading to who knows where I was debating what lines I was going to use while they checked us. I’ve been searched quite a few times going to concerts and sporting events and was debating on which joke to crack, “are you free Wednesday night?” “does your wife know about us?” You know the tongue and cheek stuff. As we enter the security check point aka the men’s bathroom, I realize were in trouble. The police officer quickly searches and dismisses the 3 Zimbabweans and then it’s just us. 4 white foreigners in a men’s bathroom with a cop holding an AK-47 at 2am on the South African side of the border. Iki bazo, it’s a problem, As he started to search my friends, I was thinking shit, this guy is going to want a bribe and I don’t got that much money. So the guy goes down the line and turns out that he just wanted to be very very generous with pat down and let us on our way. I would usually protest to such a physical assault but you don’t have many options when they got an AK-47 and its 2am.
We jumped back on the bus falling asleep to a blaring Lucky Dube dvd and ended up arriving in sketch Jo’Burg at 5am where everything was still closed. We had to stand in the cold until 6am when this gross fast food chain called Wimpy opened up and let us warm-up, eat some greasy food and reminisce on a long strange trip.
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