Category Archives: Travel

Weekend in motion

Adventures, Airports, bus, Car, Eastern Cape,

The weekend started at 5am on a Thursday. It wasn’t a long-weekend, really, but Thursday was a public holiday, so one day off turned it into one. I woke up anxious. I’m always anxious before travel, worried I’m forget something, scared I won’t wake up on time, nervous bookings haven’t been made, even when I’ve sorted them out myself. None of it ever happens, but the anxiety wakes me early. By the time my alarm goes off, I’m wide awake.

6am. Dawn is breaking over Durban as we speed towards the city. It takes half an hour to reach the bus station. 40 minutes really. It’s the first time I’ve taken a bus from the Durban station, I realise. The first time I’ve been since I arrived by bus, just over a year ago, moving to KZN.

Check in, stow luggage, climb onto the bus. In a curious (and pleasant) twist, I find myself not squashed into an aisle seat next to an oversized mama with fried chicken or, worse, a someone with a baby, but right in front, looking out at a waking city from huge front windows.

We leave almost on time, just as the sun is rising. Through Durban, past landmarks and familiar places. Two of the craziest weeks of my life happened in this part of the world, one at the Expo Centre, one at the ICC. I’m thinking about those weeks as we pass the ICC, Wilson’s Warf, the restaurant where I first tasted sushi. I got a message that morning from an old friend from those crazy days. The memories make me smile.

From Durban, we head south, towards Port Shepstone. This stretch of road I know well from travelling down this way for work. I watch the familiar river-mouths, the clusters of huts, the little towns. The bus drives on and on, gobbling up the road. I’m sitting there with my headphones in, my feet up and my seat reclined. I feel happy. Happy about the coming weekend, sure, but mostly just happy in that moment. Sitting there on that bus, with my music, watching the world go by, I am happy.

Just north of Kokstad, we reach the snow. A heavy cold-front hit the country a few days before, causing snow in all 9 provinces, I read somewhere and bringing traffic between major cities to a standstill. Now, the sun is shining and it’s beautiful. The snowy hills go on for at least half an hour.

We travel south after a stop in Kokstad: Mthatha, Qunu, Dutywa, Butterworth. We stop and pick up passengers. At Butterworth, we get out and walk around. The wind is still snow-cold. Somewhere on the Kei cuttings, a police van passes us going in the other direction and flashes its lights, warning the bus driver about a traffic cop hiding around the corner catching anyone who might be speeding. On and on.

It is dark when we reach East London. The windows of the bus keep misting up. It is cold outside. I rush into the ticket office to pick up another ticket for Saturday but they warn me that those buses are running late. I’ll have to make another plan.

That evening, I have supper with my family in East London and then head home to Stutt for the night. I haven’t been home for ages. It’s great to be able to spend a night at home. Home with the family and a fire and the cats.

The next morning, back to East London. Saturday is out, so I’m travelling on Friday afternoon. We pick up the ticket at a Checkers and head back to the bus stop. Rushed goodbyes and I climb aboard another bus. This time it is a Translux bus. It looks newer than the Greyhound I took the previous day. The bus is almost empty. The stewardess tells me to sit where-ever I like. I find a window seat and settle down. Their sound system is, mercifully, broken. The trip will be peaceful.

Along the beachfront, the sea a perfect blue that day, then out of the city and away. We take the same road as the day before but in the opposite direction, towards King William’s Town. This time, my mind is drifting. I’m miles away as I stare out of the bus window at the country-side that is so familiar.

In King William’s town, the bus fills up, but I still have an empty seat beside me. I put on my music when a baby begins to cry. Children so often disturb the beautiful peace of travel.

I barely see the countryside passing as we head on towards Grahamstown. I know this road so well. I drift in and out, sometimes noticing where we are, sometimes not. The landmarks pass, the familiar curves and twists of the road. How many times have I travelled here? How many trips to and from varsity? How many since?

In Grahamstown, the first thing I notice is that Birch’s is still open. It’s a Friday afternoon. How often I have arrived at or left from this stop. Never while I was at University here. For some reason, I never took the bus then. Since graduating, nearly ten years ago, I have been back so many, many times and each time this is where I arrive, where I leave.

I gather my bags and set off up the familiar hill, familiar streets, familiar houses. It’s a long walk, but a peaceful one. I turn down a quiet street and pass a man walking his dogs. He looks like a professor.

I’m staying at a backpackers. I check in and settle down. The website said they served food. It turns out the website was wrong. It doesn’t matter. The deck outside looks out towards Makana’s Kop. It’s starting to turn towards dusk. I watch the fading Grahamstown sunset. This town used to be home. I wonder if it is anymore. I meet a Canadian who is here to figure out what he wants to study. He talks about his family. They’re coming over soon, to see this strange country that has bewitched their son. We talk of history and ideas and the contrasts between countries and of humour.

I plan to go to bed early but instead find myself reading and catching up on the ideas of my own academic world. The conversation with the Canadian has left me wanting to engage, to think. The others who are sharing the dorm eventually head out for the night and I put away the computer and head to sleep.

Saturday is an early start. I am the only person awake in the place except for a lady lazily cleaning the kitchen. She opens the door for me. I settle down on the veranda to wait for my lift. I’m travelling with two people I don’t know. I want to be ready when they arrive.

Bags packed we head off towards Nieu Bethesda. I’ve never been there before but I assume the driver knows the way. Strangely, it doesn’t bother me when he intimates that he’s not 100% sure. Someone these roads, this part of the country, feels familiar.

We take the Cradock road, driving along through miles and miles of countryside. My countryside. When I travelled to Kenya a few months ago and found myself nostalgically feeling like I’d come home, this was the home I was thinking of. At Cradock, take the road towards Graaff-Reinet, past the Mountain Zebra Park.

I’m jerked back from staring at the passing landscape by a sign for Colesburg. We’re on the wrong road. We turn back and find out way again. How did I know? Colesburg was the wrong way. I get strange looks as we head off again.

At the T-junction with the Graff-Reinet road, we see the first sign for Nieu Bethesda. A few km onto the final stretch and the road turns to gravel. I realise I’m not driving and it’s not fair to say, but gravel roads through this countryside in this part of the world feel peaceful. Perhaps it is because the gravel forces a slower pace. You notice more. We pass a beautiful antelope in the camp next to the road. There is snow on the mountain peaks.

Nieu Bethesda is a tiny, tiny town in a ring of beautiful mountains. It is well known for its more eccentric inhabitants, most notably Helen Martins who lost the plot after her father died and turned her ordinary, small-town home into a crazy place full of sculptures and stained glass and paintings, known as The Owl House.

We meet the groom at the pizza place. A place as small as this could only have a pizza restaurant because of the tourists. The pizza is good. We go back to the house where they’re staying, right near the micro-brewery where they will get married.

The rest of the day passes in a blur of laughter and getting dressed and prettiness. Everyone helps to get the place ready. The moment arrives. It is relaxed and beautiful and intimate. There is beer. There is crazy, intelligent, interesting conversation. There is cake.

It’s a lovely evening, followed by a gorgeous, crisp morning in Nieu Bethesda. The snow-topped mountains sit in the bright sun. The trees look wintery and beautiful. The houses are the settler houses I love, all perfectly maintained and whitewashed. We have breakfast at a place called The Karoo Lamb. A few of us take the opportunity to visit the Owl House. Nieu Bethesda is not what I expected but it is beautiful. Definitely worth a visit.

By 11am, we’re back on the road. On and on, past the Mountain Zebra Park, past Cradock, past Bedford. We are driving into heavy, dark clouds. It seems appropriate. I feel such heartache at leaving the Eastern Cape.

In Grahamstown, I stop at one of my favourite restaurants for a quick late lunch before heading to the shuttle and out of town. On and on. The window of the shuttle bus is broken. Icy-cold air howls through the vehicle.

It is a relief to get to PE. I take the usual quick lap around the PE airports, remembering all the times I’ve been here and, more often than seems fair, been stuck here. Through security and, unsurprisingly, the flight is delayed. Luckily, the delay is short and soon we are making our way towards the plane.

We land in Durban after 9pm on a Sunday night. The driver of yet another shuttle is there to pick me up. Just another hour and I’m home. I’m tired but happy. I get caught up watching the Olympics closing ceremony.

Walking home from work the next day, I realise what this feeling is: I feel peaceful. I have no doubt, in fact I am certain, that it will not last, but just for a while, just for now, for a change, I do not feel restless.

The last journey: Epulu to Bunia

Adventures, bus, drc, Travelling in Africa, ,

It’s been more than six months since we returned from that crazy, whirlwind three week trip to Uganda and the Eastern DRC. The whole trip lasted less than 21 days but it’s taken all this time to process, to remember, to understand what was crammed into that short space. I could tell more tales of more journeys – car, ferry, bus, plane – but this is the last story of the trip. The last piece of remembering pinned to the page.

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We woke early that morning, two days after Christmas, packed and went to wait by the road. Unlike our outbound trip, we were unsure what kind of transport we’d get. After all, hopping a bus where the route started in Bunia was likely to be far easier than cramming a spot on an overcrowded skorokoro already full from its starting point in Kisengani.

So we waited. The guards, who knew us of old by now, brought us blue plastic chairs to sit on. Five travellers, with their bags, by the side of the road. We took bets on how long it would take us to get a ride. We took bets on what kind of vehicle we’d end up catching. We contemplated playing cards.

Two vehicles arrived. One was an NGO landcruiser. The other was a Nile Coaches bus. After the misery of the trip here, we were reluctant even to consider another eight hours on one of those busses. Extremely reluctant. This one, however, turned out to be a semi-out-of-service bus, which, crucially, meant that it was empty. No millions of people, no masses of luggage, no white sacks, no Chinese flip-flops. An empty bus would be far better able to navigate the potholes. And it could move faster. We were sold. We climbed on board. Most people headed for the front. I found myself a seat further back. This trip I wanted quiet, to be by myself, to watch the world go by.

The world was beautiful. We passed homesteads and households. People sitting outside. Children playing. Forests. Streams. At Mambasa, we stopped for breakfast of stale chapatti and cake. Chapati – the one food I’d rather eat in Uganda.

Back on the road. Run-down vehicles-that-never-die passed us. We passed pedestrians – how far were they walking? Ituri River Bridge (Pont Ituri 22m), donated by the British government and assembled by MONUC Nepalese troops. More homesteads, more huts, more contrasts with the Southern African rural areas.

The bus took us as far as Komanda, where we’d find other transport. We sat on the side of the road, leaning against a fence. Komanda, 2pm. Dusty. Hot. Waiting for transport of any kind. The two people in our group who speak French and Swahili had wandered off. A storm was building up in the distance. We waited. Patiently. Peacefully. We weren’t rushing to be anywhere, anymore. There was an ease to the afternoon. Travelling in Africa teaches you patience. Richard dozed in the reccie hat he bought in Bunia, with his army bag, by the dusty road.

A truck passed by but they said they weren’t going to Bunia. A man offered his car for $90. We countered with $60 but he refused. Two boys came by selling hard-boiled eggs. We bought one. Then another. And another. Boiled eggs with salt on the roadside in Komanda. That’s a good memory. Someone went off and bought more stale chapati and some water. We eat more eggs.

After a time, a mini-bus taxi came past. We wandered over to find out if they were going back to Bunia tomorrow, mostly at peace now with spending the night in Komanda. It turned out they were travelling back that day. A price is negotiated, the taxi headed to town to collect other passengers while we settle back into the shade of our tin-sheeting fence, to wait.

The taxi ride was hair-raising. The driver narrowly avoided a head-on collision more than once. To be fair, this was generally the result of a car in our lane refusing to move till the last minute but still a little terrifying. The poultry were in grave danger of death-by-taxi, too. Chickens who sauntered across the road in front of oncoming traffic. Ducks who refuse to move so the driver literally had to go around. Pigeons who waddled away at the last minute, far too lazy to fly.

In between worrying about cars and poultry, we watched the gorgeous stormlight. Dark clouds across grassland with stretched-out rays creating spotlights of contrast. A relief, as always, to get back to grassland. The forests had been beautiful but the grasslands of the world will always be my heart and my home.

Back in Bunia, the taxi stopped outside MONUSCO house. What a different arrival to the first time, just a week before. We wandered down to Mama Tamara’s, where the boda-bodas had first dropped us, and booked rooms at $10 per night. Way more pleasant than the other place, even if it turned out, maybe, possibly, to be something of a brothel. The doors had locks. The rooms were clean. It was a good place to stay.

A good place to end the journey. The eastern DRC is an amazing place. Just getting there, just being there, had taken months of planning and research, plucking up courage and calming down anxious relatives and friends. I doubt it would have happened if it hadn’t been for Richard. I owe him a debt of gratitude. Him and the others who travelled with us. The people who shared the frustration of getting stuck in that horrible hotel in Bunia and the joy of discovering Epulu and Kisenyi, and the magic of movement and travel and going, just going, not to discover something new and world-changing but just to see.

In 2008, I travelled into Africa for the first time, with an amazing group of people. Since then I have been to two other continents and seven more African countries. I have learnt that the end of one journey is invariably the beginning of another and that journeys start and end far beyond the actual days of travel; the anticipation, the remembering are part of it too.

That last morning in Bunia, I sit on a cement ledge and watch a little microcosm of this foreign-familiar world. Men and boys fetch water in yellow gerry-cans. A woman in a black dress and gold hairnet washes shoes in a bucket. Crows come to rest in the tree next door. A white rooster wanders around, contemplating crowing. A boy teaches his sister French counting words outside a wooden shed. Someone is sweeping the yard. It starts to rain. The camera pulls back and the shot fades out. It’s time for the planning, the anticipation of the next adventure to begin.

Public transport, DRC style – Bunia to Epulu

Adventures, bus, drc, Travelling in Africa

One of the best things about living in South Korea was the public transport system. Anywhere you wanted to go, you could get there. Public transport is wide-spread, reliable, efficient and reasonably priced. Small villages have train stations and bus stations serviced once or twice a day. Busses run everywhere. Larger cities have subways and high-speed trains. Of course, for anyone travelling a little further afield, there are ferries and planes. Incheon airport (near Seoul) is a major international transport hub.

But for all the high-speed trains and fancy airports – which are great, don’t get me wrong – it is the fact that day-to-day travel is so easy that makes the real difference to quality of life. It’s something I miss in Africa. What public transport does exist here tends to take the form of mini-bus taxis (also called matatus) or, for those with a taste for adventure, boda-bodas. Buses are few and far between and tend to be both expensive and reserved for longer trips. On a visit to Mozambique a few years back, we took a bus from Vilanculos to Maputo. Nine hours of broken seats and overcrowding in what looked like it might once have been a Greyhound bus from South Africa. We decided then that Mozambique must be where buses went to die once they were no longer considered roadworthy in SA.

If that is true, then the eastern DRC is where buses go when Mozambique no longer allows them on the road. At least that is what we thought, although one of our group swears that the awful bus we took had a manufacturing date of 2005.

We were up early the morning we left Bunia. We had bought tickets the day before but you can never be entirely sure in the Congo, particularly on Christmas Eve when an awful lot of people are desperate to get home to their families on what limited public transport is available. By 6am, we were all up and ready to leave Hotel A Cote for the last time ever. We left our keys with the smiley man who had cleaned up and brought us buckets of water.

Off to the bus station. It was an overcast, hazy day. There were some people on the streets but the world wasn’t properly awake yet. We walked past a dog determinedly still asleep on a pile of sawdust. The sight of the bus was a little daunting. We’d seen it yesterday, but there was always the vain hope that it might somehow have improved overnight. Next to our bus were several other buses, perhaps left there to make ours look good because at least it had wheels and an engine.

When we arrived, people were loading large white sacks onto the bus. One of our group, Jon, tried to climb on board but was hastily chased away. No-one showed any interest in loading our luggage. 6:30am – the departure time – came and went. Some of the others went off to search for a restroom. We found a lady selling sweet, hot tea. After a while, someone came around selling cooldrinks. We finally tried strawberry-flavoured Fanta; it tasted like Red Sparletta.

All this time, the bus people continued to load white sacks onto the bus. They also loaded fuel. Refuelling here seems largely to consist of siphoning petrol or diesel from large, slightly dented metal barrels into whatever vehicle needs it at the time. It is entertaining to watch.

Clouds began to gather, promising to rain on all the people and all their luggage, which still hadn’t made it onto the bus. Eventually a sudden panic of people suggested we may be moving. We clambered and pushed and rushed our way onto the bus, scrambling over the huge white sacks filling the aisle. White sacks full of plastic Chinese flip-flops. Or perhaps not.

The seats were uncomfortable and crowded and there was nowhere to put our luggage, so we had no choice but to keep it with us – not the most comfortable way to travel. Overhead luggage compartments were full of cargo and the aisles filled with the white sacks.

Eventually, around 8:45am, we left. The bus was most definitely overloaded and swayed from side to side but once we got out of town, at least it felt like we were moving. The trip was hot and smelly and crowded. The bus lurched and bounced along ill-kept dusty roads. At some point (was it at Komanda?) we stopped and picked up more passengers, passengers who had been stranded when their own bus broke down. The climbed into the bus and took up their seats on top of the huge white sacks. In Mambasa, we ate stale chapattis, the first food we’d seen all day. It seemed impossible to fit any more people on the bus, but that, of course, didn’t stop anyone from trying.

By the time we reached the last leg of the bus trip, everyone was fairly miserable. By then, however, we had begun to pass through forests. The bus dipped and wobbled across swift streams passing across the road. The streams and the dappled forest light were beautiful but the mud puddles threatened to leave us stuck and the bus crawled along, still overcrowded, still hot and still miserable. We kept looking, kept searching for Epulu town and Epulu river, where we could finally get off.

After what felt like an age, we saw the river. The bus rumbled across one river bridge and then another and finally stopped at a guarded boom gate. We climbed out and passed our bags out of the window and joyously watched the horrible Nile Coaches bus disappear. It had taken us approximately eight hours to travel something like 200km in perhaps the worst looking bus any of us had ever seen.

Now, the horrible bus was gone and we stood at the gate of the Okapi Wildlife Reserve, that magical, wonderful, peaceful corner of the magnificent Congolese rainforests where we would spend several incredible days.