The bus left Somerset West at 8:10 on Friday evening. I settled into my window seat and disappeared into an mp3 playlist, dozing every now and then. All went well until, somewhere near Swellendam, sometime around midnight, the bus pulled off the road.
We had no idea what was going on. The lights were turned on, the bus stopped and we sat idling for ages. After about half an hour of waiting, the bus pulled back around and then returned to where it had originally stopped. Another delay, another trip around the circle. After a third trip around, the stewardess finally informed us that the bus was overweight. The reason for the going around and around was that they had been attempting to redistribute the luggage to balance things out – the weighbridge measures the weight on each axle – but to no avail. The only solution was for some passengers to get off the bus.
They weren’t, it turned out, planning to leave people there. Someone had called someone who knew someone who was organising a mini-bus taxi to take some people through to the next stop, where passengers would get off, so we would no longer be overloaded. ‘n Boer maak ‘n plan.
The stewardess found 13 volunteers who were loaded into the taxi when it arrived. The bus returned to the weighbridge. Still too heavy. Two more people moved to the taxi. The bus moved back to the scales. We got half way and it looked like we were going to run into problems. We couldn’t unload anyone else because the taxi could not legally carry more than 15 people. This is not normally a problem in taxis but this was at the actual traffic department stop with traffic cops running the place so they would have complained. That said, they didn’t seem to notice when the stewardess asked the passengers from the front to move to the middle and crouch down so that we could get through the weighing and get out of there.
It worked and the bus was on the road again, much to everyone’s relief. As we headed off into the night, it occurred to me that all of this had taken place in a country where most people strongly belief that traffic cops do nothing, in the middle of a Friday night and in the midst of a massive labour dispute between public service workers and government.