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thatcrazycajunHaving finally gotten our car's insurance squared away to the point that we can safely drive to South Africa (well, as safely as I ever drive, anyhow...and no smart-assed cracks from the peanut gallery of folks who've ridden with me behind the wheel, if you please), Songbird took a day of her shockingly copious accumulation of use-it-or-lose-it leave time so we could visit the US Embassy in Pretoria for medical reasons. We had planned on leaving Friday afternoon, but found we could not get medication our poor Maine coon Rosita needs for her hyperthyroidism locally, so we ended up leaving Saturday morning with a plan to drive back Monday afternoon.
Pretoria is a drive of four hours or more from Mbabane, Swaziland, and like a lot of other places in sub-Saharan Africa, much of the route is through middle-of-nowhere expanses of mountain forests, endless prairie that would not look the least bit out of place in the early half of Chris Reeve's first Superman movie and otherwise unlit rural areas. Happily, though, it's mostly national highways that are smooth and well-maintained. We got to Pretoria three-ish in the PM and checked into this lovely little guest house run by a local couple who were about our age or close, very helpful and friendly and cooked us a lovely breakfast both days we stayed. We then drove out again over the rather large multi-lane highways between Pretoria and Johannesburg (the two cities are less than an hour's drive apart) in search of a cinema, since our late arrival had cut short our shopping time severely. Turning off the slab at Sandton, we took a left when we should have taken a right and wound up in a somewhat seedy-looking commercial neighborhood where uniformed police were stopping people for some reason. We drove past them, not certain whether we should stop or not (and having heard about other ex-pats getting shaken down by both real and fake cops in these parts), only to find a marked police vehicle pacing us and two officers flagging us down. After some difficult communication, displaying of diplomatic passports and a failed attempt to reach the embassy by phone, we established that these were members of an anti-corruption squad who wanted to fine us for failure to stop. Once they saw that we were not disrespectful to them and were simply lost, they thankfully relented and did not charge us, and even escorted us back to the overpass to help us get going in the right direction. And after all that, we didn't even find a single movie both of us wanted to see at the mall. Moral of the story: we learned the lesson every black male in our home country learns early on from the reverse side - when you get stopped by a cop whose skin color doesn't match yours, BE VERY POLITE.
Sunday, we visited a smaller local mall closer to our guest house in the Brooklyn area of Pretoria (yes, it actually has neighborhoods called Brooklyn and Sunnyside; go figure), where Your Humble discovered a genuine old-fashioned men's barber shop and took the opportunity to lose about six weeks' growth of head and facial hair. (Mbabane has no barber shops that I have seen as yet, though it does have at least one salon local Embassy folk recommend.) Looking a tad less like the Wild Man of Borneo, I rejoined SB and we then found our way back to Jo'burg and saw the new Mike Newell film of Great Expectations, featuring Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter among others in an excellent adaptation of Charles Dickens' classic novel. (Did you know it's his most filmed work? Yep, even more than A Christmas Carol.) We then seized the opportunity to enjoy something else YH had been craving that's scarce as hens' teeth in our new country of residence: a genuine McDonald's hamburger dinner (the local fast-food chain's attempts at US-style burgers leave much to be desired, and Mickey D's has made no inroads in Swaziland as yet, although its major competitor KFC has).
Monday morning bright and early, we tootled off to the Embassy to see a doctor, then SB had to drop off a government laptop at her agency's local office for some software installation (and found an actual comic book shop to browse next door!), and while that was being done, we drove over to the US Consulate in Jo'burg, where a friend of SB's was holding for us a new artificial Christmas tree she had purchased for the holidays. (Conifers of the sort most Americans and Europeans are used to using for decoration at Yuletide are also pretty hard to come by here. Besides, it's way more environmentally friendly — leaves the real trees where they can do the most good.) By the time we had finally finished all our various errands, however, it was nigh on to 3:30 PM and far too late to drive back to Mbabane without having to do at least part of said drive in the dark. SB's boss suggested we stay another night and drive back in the morning, so we found a place in the Lynnwood area of Pretoria that cost us about a Benjamin a night for a room just this side of broom-closet size...and no elevators (that's "lifts" here) or bell service in a building four stories tall! After lugging our bags up two flights of stairs, we found a nearby mall that was even bigger than the others nearby with a largish food court and had a nice seafood dinner before heading back to the room to get an early night's sleep.
Getting up at oh-God-you-have-abso-freaking-lutely-GOT-to-be-shitting-me-dark-thirty, we enjoyed the hotel's admittedly decent full breakfast, then nipped back to the guest house where Yours Stupidly had left our coats hung in a closet the day before at checkout, picked them up and finally made like cow patties and hit the dusty trail back home. Regrettably, no pictures were taken despite my having brought a camera; and both places we stayed only allow guests to use their WiFi free for the first 15 minutes, and make you pay per minute after that (a sadly common practice on this continent; we've been spoiled by US hotels with free all-you-can-surf Net access). But at least we learned our way around for next time and got map books to help — and hopefully will have our GPS installed in the car before the next trip.
