Day 229: Durban to East London

Road-trip 2013! Andrew and I picked up our car early in the morning and headed down through the Transkei to East London where we planned to stay one night with yet another couchsurfer host to help break up our drive down to Cape Town.

We knew it would be a bit more expensive, but we were in desperate need of some freedom. Driving again (I haven’t had a car since… college?) was a little challenging. Not only has it been at least 5 years since I’ve driven a car, but shifting gears with my left hand and driving on the left side of the road, in pouring rain were not factors we considered.

Furthermore, one of the tires was low. Andrew pointed this out to the rental company right away. They assured us it was just because it had been sitting in the parking lot for awhile, and had it pumped up for us “to make us feel better.”

Driving through the Transkei was everything our South African friends warned us about. There were cows and goats wandering across the road whenever they wanted. I’m still a bit skeptical why there were absolutely no fences for these herds. If I had a herd of cattle, I would think fencing them in would eliminate accidental deaths of cows crossing the road on a highway where the majority of the people driving through are INSANE.

At one point, a woman wandered in the middle of the road- without looking and I had to swerve around her. It was raining. There was fog. Animals. People. Construction. It was a FEAT getting into East London that night. Andrew is not as experienced driving a standard (shift) car. I was nervous enough adapting to driving on the other side of the road, shifting with my left hand, in the rain, we both figured it was probably a safer bet for him to continue navigating and me continue driving.

Meanwhile, our tire kept losing air. Every time we stopped for gas, we had our tire pumped up.

We were late getting into East London. It was still pouring when we pulled up to our couchsurfer host’s house. Not house, more like mansion. We discovered we were actually staying in their bed and breakfast that was attached to their house. A beautiful room with a loft all to ourselves. We were drenched. I was exhausted. Our host, an older woman in her early sixties I’m guessing- but a youthful sixties- offered us some soup. I immediately accepted and we sat around her kitchen talking about our travels, warming up over homemade soup with fresh bread and butter.

Her and her husband had traveled up through Africa and ended up couchsurfing. They had a really positive experience doing so, and had since decided to attempt to give back to the community. I was so grateful. I am still so grateful. I can’t even imagine getting the same kind of reception if we had showed up to a generic hostel or hotel in town. Can you?

Day 213: Nampula to Vilanculos

Instead of having you suffer through another bus ride like we did, the above video is of Vilanculos- once we got there…

We rolled up to the bus by one in the morning, by the time we figured out our seats, I was once again in the middle of Andrew and a Mozambican woman, this time with an adorable two year old (I’m guessing) on her lap. He had big eyes and was incredibly intrigued by my presence next to him. Whenever I wasn’t looking, his little fingers would dance across my arm. As soon as I would look down to him, even with a big smile, he would withdraw his hand, but continue looking up at me with big eyes, wondering what I was going to do next. As I couldn’t exactly move, I didn’t do much, except sometimes tickle him, which didn’t seem to phase him.

After 14 hours, they got off the bus and I got excited to share our seat with one other person, instead of two. I should have known better. A young man made his way through with a backpack three times the size of the two year old who had just left. My heart sank. By hour 18 – and no, I’m not even exaggerating – I was beyond uncomfortable. Sitting in an upright seat, with zero legroom, and maybe two bathroom breaks the entire journey puts economy seating on American Airlines into perspective.

By hour 19 – we were dropped off. It was in the middle of nowhere. We had specifically asked, even had the lady at the hostel write in Portuguese, “Will we get dropped off IN Vilanculos?” for us. They told us, “Yes. Vilanculos.” But, no. This was not Vilanculos. Instead, it was a dirt four way intersection. No lights. No waiting taxis. No cars whatsoever. Twenty minutes away from Vilanculos.

“Bus at four!” One of the men said as he retrieved our bags for us. He pointed to the opposite side of the road and told us to wait for cars. It was roughly nine in the evening. Four in the morning was seven hours away.

We started making our way to the road we needed to go down, thinking we were on the right side of the road. Three cars turned off and headed towards where we wanted to go. Andrew ran after them, trying to flay them down in the dark. It didn’t work. We went to the opposite side of the road and waited some more. And then some drunk shadows seemed to appear out of nowhere and I got nervous. So nervous, I turned off our flashlight as to not draw attention to myself being a woman. So nervous, I held onto my Nalgene just in case I would need to use it to hit someone in the head with. I figured I could take at least one skinny drunk man down if I had to. I glanced down and saw Andrew had his keys in hand and had put the can of bug spray in his pocket. I smiled. Not a bad idea, I thought!

The drunk men stood across the road from us for awhile, tried chasing down a car, and then seemed to give up on the idea of getting to Vilanculos that night. They argued about which way to go, and then slunk back to where they came from.

Andrew and I made our way under a streetlight down the street, hoping that a car passing by would see that we weren’t from here and we weren’t drunk. This didn’t work. But, it did attract the attention of a kind young mother with a baby tied to her back. She came up to us and in Portugese, told us what time the bus was coming and motioned to her house along the road to sleep in until then. While I was overwhelmed by her kindness, Andrew wasn’t keen on sleeping on a dirt floor for seven hours after our latest nineteen hour bus adventure.

We asked if she had a phone and assured her that we would pay for the time we used. She obliged and we called the hostel and had a car come. An extraordinarily overpriced car came to pick us up and we were whisked away from the dark dirt intersection towards the beach. We grabbed some bottles of water, went directly to our bunk-beds, and crashed.

Day 170: Crater Lakes outside of Fort Portal

So really, there is nothing in Fort Portal to do. There’s not even a Fort. And it seems that not even Wikipedia can give me an explanation of why there is a ‘Fort’ in its name. There is, however, quite a bit to do outside of the city, or so we were told. We headed for a campsite with bandas (small thatched-roof huts) near the crater lakes for a couple of days.

Getting out there was the most interesting part of our day, really. We took boda bodas (motorcycle taxis) to the matatu (shared bus taxis) stop. And then, we waited. Luckily, this matatu was a car and we only needed to wait for two other passengers to show up, instead of waiting for up to fourteen to fill a van. An hour or so later, four of us were squeezed into the backseat and two were squeezed into the front passenger seat, and we were on our way. The older Ugandan man who I was scrunched up next to pointed out different things along the way. The school. The health clinic. Maybe a few other things I can’t remember right now… It was really sweet, except he was only inches away from my face as we were scrunched next to each other and spittle landed on my face (lips included) every time he pointed something new out. I had a brief respite when the other older man crammed in the back didn’t seem to care for the audio tour and they argued back and forth until I smiled and said that I really did appreciate hearing what was where.

Once at the campgrounds, we had a late lunch, put in our order for dinner (fried chicken that tasted like they had started cooking it then, even though it wasn’t served for three more hours) and then we hung out on our front porch of our ‘cabin in the woods’ on the edge of one of the crater lakes.

Colobus monkeys danced around the trees above our cabin all afternoon. Can you see it’s white bushy tail?

When we walked back down to our cabin in the woods after dinner (about 400 meters into the woods) I was so jumpy and scared thinking that some zombie redneck torture family was going to reach out and grab me that I refused to let go of Andrew’s hand. Then I got him so jumpy when we went to sleep that I might have had him momentarily convinced something was in our cabin that we had to investigate under all of our bags and the bed and then I made him turn off the outside light so any lurking stranger dangers couldn’t see that we were in the cabin for the night. And don’t even get me started on going to the bathroom- a steep climb in the opposite direction from the campsite. I peed off of the front porch instead of even thinking about attempting that night climb into the wilderness on my own. I made Andrew stand outside with me while I took care of business. He made me do the same. It was that scary.