Sunday, 1 June 1986: Successfully Navigating the Railway Bureaucracy

3:30PM, Emmarentia Dam Park, near Johannesburg

This is the first writing I’ve done in about three days.  I got the fucking flu – the second time in four weeks.  A first rate pain in the bum, it is.  I never get sick in Colorado.  Obviously I have no resistance to the local bugs.  What makes it worse is that I have been getting everything ready for a big trip north through Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia.   I have reservations on a 9:00PM train tonight. 

I actually thought of postponing the trip a couple of days, but don’t know how easy it would be to change the reservations.  Yesterday was a national holiday in South Africa and today is Sunday so reservation offices wouldn’t be open.  As much trouble as I had making the reservations, I’d rather avoid further hassles, cancellation fees, and who-knows-what other shit. 

I got caught up in one of those lovely African Catch-22s when I tried to make my reservations a couple days ago.  I told the clerk at the Jo’burg railroad station that I wanted a ticket to Bulawayo, Zimbabwe with a stopover in Gaborone, Botswana.  That was no problem.  But, I also wanted an open return ticket from Bulawayo to Jo’burg because, in order to get into Zimbabwe, you have to have to show the border agent that you have a ticket out.  The clerk made the reservations and then sent me to another window to actually buy the tickets.  The clerk at the second window said I’d need an actual return date (which I could change) in order for him to sell me the return ticket.  So, it was back to the first window.  Now, I learned that he would have to telex the railroad station in Bulawayo to get me the return reservation.  It could take up to a week for him to get a reply.  After I explained my dilemma, he took pity on me, I suppose, and offered to try to phone the Bulawayo station.  Odds were that the circuits would be busy, as they usually are with the 19^th Century South African phone system.  By some miracle, he got through and got me the reservation for a return in late July.  How much trouble it will be to later change the reservation, only some witch doctor would know for sure.  Thus, with my reservations now in hand, I went back to the second window to purchase my tickets.  All the paperwork he had to do to issue me tickets for three different countries and two different railways must have taken a good ten minutes.  Then there was the matter of my 40% discount as a foreign visitor.  He said that only applied to the South African portion of the journey which was no surprise.  However, I wouldn’t qualify for the discount because the trip had to be at least 350kms and it is only 304kms from Jo’burg to Mafeking where I would be switching to a Zimbabwe Railways train.  Then he started copying down the information from my passport, and I realized that he was giving me the discount anyway.  Oh, but then if I was returning in July, I wouldn’t qualify for the discount because it was only good for the first three months you are in the country.  He had spotted the original April 5 entry.  No, I pointed out, I had entered the country on 15 May.  I showed him the entry stamp I had received when I re-entered South Africa from my brief trip to Lesotho two weeks ago.  That was good enough for him, but the queue behind me was growing restless and I felt bad for taking up so much time.  He said the total came to R118.65 (about US$54), a paltry sum for 1400 miles of 2^nd class travel.    

 

My train trip from Johannesburg to Zimbabwe included an overnight train to Mafikeng, South Africa (Boputhatswana), an afternoon/evening train to Gaborone, Botswana, and an overnight train to Bulawayo, Zimbabwe a few days later.  Base map: Railway Map of South Africa and Neighbouring Territories, South African Railways, 1985.

     

One other little annoyance has developed in the meantime.  Last week, I contacted the presidents of Rotary Clubs in Gaborone and Bulawayo regarding accommodations.  Both seemed agreeable, but when I phoned the president in

Gaborone back on Friday night, he said no one in the club would be able to put me up.  He offered to pick me up at the railroad station and drive me over to a local campground.  The hell with that.  I’d skip Gaborone but it’s the capital of Botswana and was hit by South African Army raids on suspected ANC targets last week.  I want to gauge the mood there.  Fortunately, it looks like I will be getting another red carpet treatment form Rotarians in Bulawayo.  After that, it’s on to Harare, Lusaka, and Victoria Falls depending on how things go.  

After nearly two months in South Africa, I really can’t offer any dramatic conclusions about the future of the country.  My mood about the situation changes almost from day to day, depending on my most recent conversations and experiences as well as the newspaper accounts I read.  Actually, anyone who thinks they understand this mess is either a genius or full of shit.  I’d suspect the latter.  I do find that one gets numbed to the realities of South Africa after you’ve been hanging out in quiet, peaceful white neighborhoods long enough.  The SABC radio and TV news is a joke.  Oh, they report on violence now and then, but it seems like it’s happening in another country.  

Emmarentia Dam Park near Johannesburg.  Source:  “Life Is a Walk in the Dog Park” by 2summers  http://2summers.net/2011/11/15/life-is-a-walk-in-the-dog-park/

 

You sit in a park like this one on a Sunday afternoon watching white families walk their dogs and kick a football (soccer ball) around, and you could just as easily be in a suburban park in the Denver metro area.  The fear and anger are covered by a façade of denial.  Yet, start talking to people and tell them you are an American writer, and the façade crumbles in seconds.  Most want to tell you what’s wrong with foreign news coverage of South Africa, how “Your American Negroes are different from our blacks,” or “Why is it okay for America to bomb Libya but not okay for South Africa to go after the ANC in neighboring countries?”  Not that they don’t make some good points.  They certainly understand their country better than we do.  At the same time, they are almost too close to the situation to be able to see through some of the hypocrisy and other bullshit spewed out by their government.  Or, they are so anti-government that they could even find fault with the way President P.W. Botha takes a shit. 

I have a new girlfriend here in Johannesburg.  Mavis and Bill Urmson, with whom I stayed when I first got to South Africa, introduced me to her before I left on my trip to Bloemfontein and Kimberley three weeks ago.  Cathy is 35, divorced with no kids, intelligent, nice-looking, and sort of a free spirit like me.  We’ve gotten together a couple times since I got back to Jo’burg.  I get the feeling that it won't last very long but I’ll enjoy her company while it does.