For my post-Lesotho travels on the blog,
I’m gonna be pretty specific about places and prices and things just in case
you’re trying to do some traveling in Southern Africa and somehow stumbled upon
my blog to help you with your plans. In this case, please enjoy and feel free
to comment or email me with any questions
I
specify this post as Durban round 2 because I did go to Durban once before
about a year ago, but that post has been removed because of...reasons. So here’s
a little, much less exciting, snippet about my second go at Durban.
After
arriving at Tekweni hostel (R190/night for a dorm) on Halloween day, I just
kind of lazed around and read and wrote. I came to Durban as my first stop
because it would be the place I would pick up a rental car that I would use to
hop down the coast toward Cape Town with. My plan was to spend about a month
doing this in South Africa. So Durban consisted mostly of me getting the car,
but other than that I didn’t do much in the city besides eat Indian food, try
so hard to swim at the beach but being thwarted every time by rain, and
generally wandering around town.
Moses Mabhida Stadium
Cloudy skies, but the fishermen are still out
Oh,
my other plan in South Africa was to, once done with Cape Town, stop off in
Pretoria to get a visa to visit my dear friend Milea in Liberia. Southern
Africa is great for free or cheap visas that you can, with little exception
(Mozambique), get upon arrival. It’s all very low stress, except when you get
stuck at the border of Malawi with no US Dollars after being super fried from
being on a train for like 18 hours (See the Malawi "Panic! at the border" post
from July if you missed out on that fun story). So the point is, almost every
other country outside of Southern Africa has expensive visas that you have to
apply for ahead of time, Liberia being no exception. So eventually I’d have to
get into contact with the Liberian embassy in Pretoria. So I promptly bought
some airtime for my South African sim card and called the number I found
online. No answer. I called again so many times at different times of the day
and different days of the week with the same non-response. It also didn’t help
that my emails to their listed address kept bouncing back to me undelivered. I
decided that I would just show up in person in Pretoria in a few weeks and see
what I could make happen.
Perhaps
the most interesting part of my Durban story is getting the rental car. I
reserved it through a company called Around About Cars, which farmed me out to
another company called Tempest. I walked to their location downtown, having to
ask a bunch of people where the actual place was, because it wasn’t super easy
to find. I had reserved the cheapest car they had, for about R200/day. Being a
cheap car, it was a teeny tiny Chevy Spark. Also being a cheap car, it was a
manual, not an automatic. Mind you, I didn’t drive a manual at home, and the
only few times I had practiced with a manual were when a bunch of us rented a
car and went through Namibia a year and a half ago. My friend Lea had
shown me the basics, and the most I’d done was go maybe a few hundred meters on
a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, stalling all the way. In preparation for renting
this car, I had called both Lea and my mom for some last-minute refreshers, and
I used the wifi at the hostel to find some Youtube videos to give me some tips
as well.
I
decided to rent a car for several reasons: I really wanted to learn to drive a
manual car, it would give me much more freedom to go when and where I wanted,
and the other options were not ideal. Public taxis were, well, the
same taxis I had been dealing with for the past two years, which leave whenever
they feel like it and only limit you to certain routes. There are also big busses like Greyhound and Intercape, but similarly, they run on set schedules and don't go everywhere. The other popular
option among backpackers is the Baz Bus, which is like a hop-on-hop-off type of
thing that goes all over South Africa and drops you right at your hostel, but you have to book it several days
ahead of time, and it is pretty expensive considering what it is, and it would
have cost me almost as much as the rental car.
The
day came. I had been pushing imaginary pedals and shifting imaginary shifters
in my mind all morning. So here I am at the rental place, and as the rental car
guy and I are going around the car checking out the scratches and stuff, I mentioned that it had been a while since I drove a manual. This was an understatement
to say the least, as I had never actually driven a manual other than for a few
middle-of-nowhere stretches. He said that my license was for a manual car, so
it would be fine. I found out at this point that in other countries, your
driver’s license specifies if you’re certified to drive a manual or just an
automatic. The US doesn’t do this, so I guess no indication of “automatic only”
on my license gave him the impression that I had passed my test with a manual.
After I immediately stalled out a few times trying to get the thing out of the
driveway, the rental car guy offered to give me a mini lesson around the block,
assuring me all the way that my (non-existent) muscle memory would soon come
back to me. Then he put the car in a little strip of the parking lot so I could
just practice going forward and backward a bunch of times. After I decided that
I could sufficiently start the thing without stalling it, and after many odd
stares from the lady cleaning the parking lot, I jerkily and haltingly
unleashed myself to the open road. First, to do some more practice, I got
myself to a pretty calm road with lots of roundabouts that parallels the beach.
I took a break to photograph this cool skate park I found covered in graffiti,
then continued on to my hostel.
Let
me take you aside here, oh reader, to tell you about the wonders of an app
called Maps Me, which lets you download maps ahead of time and use them offline
so you don’t suck up all your data. This is the app that routed me to my
hostel, and all the way to Cape Town with many stops in between.
It
was a while before I got to my hostel again because I was having trouble
starting up hills. Durban is quite a hilly city, and starting up a hill without
stalling was proving to be very difficult. At one point, these people eating at
the patio of a restaurant nearby looked on with much concern as I stalled out at least
a dozen times trying to turn a corner going uphill, and it was only after I
assured them that “I’m still learning; don’t worry,” that I realized I was
trying to start in second gear, then corrected my mistake and managed to actually continue driving. Ooff. Then I found a residential hill nearby
and did a million hand brake hill starts in little increments, and then when I
got to the top I drove down the hill and looped around to the bottom to do it
again and again and again. Content with my progress, I got my bags from the hostel and got kind of lost trying to find the highway. I was sweating at
intersections (exactly as Lea told me I would) with the anxiety of thinking
about starting without stalling and worrying about making tons of cars behind me start honking
at me like I was some moron on the road.
I
finally found the highway and set myself free, taking so much pleasure in the
freedom and in the speed. It was at that moment that it started to hit me that
I had left my Lesotho life behind, as I was driving away literally as fast as I
could (safely) go. My next stop was an hour or so southwest, past Port
Shepstone to a beautiful place called Oribi Gorge.
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