After
a butt-crunching 20 something hour ride on the Intercape bus, I had arrived in
Pretoria. Let me tell you about Intercape, loyal readers. The bus was pretty
nice, with plushy seats and air conditioning. They also had some TVs spread
through the bus that played movies interspersed between preachy messages.
Intercape is a Christian company, and some of their movies have non-in-your-face Christian
overtones, but it was pretty annoying in between the movies when this blonde
preacher lady would come on and explain some bible section or whatever the heck
she was blabbering on about. I mean, it wasn’t offensive, just weird. The other
weird thing was that whenever we’d stop at a gas station or something, their
programming would start over in the middle of the first movie they played, so I
saw the last half of “Robo Dog” at least three times. But no one complained or
even mentioned it to the driver, weirdly. It was super loud, too, and no one
seemed to care. That seems to be a common theme here. Some inconvenient thing
is happening- we have to wait in line at the bank for four hours, there are no
tomatoes today at the grocery store, I’m suffocating in the back of a taxi- and
you just deal with it without complaining because that’s just how life is
sometimes.
Anyway,
I arrived at the Pretoria bus station and went to the PRASA train station to
get a ticket to the next station over to go to my hostel. Little did I know
that there were two train stations right next to each other: the PRASA metrorail
station, and the Gautrain station. I actually wanted the Gautrain station, but
I didn’t know that it was right there, so I figured I could just take
metrorail. Nope. I bought a ticket, and after the train I wanted pulled away just as I arrived, I
waited an hour for the next one. I got on and it was going the opposite
direction I wanted to go, according to my little blue dot on my maps.me app. I
got off at the next station, waited about half an hour more to go the opposite
direction back to where I started at Pretoria station, then got off and asked how to get to the
station I wanted to be going to. Turns out the train didn’t currently go in
that direction, so I’d have to go back on the original train I thought I had
mistakenly gotten on earlier, go some roundabout way around some closed stations,
then take a shuttle. Nope, nope, nope, I thought. So, frustrated and exhausted,
I abandoned my R7.50 ticket and decided that, though I was an expert at
waiting, I just wanted to move. Like a zombie, I blankly handed my unused
ticket back to the turnstyle attendant and left, not looking back to see what was
probably a very confused look on her face. I mapped the route to the hostel,
and it would take about an hour and a half to walk there. Yep, that was fine.
As long as I don’t have to wait for any more trains.
Having
had sat around for more than 24 hours at that point, it was good to move. An
hour and a half later, exhausted and sweaty, I finally arrived at the hostel,
Pumba’s Backpackers (R100 for camping, R180 for dorms, discounts for
volunteers) and set up my tent. I ran into some South Africa PCVs, some of whom
I had met at Sani Pass in Lesotho, who were staying there while they had some
PC business in Pretoria. Then, I attempted to scout out the Liberian embassy,
which was the whole point of why I had gone to Pretoria in the first place, to
get a visa for Liberia. I went to the place where it was supposed to be,
according to the internet, only to see a sign that said that it had moved
across town. Ugh. At that moment, I was just so tired of being slapped around by
the system that I just said screw it, and decided to get it when I flew up to
Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire in a few weeks.
The
next day, I lazed around the hostel, and the only thing I did was attempted to
change my extra Rands into Botswanan Pula (as I was going to Botswana the next
day) or US Dollars (a good alternative currency for so many countries in Africa). After trying at a bank and being told that I needed an
account or proof of residence to change there, I went to another exchange
place. I pulled out this massive wad of Rand cash and carefully calculated how
much of each currency I’d need, but they told me that they needed proof of where
I’d gotten the cash. Since I’d taken it out of my bank account in Lesotho when
I closed it, and didn’t have that receipt, they were not about to change it for
me. I got on my online banking and found one time when I took out a bunch of
cash in Lesotho, took some screenshots of that transaction, and emailed it to
the exchange place lady. But, nope, Julie gets slapped down again because they
didn’t accept that because it was taken out in Lesotho and not South Africa.
But it’s the same currency! Ughhhh. They suggested that I could change money
without all the proof and receipts at the airport in Joburg. I'd have to figure out how to get over there, either by Gautrain or by taxi, change money before business hours were over, and then get back to Pretoria. Hahaaaa, nope. Not
doing that. I’ll just hang on to my Rands and change it elsewhere if I can, or
else just keep it and change it in the US.
So,
in summary, I accomplished nothing I came to Pretoria for: no Liberian visa, no
Rand exchange. Cool…But I wasn’t super bothered by it because, as I described
above, sh*t happens and most of the time there’s nothing you can do, and
complaining won’t fix a thing. So I bought my bus ticket to Gaborone, Botswana, and
hoped that the next destination would allow me more excitement and allow me to
actually do what I’d planned to do for once.
Bus life
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