On the ropes from coast to coast
If you were travelling on the highway between Cape Town and East London yesterday, a distance of about a thousand kilometres along the southern coast of South Africa, having crossed Queenstown at around 8:30 am you would have seen a group of hapless Bangladeshis staring blankly at the whizzing cars going by. You would also have seen a bus -- let us not name the company here -- blowing smoke out its exhaust pipe and going nowhere a few yards ahead. Just thank your lucky stars that you were in a car.
There is just one bus a day leaving Paarl for East London and on Thursday we rushed, because Bangladeshis always rush, to the Shell Garage where they would pick us up. Well, the South African bus drivers are on another level it seems as they made Bangladeshis wait for an hour, and we stood with those vacant expressions -- little did we know that that would be the theme for the journey.
The first stop after they finally picked us up at 8:00pm was at another Shell Garage four hours later, and the driver officiously said "10 minutes!", but after those 10 minutes we were on the bus for another 40 minutes before we set off, as more passengers got on, heaven knows from where and why because while loading our luggage the helper said not to worry about tags for our luggage as no one else would be getting on.
It was repeated over the next two stops, but then, after the Queenstown stop at eight, we knew we were now on the way to East London. "No more stops, one hour at most," the driver laughed. We did not take the second part of that statement seriously as his start-of-journey estimate of an 8:00am arrival time had been woefully overshot. Google Maps said it was two hours over to East London and that is what we settled in for.
10 minutes into the journey, the bus stopped, a policeman entered and soon the driver was telling us to disembark. They have these highway checkpoints with police standing on both sides of the road and flagging down seemingly every vehicle that dares pass, another aspect in which they surpass their Bangladeshi counterparts. "This bus won't go further" was all we were told by the driver. Where are we? "Queenstown."
But where in Queenstown? "Don't know."
It took an admonishment from the policewoman there who seemed to be in charge for the driver to tell us exactly what happened. The bus was not road-fit as it was spewing black exhaust that had blackened the back of the bus, and that they had called the office and another one was coming in 10 minutes (read one hour 15 minutes).
We reached East London at 12:30, each feeling like we had been through a 12-round bout but with a message for the operators of Shohagh, Hanif, Desh Travels et al – unlike the South African cricket team, your South African counterparts cannot hold a candle to you.
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