Holy Wheel Nuts!

OK, so I shouldn't have complained about the minibus taxi journey to Port Shepstone. While I was there, I met a couple of other travellers who also needed to get to Coffee Bay the next day, and I reassured them that the minibus taxis would be a great way to do it. Oops. The supposedly 2-leg, 4 hour journey ended up as an eventful 9 hour journey, in 5 different taxis - speeding round mountain roads in torrential rain. One event that sticks in the memory is a baby, sitting on the lap of his mum opposite me, that kept turning round to look at me, and then crying (much to my companions' amusement). After a while, the mother kindly explained to me that the baby was scared, because "he's never seen someone that looks like you before" - i.e. a non-black person!

The highlight of the trip was in the second taxi, when every so often we'd hear a noise, and the driver would stop, get out to look at one of the wheels, then carry on. Eventually found out that the noises were the nuts flying off the rear left wheel, and our intrepid captain finally decided to abandon ship when the wheel was only being held on by one nut! Maybe he thought we had divine protection, judging from the African 'Jesus is our saviour' music that had been blasting out of the speakers the whole journey.

In Coffee Bay I stayed in a hostel called the Coffee Shack - if you ever come to SA, make sure you stay there, it's an unbelievably great hostel (I'm not on commission, honest). I was planning to try and find Luzie Drift school, that is linked to The Compton (where I was teaching in England) - but actually I would have had no hope of finding it (it's tucked away in the mountains). So the staff at the hostel phoned around for me and got hold of the headteacher's mobile number, and I gave her a call. I didn't visit, instead I'm heading to Cape Town first then after Cape Town I'm going to Luzie Drift for a few weeks, to do some teaching or just help out. I'm quite excited to go somewhere with absolutely no tourists and experience a genuine African village life - and she sounded excited to have me visit too. I'm going to try and learn Xhosa while there (the first language in that area), but will have to get my tongue round the clicks first!

While in Coffee Bay I spent one night at a local village. It was a really interesting experience, a poor rural village in the mountains, not touristy at all and a real insight into how most South Afriacns live. The highlights were the food (blnd and stodgy, all they eat is maize - but they can't afford anything else), helping them bring in the cows, and brushing my teeth with grass. I got some good pics, in my online albums.

I'm in a beautiful beachside place called Cintsa at the moment, going to head to Jeffries Bay for some surfing, and Storms River to do the worlds highest bungee jump (213 metres!) on the way to Cape Town. Going to travel by nice, safe, reliable backpacker busses. By the way, I'm not getting as much feedback on this blog as I was at first - are people still reading it? Anyone out there?