Okay, Adventuretime with Kristen and Christiana, Episode 1: Transportation
Love it, hate it, took a lot of it, paid a ton for some and basically nothing for others.
First of all, I would like to state for the record that I refuse to travel to a foreign country again before I turn 21. Luckily, since I don't plan on going anywhere else before April, I don't think that it will really be an issue. I also am not traveling anywhere without a credit card again, but that is another issue... It is fairly difficult, it turns out, to rent a car if you are under 21. In fact, in some countries you have to be 23, but the limit for most places in SA is 21. I am fairly sure that it is impossible for me to rent a car in Grahamstown; the Avis at least won't rent to anyone under 21. This shouldn't really matter because technically I am heavily discouraged from driving by my study abroad program. I signed a form that I believe acknowledged that they told me I shouldn't drive a vehicle in SA (without actually agreeing that I wouldn't drive... ) The point is, they don't want me to do it because people drive on the other side of the road and driving cars is dangerous. So I shouldn't really be driving anyway, which is fine because I didn't... Kristen and I were able to book a car at an agency in Durban that would rent to people under 21, but when we got there, they wouldn't accept her traveler's credit card for complicated reasons that had to do with holding payments and regulations and such. So, the moral of the story was that we were safe little girls who did not get into any cars with steering wheels on the right and take ourselves to Kruger. It was a bit disappointing, since I don't know if I will be able to get up there while I am here, but God was probably looking out for us and preventing some sort of disaster.
However, we still had many crazy transportation adventures which no doubt kept our guardian angels busy (my study abroad program did not have me sign any forms against walking in cities, which I think is probably more dangerous than driving...). We took a coach bus to and from Durban, but rather than paying the extra money for a Greyhound bus (one of Gettysburg students who was at Rhodes last fall told me that his Greyhound broke down, anyway), we took City-to-City, which got us there just fine, despite being slightly lower quality than some buses I have been on. However, I think that in general, not having a bathroom on the bus worked out really well in our favor, since we made plenty of stops and the bus smelled fine the entire trip. The first hour out of Grahamstown was both hilarious and awful; there were music videos this boy-band full of blond haired guys (I can only describe their singing style as crooning) playing on the tvs (and the 40-something guy beside me was definitely singing along). Kristen was a few rows ahead of me, sitting next to a woman with a baby that was totally chill when we got on the bus, but started wailing for approximately the next hour until they got off. Luckily for us, a lot of people got off after the first hour or two, leaving us to enjoy the other 10 hours in relative peace. They played some ridiculous movies, including Jennifer's Body (without the sound... it was just as funny for me but Kristen had no idea what was happening) and what I assume to be a bootlegged version of the Salina Gomez movie where she goes to Paris and gets mistaken for a movie star. I actually enjoyed most of the bus ride, as I like road trips, and I enjoyed checking out the scenery until it got dark.
Once we got to the bus station in Durban, we needed to take a taxi to our hostel (it was dark and we had luggage, anyway). We did take a few taxis over the week: to the music festival, because we didn't know where it was (and it was dark), back and forth to the downtown when we went out Tuesday night (and again Wednesday after we walked downtown in our quest for a rental car but didn't want to walk all the way back), to Ushaka and back, back from the mall once, and whenever we moved our luggage, but in general, we tried not to use them too much. There are some metered taxis, and others where you can haggle a bit with the driver, but either way you can end up paying quite a bit... or at least, more than we wanted to. I was sent to Durban with advice to "not let the taxi drivers rip you off" and I still have no idea how to accomplish this...
So, we spent quite a bit of our time on minibuses! I didn't take any pictures of them (usually because they were in areas where you wouldn't want to take out a camera) but basically they are 15 seater vans that drive people around... you can find them all over southern Africa. Most of the ones in Durban don't exactly have specified routes, or at least not posted ones, so I usually just ended up walking to the drivers window and repeating the name of the place we were trying to get to, and the driver would either tell us to get in or point us in another direction where we could find minibuses to our desired location. This could be tricky, and was a bit of an adrenaline inducing activity, but it felt like such an accomplishment to get to where we wanted to go (and only spend 4 to 10 rand to get there... the exchange rate is 7 rand to the dollar). I spent 10 rand to ride a minibus to a place that it cost 260 rand to get back from in a taxi.
While using various forms of public transportation made me appreciate my 4runner at home all the more (I don't even know what the age to rent a car in the US is... it has just never come up), and we sometimes had to invest quite a lot of time and energy to get where we needed to go, I believe that our transportation adventures in Durban were overall quite successful (of course, there was the 260 rand taxi ride, which was depressing, and then that time we were dropped off on the side of the freeway, but that it a story for another post...). We got safely where we needed to go all week (this includes our multitude of walking adventures, as we walked whenever it was daylight and the distance was doable. Or when we thought the distance was doable and ended up walking basically to the other side of the city) and in the end were returned in one piece to Grahamstown. I should mention that the bus ride home was fairly uneventful, as we were traveling overnight and mostly just tried to sleep, except that my seat mate was extremely talkative and I got to hear all about his life, from his job working for Volkswagen to his opinions about crime in Port Elizabeth and experiences with religion. Not as conducive to sleeping as snuggling with Melissa Dorrance on a band bus, but I did okay :)
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