Last Days of South Africa part 2 (Pics included)

June 26th, Day 15:

We woke up early in order to get prepared for the final leg of our journey to Botswana and finish our final tasks that had eluded us the night before; building a new camera mount for the bicycle and sending some emails to Botswana newspapers. Thankfully, the internet cafe was finally functioning that morning so we spent an hour or so doing some "office" work and then headed back to the hotel to grab Eric's bike for the new upgrades. Eric stayed in the room to do data transfers from our camera to our hard-drive while I set out to figure out a way to get a new camera mount.

Our only lead was a man named Horace (whom we had accidentally confused with Wallace the evening before which had not ended well) and we were told he would be at the "Build-It" shop on this morning. He had access to the drills and saws we needed, so we desperately needed him. However, upon arriving at "Build-It" it turned out the Horace once again was not in, the third time that this had happened to us in the last day. I was quite frustrated, and tried to explain the situation to people in the store but they claimed there was nothing they could do.

That is when Jerome stepped into the picture. Jerome was a local construction worker building some sort of housing complex on the other side of town, and while overhearing my situation decided to intervene and offer assistance. After explaining the specifications of what needed to be done to the bike, Jerome took me around the store and helped me pick out the correct drill bits and metal pieces I would need. However, when we got to the checkout counter I realized that I had forgotten to bring cash with me, so I asked if Jerome could stay for a minute while I ran back to get money. "No need", he said, as he footed the bill for me extremely generously.

Jerome then threw the bicycle in the back of his pickup, and I hopped in back as well for a ride to the construction site. We arrived there in less than 10 minutes and sure to his word, all of the necessary equipment was there. Jerome then talked with the site foreman, who happened to be his brother, and got permission to halt the other work in order to assist me. He spent about 30 minutes with power drills and saws and rigged up a great camera mount for us and then drove me back to my hotel. I was astonished by the generosity and hospitality of Jerome and his co-workers, and made sure to repay Jerome for the money he had fronted me.

The task had taken longer than we expected so Eric and I were a bit late leaving, but we hit the road at about 2:00pm for our next destination, Stella. We stopped by the construction site to say goodbye to Jerome and his friends and chatted a bit about America. They had been telling us that they were scared to visit American because they had heard it was extremely racist, but we assured them that while they may be correct to some extent, that it was certainly not on the same scale as race issues in South Africa and offered to show them around if they visited.

The road to Stella turned out to be shorter than we expected, but due to wind, fatigue, and cold, we made slow time and arrived just after nightfall. After a difficult search we managed to find a place to stay for the night and put our things in the room and set out to find some food, which turned out to be a much more difficult task than one would have expected.

It was Friday night in Stella, and about 7:30pm, and NOTHING was open. We finally managed to find a gas station with some hot pies and we bought up as many as we could while chatting with the two attendants there. After about thirty minutes we managed to convince them that we were not lying to them and pretending to be Americans, but in fact really were. Then after another 30 minutes we managed to convince them that we also were not lying about the bicycling either, and finally managed to become friendly with them. They explained to us that race issues were very difficult there and so they are very skeptical of white people, but once we had explained ourselves they offered to show us the local tavern.

We went with one of them while the other stayed to work and entered a small tin tavern with two pool tables, and lots of people of all ages, from 15 to 65 I would guess. It was an interesting scene, as we were probably the only white people who had ever entered that bar, but after the initial awkward phase people became extremely friendly, even if they did hustle us out of a bit of money in pool (they were quite good).

Our night then took a different direction when some local white teenagers passed by outside the tavern and offered to show us the "other" side of town. We decided to accept their invitation out of curiosity, and we hopped into the back of their pick-up and drove for a while through the freezing cold to a farm-pub full of Afrikaans people of all ages. It was a similar scene except that everyone was white instead of black, the music was some strange country music sung in Afrikaans, and the people were not quite as good at pool but we had an interesting time nonetheless. At around midnight we told the our hosts we needed to head back to get some rest for next day, and they kindly took us home where we hopped into bed and fell fast asleep. It had been a long and unusual day and we were very tired.

-Aaron