A Chilly Adventure

2 August 2012. 10:13 am.

If I have ever previously said that South Africa is not cold in the winter, it was an awful lie. An accidental lie, to be sure, but completely untrue. South Africa can be bitterly cold in the winter.

                Yesterday morning, the members of OAMC and AOM packed our bags back up, headed to St Mary’s Cathedral to sing in a mid-week service, then left Johannesburg for Cape Town; about a sixteen hour drive. If we had stayed on schedule, we would be in Cape Town right now; as it is, we have about six hours left of driving.

                OAMC and AOM mostly fill up three buses right now, and for the first four or so hours, we convoyed right along with no problems. Then the bus ahead of us developed a problem; as far as I’m aware, it was the suspension system. We parked on the edge of the road for over half an hour until the drivers got it more or less patched up, and we proceeded to the gas station where there was a Steers (fast food place) at which we had planned to eat supper. While there, it was discovered that the one bus with the suspension problem was now irreparable by us. A couple dozen people remained behind at the gas station while the two good buses went on, and Don Hepker communicated with various bus companies via telephone, and eventually cajoled one to send us a bus so that we could continue our journey.

                It arrived, we went on for about an hour, then that bus also broke down. I had been napping, but not very well, because the heater on that bus was not working as far as I could tell, and it was absolutely frigid on there. The bus company sent another bus, and a lot of us helped transfer luggage from the underside of the old bus to the new one. It was ridiculously cold; I was shaking uncontrollably straight from my core as I hauled luggage around.

                It was a gorgeous night; the constellations in the Southern Hemisphere are mostly unfamiliar to me, but the Southern Cross was burning brilliantly on the horizon, and there were two yellow-white stars that were huge and luminous as they hung above a set of hills. Several people think that they were actually Venus and Jupiter, gracing the cold, clear night sky as partial recompense for the temperature.

                Unfortunately, someone keeps requesting to have the televisions in the bus turned on to a showy, flashy, overly-polished Christian television show with a lot of poised people singing beautifully, but in such a fake showy way that it’s relatively revolting. The full, string orchestra playing for all the singers is really quite excellent, however, even if the songs are repetitive with uninventive lyrics.

                We stopped in the little town of Beaufort West and had a rousing game of hacky sack, and I got a 1.5 litre of water for my parched throat before throwing a couple of handsprings and re-loading back onto the bus. Only six hours behind schedule, and 200 kilometers (125 miles) behind the other buses which are also behind schedule more so than they ought, due to one of the guys needing to go to the hospital in extreme pain from passing kidney stones. Thankfully, his bus was the one that our trip doctor was either on, or close to with the other bus. He’s all right, apparently, and back on the bus traveling, but it delayed them even more than the long stop at the Steers gas station did.

                Now, even though we’re traveling long distances on the bus, I’m still keeping very busy. Last night I took my laptop around my bus and told everyone that one of my jobs on this trip is to write down peoples’ stories for the OAMC blog, and asked if they had a story for me. On my bus I wrote down eleven stories with a total of 4667 words, and on another bus I wrote two stories with a total of 603 words. So my fingers were very busy last night.

                Currently I ought to be very busy editing them and turning them over to Sam Wright who’s in charge of the OAMC blog on this trip.