The Last Few Days

We woke up early on Saturday to take the taxi (public minivan) from our location 85k (~50 miles) into Vryheid, our shopping town. There is only one taxi a day from here to town. It leaves at 7 a.m. no matter how full it is, but if it fills before 7 it leaves as soon as it’s full. Anyway, we got to the taxi at about 6:15, and it left at about 6:30, so not bad. We spent the morning running errands, grocery shopping and eating. The taxi back to Mountain View leaves around noon (or, again, whenever it’s full). If we miss the Mountain View taxi, we can take another taxi, but it’s more expensive and drops us off about 1.5 miles from home. Luckily, we were able to the catch the Mountain View taxi before it was full.

The taxi home was a bit of an adventure. First of all, since our community is fairly rural, most people don’t come into town very often. So when they go to town, they stock up. Picture a van full of people and then adding 10kg bags of rice and dozens of shopping bags. After loading up the van, we started our journey home. About ten minutes outside of town, we stopped so people could buy chickens for dinner. Live chickens, of course. Feathers were flying and the taxi began to smell a bit like a farm, but we were on our way again after about 15 minutes (of course, there was a lot of clucking to be heard the rest of the trip).

After making it almost halfway home, we came across an accident. Tons of people were standing around, and our first thought was that someone must have been hurt in the wreck. Soon, however, we discovered that a large truck had actually hit a cow. Unfortunately, hitting a cow isn’t all that unusual for where we live. Cows graze along the road, and drivers frequently have to swerve and slow down to avoid hitting them. Anyway, the cow that had been hit was now being slaughtered by the side of the road, and people were watching the action. It had turned into a community spectacle. TIA (this is Africa).
On a side note, we tried to watch Blood Diamond last night and gave up after 15 minutes. Both of us had seen it previously and rather enjoyed it. The reason we couldn’t watch was because Leo had the WORST South African accent we have ever heard. It was almost offensive. We were really excited to re-watch the movie, so it was disappointing that we couldn’t stand his accent. As South Africans would say, “Shame!