Zimbabwebound

Just last week, Jodi and I travelled down the Pretoria (in South Africa) for a 5 night getaway and shopping expedition with an American couple (with their 8 month old baby) who lecture at the theological college (the baby doesn’t lecture yet).

Before trekking off, we heard rumours of long waits at the boarder if we get there after 8am.  As we all don’t like queuing, we decided to start the 2.5 hour journey from Bulawayo to the border a little before 5 am.  The journey to the border went extremely well with no drama’s what so ever (except for the choice of music … Jodi insisted that we put Billy Joel on repeat).  As we approached the border post on the Zim side we saw that there wasn’t a massive line up and we appreciated the fact that we had got in front of the predicted bus loads of Zimbo’s who make their pilgrimage over the border to get their groceries.   30 minutes later we were back in the car and travelling over the Limpopo River to get the South African border post … this is where the trouble began.

We travelled through the gates and saw a massive line up of cars behind 5 buses and to make things even worse, as we drove up to the back of the car line, the actual line up of people to get through immigration was even longer than the line up of cars.  Having a baby in our travelling party we wanted to see if we could get to the head of the line (pregnant, elderly or crippled people generally are allowed to get straight the front).  No such luck … the guards monitoring the line told us to pick a line (as there were two lines) and to wait our turn.

We examined both lines (queuing in two different directions going through the same door though) and decided to pick the shorter line … this was an error we later chose to regret.  I think it was at about the 2 hour mark that we noticed that the other line was moving a lot faster than ours and that we had probably only moved 5 steps in this time.  At the 4 hour mark (and another 10 steps ahead on our queue) we were tossing up whether or not to continue our journey or just head back over to Zim.  This is were I should make a note that we could have made it to the front of the line and through to SA in about 30 minutes if we chose to give a 100 rand “gift” to a local who offers to take you to a “friend” who can “help” … not an option we wanted to take.  I think it only took another 30 minutes and one of our travelling companions we met in line decided to take the matter of the lack of line movement to the proper authorities. 

It was at this point that we thought everything was going to be ok, as our line started to move through the first doorway; all of us were extremely happy and could not wait to get our passports stamped and continue on our journey … this excitement was short lived; as we ventured through the doorway into the “inner courtyard” there were another two MASSIVE lines travelling around the perimeter.  With shoulders dropped, and ambitions shot for a quick exit we joined one of the queues.

At this point Kayle (our American friend) decided to head back to the car so she could feed and change her little one.  As she was about the exit the “inner courtyard” she noticed an old man queuing who was on crutches:
“have you asked to get to the front of the line” Kayle asked the man. 
“no” he replied “can I do that?”
Kayle went to the front and asked the official if her “crippled father” could come to the front of the line … this was our ticket through.  The lovely elderly man (we called “dad” for the next 30 minutes) wanted to help us as we had helped him get to the front of the line.

It was at 2:30pm that we finally got through the gates (6 hours at the border) and continued on our journey (still another 5 hours to go until we get Pretoria).  We got to our lodging at about 8pm that night; it took us 15 hours in total were we were only expecting 9 hours (including border posts).

Life in Africa … you gotta love it!!!!