Travels With Charlie
So I think I had the world’s most patient and good-natured travel companion for the end of my trip. What is this assessment based on? Well, when Charlie and I were planning our last week in South Africa, I asked him if, instead of taking a two-hour flight from Cape Town to Johannesburg, he’d be willing to take a 27-hour train trip. And instead of a) laughing at me, b) laughing at me, or c) laughing very, very hard at me, he agreed to do it.
That’s how the two of us ended up at the Cape Town train station last Monday morning, cramming ourselves and our nine weeks of luggage into a two-person sleeper car and preparing to be immobile for over a day.
Getting to the train had itself been something of an odyssey. Besides the fact that the train company did not accept credit cards as a method of payment (my thoroughly American mind is still struggling with that one) and I had to wire them the money from a bank in Zambia, train stations in South Africa are also really dangerous—full of the kind of random, violent crime that the country is unfortunately famous for.
By the day Charlie and I left, we were actually more nervous than excited for our trip. Lest you think this was unwarranted, do a quick google search of the terms “park station Johannesburg safety” and you’ll see what I mean. Among the comments I either received from South Africans or read about the train stations in Johannesburg and Cape Town were: “don’t go with luggage,” “this is the only place I’ve ever been mugged,” “never leave the site of a security guard,” “don’t exit the station onto the street unless you are stepping immediately into a waiting taxi,” “don’t go alone as a female,” and—my personal favorite—my tour book said that the train station in Jo’burg was so dangerous that I should get off the train in a city an hour away and then arrange for a taxi to take me the rest of the way.
So basically…we were scared senseless. I entered the station with my passport, credit card, and cash all stuffed into my shoes and my insulin pump packed away in my suitcase (to avoid the ‘cell phone bulge’ that we’ve been told makes you a conspicuous target for muggings here). Luckily we found our way straight to the ticket counter and then onto the train without issue. All that worrying for naught. But I did find out that my shoe can hold a lot of valuable stuff at once. I’ll mentally file that for future use.
As for the train ride itself, it floored me. The thing I love about trains is that you actually get to see how far you’ve traveled; every inch of the distance presents itself to you in the scenery outside your window and in the hours you spend traversing it. First came Table Mountain and beyond it the vineyards of the Cape Peninsula, the rows of spindly grape vines flanked by mountains and fog. And by nightfall we’d passed into completely flat land, scrubby plains that the sky practically had to bend down to reach. All the while we were stopping through small towns with quaint British or Dutch-sounding names: Beaufort, Krugersdorp, Westville. This is the funny thing about South Africa, all of this could have been America or Europe, except for one thing. The towns, the countryside, the farms, were all scattered with identical small, prefabricated houses and slumped, frail-looking tin shacks. There were colorful lines of laundry fluttering behind them and goats and ostriches wandering among them. All of these the small but persistent reminders that I was somewhere foreign.
In the morning we passed fields of dead sunflowers with bowed brown heads, the carcasses of old rusted cars left by the side of the road, herds of bored looking cows, and several huge, disorderly graveyards with fresh mounds of dirt covering many of the graves. The cities here were small and grubby and industrial. Their landmarks were grain silos and power plants. We were in mining country, the heartland of South Africa’s gold and diamond industries.
And inside the train were Charlie and me—talking, sleeping, listening to music, eating an untold number of peanut butter sandwiches and granola bars (hey, we’re two vegetarians in Africa, what can you do?). After the first few hours, we stopped trying to take pictures. There were too many layers to the scenery, too much we couldn’t hold behind our lenses. Then it became all about watching, about pointing out landmarks and repeating back the strange Afrikaans names we read when we pulled into stations.
By the time we arrived at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, we’d been on the train for 29 hours (a little behind schedule!) and we were both ready for a shower and a real meal. But I’m glad we traveled the way we did. It was a good last leg to our trip here. I’ll go home now with a map of South Africa in my head that’s more than just individual cities. On train we caught a glimpse of some of the spaces in between.
(ten cool points to anyone who gets the reference in my title)
