Technical difficulties or, how to see a foreign city without really trying.

A mosquito coil is burning slowly on a plate on my desk as I write. There are two delicious T-bone steaks marinating in the fridge, bought for a dollar apiece. Filter and Franz Ferdinand are playing in the background, and I’m chewing on a mouthful of biltong, the ridiculously durable South African variant on beef jerky. I’m slowly learning how to do things around here.

I’ve actually got a good excuse for failing to respond to emails and neglecting to install a better comment system here. Internet access is so atrocious here that it’s impossible for me to write emails and blog posts while sitting at the web café. It literally takes me fifteen minutes simply to check my hotmail. So I’ve been writing emails and posts on my laptop, burning them onto CD, and hoping that the one computer at the café with a functioning CD drive is unoccupied. The slowness that makes writing so difficult pretty much prohibits me uploading any photos… even the elephants. Incidentally, I looked into the cost of getting a 128K direct internet line – a bit short of Canadian standards, but tolerable. The cost was $4,000 a month. Anybody feeling charitable?

I’d resigned myself to the current unwieldy process several days ago, and had nearly finished several posts and emails when fate destroyed my power cable. As my laptop is approximately as portable as a refrigerator and as electrically frugal as a Spinal Tap concert, it took only a few minutes for the battery to drain and the system to die, entombing my words within.

Normally this is but a minor difficulty, rectified by the purchase of a five dollar cable. But that would be too easy. The otherwise very helpful people at the nearest electronics shop were mystified and intrigued by the astonishingly foreign connector I showed them in my quest for its doppelganger. Likewise the hardware shop and the Japanese TV/computer repair place across the street. They recommended the oddly named Game City Mall as the best place to look. It’s far out of walking distance, though, for Gaborone is spread over a vast space far out of proportion to its population of 200,000.

In a country with fifty percent unemployment, there are quite a few people with more time than money. Many of the men in this situation make extra cash by hanging around with their cars at every conceivable place people cluster, and bellowing “Taxi!” at anyone who looks rich or white (a hue assumed to be synonymous with wealth).

Today some of them were quite helpful, though not as they’d expected. I hailed one cab, haggled down the price, and headed to Game City past Jaguar dealerships (?) and many surprisingly modern (but small) offices and shops. Game City is a surprisingly large mall, half indoor and half out, anchored by the Game Superstore, the local answer to Wal-Mart. Game was quite massive and well-stocked, with electronics and food and furniture and remarkably few customers, a problem that I’m told plagues the many other malls in the city. Well, duh. What feat of self-delusion convinced some unwise entrepreneurs that a city of 200,000, half of whom are below the poverty line, could support a half dozen Western-style malls?

I digress. At Game, the electronics gurus looked at the cable with a mixture of confusion and terror, and suggested desperately that I try Ultimate Solutions, a tech supply store nearby, before they herded me and the feared devil-cable from the department. I grew increasingly chagrined, and fearful that I’d spend the remainder of my stay not knowing the joyous bath of LCD light that brightens my existence. (There’s not much to do here after dark but play video game and write – hence my wordiness).

Three cabbies/panhandlers were lingering near the mall entrance, and as the hollered “TAXI!” I asked if they could take me to Ultimate Solutions. At first confused, they squawked somewhat angrily at each other in Setswana, and then one stepped forward and offered to take me there, growing more decisive with each word.
His confidence was a cruel joke. Within minutes he’d driven halfway across town and gotten terribly lost. He became increasingly convinced that his friend/rival among the other cabbies had given him bad directions in the hopes that we’d both be lost forever. Moreover, he completely forgot where I wanted to go in the first place. Several times.

Cabbie: “You wanted to go to Sahara Computers, right?”
Me: “No, Ultimate Solutions.”
Cabbie “Oh, OK, I didn’t know that”.

Cabbie: “You wanted to go to Riverwalk, right?
Me: “Sigh. Ultimate Solutions, please. Out of curiousity, how did you manage to hear ‘Riverwalk’ out of that?”
Cabbie: “I thought that’s where you wanted to go.”
Me: “Oy.”

By this point we were deep in an industrial district at the end of the work day, and people were flooding out of warehouses and small factories in droves. The roads alternated between blacktop and dust. The driver pulled up in front of a self-storage outlet and said “Here it is”. When asked if this was Ultimate Solutions, he replied, perplexed “Ultimate Solutions? Where is that?”. By this point I had resigned myself to this insanity and simply enjoyed the chance to see parts of Gaborone that I might not otherwise have experienced. The driver stopped to get directions at a payphone (in that particular neighborhood, a woman sitting by the side of the road with her own phone, renting it out), while I enjoyed the varied views of factories both small and immense, hovels built of tin, and homes of surprising modernity and luxury.

Eventually he figured out where we were going… a place called Commerce Park, three minutes walk from the Game City Mall I’d just left. I noted to myself that I could have avoided the entire odyssey, but probably wouldn’t want to. The staff at Ultimate Solutions, a dark warehouse packed to the gills with all manner of computer gear, regarded the cable at issue with the now-familiar lack of comprehension. They did, however, direct me to the highly helpful Frensch Corporation, the only store in town (and presumably the entire country) that had the piece I needed, albeit for an extortionate price. Content in the knowledge that my life would be alight in unhealthy phosphor tones once again, I hopped back in the cab, headed back to the guest house downtown, and paid the cabbie considerably more than the ride was worth. I’m discovering that I see far more if I have absolutely no idea where I’m going.