We've been misplaced!

Pretoria isn’t Maputo, which is another 600km down the road. Our cramped double-but-secretly-accommodating-five room at the Holiday Inn is not the sunny open-air hostel that awaited us tonight in Mozambique. The Big Mac Meal on which I gorged myself tonight, at first with novel vigour and then with mounting regret, was most certainly not the prawn and crab curry my slavering mind’s eye had foreseen. But at least Raiders of the Lost Ark is on TV! Bah. I’m sure that under the right circumstances Pretoria, South Africa’s capital, is a vibrant, fascinating city. But, since it’s Easter weekend, the place is a ghost town, as everyone of means has split for the coast. There’s nothing going on. Much more importantly, dag nab it, it just ain’t where we’d hoped to be right now.

Our precious truck more-or-less died 30 km out of town, about halfway between Gabs and Mozambique. We coaxed the wheezing beast off the freeway and into a rundown gas station/bar in a nameless little hamlet around noon. It being Easter Friday, no mechanic was available and, more strikingly, everyone there was already reeking drunk, including the genuinely helpful trucker who looked over the engine when he stopped to buy beers for the road (yikes!). He diagnosed horrific symptoms liked dropped bearings and engine corrosion and broken cylinders, but informed us that the car could limp to Pretoria, where we may have to wait until Tuesday to get it fixed. ARGH! Inasmuch as rural South Africa is not known to be safe haven for lost and confused tourists (and the trucker terrified us with, “You are NOT safe here”), we dragged the truck at 20 km/h all the way to Pretoria, where we grabbed a hotel room. Now we’re waiting, watching TV, eating McDonald’s food (which we haven’t had in many months in Gabs), and hoping against hope that the trucker had no idea what he was talking about.