Before arriving at the feast site in Mossei Bay, South Africa, my family did some exploring in the area around Johannesburg. I arrived at the airport via a flight by Libreville at around midnight, Thursday morning, and my folks arrived a bit more than four hours later after I had gotten the rental car and we headed off on our journey. After finding our that our car lacked the GPS I expected it to have, I asked some directions as to which highway would get us to Swaziland, and was told that taking N12 to N4 would do it, and so we set off. The highway itself pointed out various cities along the way, I noted some of the ones that we traveled through, and also we had a stop off for my stepfather to go to the restroom along the way.

When we got to the city of Mbombela, I figured we were pretty close to Swaziland but that as the highway was pointing us to Maputo that it would be best to stop before we got to Mozambique because that would be going too far. It turned out to be a wise move, as we ate an early lunch at a Wimpy’s, enjoyed a very inexpensive and tasty meal, and I used the free wi-fi to get onto Google Maps and map out my journey by looking at the roads that showed up on the map, which ended up not being the best move because as it turns out, not all of the roads were marked along the way, even if it turned out well in the end. From Mbombela, we headed south on R40 to Barberton and then on an increasingly rugged highway that was decreasingly well maintained until we arrived at the border crossing near Bulembu where after playing my clueless tourist mode we were able to enter the country.

This proved to be the least of our difficulties. Paying a modest fee to take a vehicle along a pass so obscure that we were only the second people to sign in at the border that day, we made our way slowly along some miserable mud tracks to Piggs Peak, with no road signs to guide the way and a philosophy of taking the path that looked most like a road until we came to Piggs Peak and were able to get directions to follow NR1 down to near the capital and then back to the border with South Africa to return. It had been our intention to drive all the way to Lesotho and then to drive back from there on Friday morning, but the slow driving from Bulembu to Piggs Peak through the execrable roads, the intense fog while driving on NR1 in Swaziland that involved us having to make more than one rapid stops for cattle in the road and having to deal with terrible visibility [1], and the stop-and-gos along N17 when we got back across the border into South Africa shortly before it got dark told us that it would be a bad idea to drive hours more, so once we got to the first town where I was able to find a lodge, a rustic lodge at the edge of Chrissiesmeer, for us to stay at for the night, we ate dinner at a local restaurant (the Billiard Room, which had tasty offerings, even if something in the oxtail ragout disagreed with me), and then tried to get as much sleep as possible before leaving early in the morning. I slept somewhere around six hours or so, give or take, and then we made our way to the car with our luggage in a grassy area where a poopy guard dog made his home, and then we drove following the directions to Carolina and then to the N4 once again.

Admittedly, these directions were somewhat vague, but two left turns to get to Carolina ended up proving to get us to the town and I followed along a poorly maintained but mercifully empty road in more intense fog until we finally came to the N4 once again. Remembering the name of a city we had driven through on the way to Johannesburg, I made the correct turn and we sped along the highway, making good time. We had wanted to eat breakfast before getting to the airport but also wanted to avoid rush hour traffic as much as possible, and so we ended up arriving at the airport, circling around to get to a nearby gas station to fill up the car, and then ended up eating breakfast in the airport after we had dropped off the rental car, which seemed better than getting lost in the area of the airport while looking for somewhere to eat. It ended up being a pretty wise decision, which doesn’t happen every day.

[1] During one of the times of good visibility along the road we went to a car wash, talked to someone who desperately wanted to be invited to America and who was named in his local language as “king’s gift” and found out that our generous payment for the car wash in USD would be used to allow the people at the car wash to flex their new-found wealth to others in their community.