SHO SO SLOW
If you had seen the panic in my eyes as I fretted and sweated outside the company office while my girl — whose phone I use — watched the bloody Uber drive in circles around Parktown, you might have called an ambulance. Or maybe a vet to either administer 50ml of horse tranks, or maybe a bullet to end the suffering. I had, of course, cut things a bit fine — I really did have a train to catch at 12.30pm, so only calling an Uber at 11.59am was either brave or stupendously trusting of the Universe.
In the end it took us 11 minutes to ride the Corolla over the hill to Park Station, where I was immediately set upon by a platoon of freelance porters who don’t care that the wheelie suitcase was invented to put porters out of business.
By the time I found the platform and the train, I was sapped of the will to live. I sat in my compartment — a coupé in which I had bought the extra berth — dripping sweat.
There was a time when the mere prospect of an imminent train journey would keep me awake at night with excitement. Even the drive to Park Station was laden with possibility of the sort that had enlivened my parents every time they walked up the gangway of the Union Castle mailship at Southampton for the two-week Atlantic voyage back home to South Africa.
It is quite possible that one day, the Shosholoza Meyl train may, in fact, take two weeks to travel from Joburg to Cape Town, but that’s neither here nor there.
Of course, it left late and ambled out of Joburg, up the Hamberg Bank to Krugersdorp, dragging its feet like a sulky teenager.
We ambled west under a grey, humid sky, through abandoned stations and struggling towns hovering in a sort of economic limbo.
Once I caught a glimpse of an eland in a field of long grass, and some pretty horses staring in amazement (“Hey look! A Shosholoza Meyl train that’s moving!”)
It was sunset at Klerksdorp and a midnight arrival in Kimberley. Come sunrise, we were well short of Beaufort West.
Half an hour out of Beaufort, we came to a shuddering, squealing halt, stopped by a suspected broken rail on the line ahead. The trackmaster would have to come from Beaufort in his trolley to investigate.
“We could be here some time,” said one of the train crew. “Maybe an hour, maybe more.”
I should know that you never make plans when you travel by train, and I felt mine slipping away like a Karoo dust devil. Five hours late to Cape Town would mean an empty, echoing station, too late to find a hire car and sprint down the peninsula to waiting family.
I sat on the coach steps on the shady side of the train and watched the desert. Then as a flock of sheep came bleating past, scuffing up the dust, I felt something give — like a knot that I had been worrying over for years, suddenly unravelling under sore fingertips.
Yes, it was hot. But there was a restaurant car full of cold beer. Yes, the German tourist in 7E was grousing but the crew were all smiles. One passenger with a blood-red trade-union T-shirt had a party going in his compartment, where ice tinkled in those special nine-inthe-morning tumblers of brandy and Coke. There was the sound of muffled laughter and desultory conversation. A windpump creaked in the light air, and the sky was blue.
Suddenly I would not have wanted to be anywhere else. I rather hoped the rail was, in fact, broken, because then we would sit here for some time, suspended from the world and its lunacy.
As a traveller on a marooned train in Tanzania told me a long time ago, “If you’re sitting, you ain’t fighting.”
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LDo you have a funny or quirky story about your travels? Send 600 words to travelmag@sundaytimes.co.za and include a recent photo of yourself for publication with the column.