CAUSING CHAOS IN DORDRECHT

When last did you cause a crash?

Surely this only happens in the movies, right? Like in those comedies when some buxom blonde walking down the sidewalk brings the traffic behind her to an expensive standstill. Yeah, I thought it was impossible until I parked the Sport Turismo outside a two-bit diner buried in the bowels of Dordrecht in the Eastern Cape.

While I made small talk with the proprietor and picked at a chicken burger, a crowd of men started assembling around the flanks of the blue Porsche squatting out in the dusty forecourt. Old camera phones were plucked from pockets; whistles and indistinct exclamations carried on constantly through the afternoon air.

Then we heard it: a quick chirp of locked tyres on tar followed by the terrible and distinctive crash of steel on steel. Peering out the window, I feared the worst. But what met my eyes was pure comic theatre. A man in a minivan, transfixed by the site of the Porsche, had crashed into a bakkie whose driver had also stopped to see what all the fuss was about.

And what a fuss it now was. Shouting. Hooting. More men. More cameras. Growing frenzy. Even though we needed fuel, I decided to risk running dry and to get the hell out of Dordrecht before any further chaos – or damage – ensued.