More Adventures in the North-West Province

As the crow flies, Sun City is probably about 75 or 80 kilometers from Randberg. Unfortunately neither Mark nor I are crows. (Do they even have crows in South Africa? I've seen very few birds here period, and none of those have been large, black ones.)
After the time we spent at Sun City, the casino, racing on the lake, and visiting a crocodile farm, Mark and I set-out for Randberg around an hour before sunset. I had wanted to be back at the hotel before it as full-on dark; we'd been warned about being out and about at night.

It all seemed to be going so well. We made it onto Route 510 and down to the R24 and were well in the way to the Magaliseberg mountain range when the first snag to my plan occurred. A huge traffic jam in Rutenburg caused us to lose over an hour just getting into the township. The jam was caused by the traffic leaving a football pitch after an Orlando Pirates game. (I've looked it up, there is an Orlando in South Africa. It is in the Soweto township.) We were stuck in traffic for about two hours until we were past lake Olifantsnek.

By the time it became clear that we weren't going to make it to Randberg in time to have dinner at any of the restaurants near the hotel, we started looking for a place to stop for dinner.

We got back into the Gauteng province around 21:00 and still had seen no place that looked like a potential place to eat. The next major snag came as along shortly thereafter when I made a slight miscalculation in scale when changing from one map to another.

I should have turned east onto the N14 to head toward Pretoria (and Jo'Burg) rather than turning right (west) and heading toward Ventersdorp. With the full-on dark around us and the intermittent rain, we thought we were keeping the lights of Johannesburg to our left so we thought we where on the map that we were following. Unfortunately, there was no sign of anything out the car windows that was represented on the map. It was just after we had decided to back-track and look for and try driving toward Pretoria that we had the third (and last) impediment to returning to or hotel.

"What the hell was that?" I said as there was a really loud "BANG!" from the rear of the car.

"I don't know. I think we've had a blow-out! I have very little control of the car." Said Mark, slowing the car as he did. We pulled over and checked and yes, we had a flat in the left-rear of the car.

In the dark, in the middle of nowhere, in an unknown location, in a cell phone dead zone, in the middle of South Africa is a bad place to have a disabled car!" Didn't we pass a gas station or something a couple kilometers back?" I asked. "This thing is supposed to have Run-Flat tires… let's try and get to somewhere lit and change the tire there."

The lights turned-out to be a police station. Mark pulled-up under a lamp and I went in to get directions. Yes, we had made the wrong turning. Of course the woman in the station didn't know that. First she pointed at a place on the map that I thought that I had thought we were in. I asked if she was sure about that and she said yes.

"So, we're in Gauteng province and if we turn right we'll get to Johannesburg?"

"Go that way." She said, pointing west.

"So this is Gauteng?" I asked again.

"No, no, man! You in North-West." She replied. (indicating that going the way she had just indicated would take us away from, not toward our hotel. By dint of ignoring her directions we were soon back in Randberg and at our hotel around 23:00. The entire 100 KM trip took us only five ours to complete.

I hope that wherever you are today, your day has gone smoothly!

Don Bergquist - 05 March 2007 - Randberg, Gauteng, South Africa