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Africa -
Lesotho
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Written by anne-sophie redisch
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Page 2 of 2
While I pondered this and considered getting off, he suddenly spun the bus around and went the other way.
"Sorry," I said somewhat timidly. "Isn’t this bus going to Maseru?"
No response.
I repeated the question twice before one of the kid passengers turned around and said something incomprehensible. My knowledge of SeSotho is limited to "greetings sister", "thank you" and "I don’t have any", none of which seemed appropriate.
He raised his voice and repeated ... whatever he said, and it dawned on me that he wasn’t speaking to me. Instead he was telling his mate at the wheel to get moving. At least that was how the driver interpreted it. I hung on to the door, but to no avail. The door panel soon ended up in my lap and screaming seemed a definite option.
Even the king wasn’t immune to the hazards of driving in Lesotho. He had died driving off a mountain road here some years earlier.
While the driver kept up his Ayrton Senna impression, I noticed a car on our tail. Had these kids pinched the bus or something? Glancing quickly over my shoulder, I saw an arm waving something at us from the passenger side of the car. Something shiny!
I knew those were bullet holes! And I was obviously in the middle of a shoot-out! I could almost hear the told-you-so from friends who said not to travel on my own in Africa. They should have seen me now. I was scared, angry and just a tad nauseous. What if I threw up all over the driver, would that make him stop?
With those men right behind us, did I even want him to stop?
After a while, I realized there wasn’t any shooting and as we approached another road intersection, my guy spun around while screeching to a halt. This spinning around seemed to be a hobby of his. The car behind us stopped and a man approached us with the shiny thing, which upon closer inspection was a metal box.
It turned out my guy was indeed a bus driver, of legal driving age, who forgot his lunch. The man slapped my back, laughed out loud and explained that he was the guy's father and this whole thing was just a bit of father-son rough-housing. They did it all the time; although, he had to admit, rarely with foreigners in the bus.
Yeah, well…
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