Come to SA, it’s terr-affic!
30. Mar, 2009
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The N1 south, Pretoria – I’ve seen a lot of things during my short tenure on this planet, but the sight of commuters reading newspapers at the wheels of their cars has to take the biscuit. Fair enough, they were stationary at the time. Indeed, we all were, sitting a mere few metres from the end of the Lynnwood Road onramp on the jolly old N1, headed south to the happening centrum of Centurion and the beckoning bright lights of the big smog beyond.
This is the daily slog for anyone trying to get in, or out of our capital city at the moment as government goes mad throwing billions at infrastructure development in case anyone from Fifa might happen to wonder whether we can cope with the millions of extra people they have promised the likes of Ronaldinho are set to draw in when next year’s World Cup gets underway.
But it’s also the daily slog for our tour operators and transport providers.
Sitting at the bottom of the same Lynnwood Road onramp I counted no less than eight tour buses in the immediate stretch next to and ahead of me. All of them were full with rather bored looking visitors to South Africa.
The conundrum sounds all the more frustrating when I tell you that this was not even peak-hour traffic. No, dear hearts, not for me the daily dice with death on the race to get past the Allandale off and onramp. This was 11.30am. A time when traditionally traffic flows freely between the capital city and the city of gold.
It took me and the tour buses until 12.30pm just to get out of Pretoria before we all hit the wall, metaphorically speaking, at Centurion where they seem to be closing the highway in both directions with impunity, allegedly for “blasting”.
The blasting is for the blasted Gautrain and my feelings for that particular white elephant are similar to those I have shared ad infinitum on that rather large soccer tournament we are all in such a tizz about.
By this time I was feeling very sorry for the tourists in those buses. They didn’t pay over their hard-earned moolah to spend hours stuck in traffic jams. Which leads me to wondering whether we need to explore the possibility of introducing a “We’re Getting Ready For 2010 Discount”.
Is it fair to make tourists pay top whack when they are spending so much time watching gaggles of men in blue overalls and hard hats scratching their parts while the traffic backs up forever in each direction?
I personally have never seen any of said workers doing a stitch of work, save driving extremely muddy trucks in and out of extremely muddy ditches and spreading said mud all over the surface of the roads.
Wait. Hang on! I am actually lying in that last statement. I did see some of them working the other day. They were standing at the side of the highway casually waving red flags while chatting to one another on walky talkies and looking as bored as the drivers and passengers in what felt like a million stationary cars, trucks, buses and bakkies.
I can imagine the commentary in the tour buses…
“Ladies and gentlemen, to your left you can see construction underway on the pillars which will hold up the rails for the Gautrain which is going to be taking soccer fans and commuters to and from Pretoria and Johannesburg… and those men you see standing there in a loose group looking dazed and confused are the people building those pillars…”
If that isn’t designed to put the fear of God into Gautrain users, what is?
And if that doesn’t bore the backsides off the poor sods who had the misfortune to book a holiday in a country obsessed with reinventing itself in time for a sports event, then what will?
The real irony of this story is not that the tour buses are getting stuck in traffic, but that once they get past the swathe of frantic urban development in Pretoria and Josies and hit the roads to holiday heaven in the lowveld or wherever, they will find themselves on some of the most horribly maintained roads in history with potholes big enough to eat an entire 52-seater in one sitting.
But instead of spending some of the Gautrain billions on fixing that problem, the government chooses to spend a few millions making bright, reflective signs which read…. “Potholes!” or, more often than not, “Slaggate!”. Now, will someone please tell me if Mr and Mrs Joseph Q Public from Notting Hill in London are going to know what the freaking hell “Slaggate!” means when they’re belting down the Ermelo road on the way to Pongola?
Nuff said, methinks.
My name is Muzi Mohale a full-time travel blogger, your host at Travelwires.com responsible for all editorial on this blog. I blog about the travel and tourism industry in Africa. Apart from blogging about tourism, I also run 
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