Not All Fun!

As I sit here before bed and write this I can hear the Jackals calling in the night. It’s nothing like you would expect a canine to sound. The sound is more like a mixture of alley cats fighting and small puppies whining. It’s a screechy sad, and lonely call.

But it’s not all fun and games, especially when you have to get a South African license. This is needed so I can drive on the safaris and it IS a process. First they don’t recognize a foreign license so you have to take your learners exam all over again. This time, however, I have to do the driving portion in a Standard after only one lesson. Yikes!

Last week we went to town to register for a Traffic Number, a process that only took 3 hours. You need this number to apply for a learner’s license. Yesterday was spent signing up just to take the written portion of the learners. There were only 8 out of the 16 that signed up yesterday and the other 8 went today because we wouldn’t have had time to get all 16 done in one day.

We were up at 5am, on the road by 6, drove an hour into town to meet the guys who were going to help us through the process, and it is a process. They then drove us to another town another hour away here we spent 3 hours moving from 1 queue to the next. It’s the most complicated system to get a license that any of us ever had to deal with and we haven’t even written an exam yet. They give you an eye exam; take your fingerprints and a digital photo of you even though you still provide them with 4 passport size photos. You go from one waiting line to the next and no one really tells you why you are waiting in each line. This is found out when you get close enough to the front to see what is going on. After all that you just feel annoyed, impatient and like you wasted your whole day for nothing and to top it off Thursday we probably do it all again because that is when we write the learners exam. All in all we never got to eat lunch until 2 in the afternoon and we didn’t go on a game drive today as was scheduled because the day was spent studying for the learners. South Africa, by the way, has a road sign for everything! 17 pages of road signs to learn many of them quite different to Canada’s.

Wish me luck on my written exam I’m not looking forward to it.

Photo (left to right; back row): Kimball, Dario, Declan, Marty, Chris, Trey, Ruth, Suzanne, Katie, Berry, Aislinn, John, Tom, (front) Tim, Me, Kathryn