After overnighting in the Road Lodge Johannesburg Airport, we collected our wheels the next day and drove away from J’burg as quickly as we could.
One of the two most striking things about the roads in South Africa is the number of lunatics that drive on them! These lunatics in Mercs and BMWs and in dangerously overcrowded mini vans seem determined to run any one, who’s not as mad as they are, off the road. Literally as it happens.
The unwritten law in SA is for slower drivers to drive on the hard shoulder when being overtaken which on some roads is pretty scary as the other striking things are pedestrians that seem to want to share the hard shoulder as well! Almost every road no matter how far away from any town village or city seems to have a continuous stream of pedestrians walking along the hard shoulder and worse still some are on the road where there’s no hard shoulder.
So driving in SA is an ongoing series of choices. Do you knock over the pedestrian coming towards you or keep on the road and get terrorised by a potentially unstable BMW driver. Once they pass you, the hazard lights politely flash if you moved over or a hand waves a one or two finger salute at you if you didn’t!
We were actually heading for Lesotho and it’s about a day’s drive away from J’burg just to the border, so we thought we’d overnight somewhere within striking distance. Well we found somewhere all right. More about that next time.

A Mini Van ‘depot’ in Johannesburg in South Africa. Mini Vans are the most popular form of public transport in the urban areas of South Africa.