Get your own Free Home PageIt was during not the last great drought, but the one before that. I had gone solo hiking in the eastern Transvaal Drakensberg of South Africa for about a week. I chose that location because there just happened to be a train going to Tzaneen when I got to Johannesburg station. Anyway after the hike, coming down off the mountains to the plains, I reached the dorp of Tzaneen again and found that there was no convenient train. So I resolved to hitchhike down to Nelspruit, down in the lowveld where my brother lived.
And so setting off, I got a lift with a bakkie a good many k's into the middle of the platteland. And there I stood in the afternoon sun, and watched the tall thunderclouds march across the dry, dry plains. No one gave me a lift.
Eventually an old Swazi came up to me, and told me to give up hope. He said that further on was just black homelands for hundreds of k's, and no black would give me a lift for fear of trouble from the police. So if a car came from the north I stuck my thumb out for it, if it came from the south, I walked across the road and tried that side as well.
Thus I ended up in a very battered bakkie, full of tomatoes going back the way I came. The farmer said the station master at Tzaneen was "full of kak", and the train to Nelspruit would be going past tomorrow. Thus I ended up at a small rural station called Letsitele, south of Tzaneen. I asked the station master if I could sleep the night on the station lawn. Never will I forget the endless sound of diesel electric trains shunting up and down during the night. Or the twenty full mosquitoes in my tent, the next morning. But I get ahead of myself.
After buying my ticket, I strolled into "town" in the early evening twilight, to see what there was to see. I think its that twilight that makes the whole incident stick in my mind so. The dry, dry air and the purple light, and the distant flickering as the thunderstorms crashed into the blue mountain peaks. The peaks I had been walking amongst two days ago. Letsitele is a tiny "dorpie", a tar road comes in one side. Goes straight past three shops, a post office and a police station, and then off over the railway. And straight on into the distance.
Beyond the dorp, aloes, naabooms, goats and dry grass.
As I came to the side of the road, I could see a bakkie in the far distance. It was travelling fast, past the dry koppies, bare veld and scrawny goats. Roared past me. Screeched to a halt. Reversed full speed and stopped beside me.
It was an ESKOM bakkie. (Electricity Supply COMmission bakkie, I remember that quite clearly). The guy leaned out the window and said, "Where can I find Mr Carter?" That's my name I thought. How does he know? I haven't said it to anyone for over a week! While I stood gaping there, he continued, "Mr Carter. Where can I find Mr WJ Carter?" That's my dad's initials and he had been dead of nearly a decade. I stood gaping there like the village idiot. He slammed the bakkie into gear, roared off over the railway and into the far distance.
Strange, I looked in the phone book.
There are no Carters in Letsitele.
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