Safe in Joburg...

Our Avis guy collected a very nice new Toyota Corolla to take us to our accommodation. He knew the suburb & the hotel we were going to as soon as we mentioned it....so that was a very good start!! We jumped in the car and headed out of the airport for the freeway to Muldersdrift. He quickly turned off this route however, as there was an accident on the freeway and the peak hour traffic was reminiscent of Sydney...He asked if it was ok for us to take an alternate route...'OK' we said.......We jumped onto the back roads and alternate is definitely one way to describe it! The workers were leaving the city on foot, most of them running alongside the road hoping for a lift. If they had a car, it had a minimum of 10 people in it. The vans had legs and arms out the windows, the trucks and utes had people hanging on in the trays. (One guy was even hiding under a tarp smoking a cigarette.) It was sunset when we got in the car, and it got very dark very quickly. The drive went on forever! There were plenty of cars and not many road rules...our driver was a major offender: Driving on the side of the road, driving on the nature strip, cutting in front of other cars, running red lights, speeding, beeping beeping beeping. Considering we were driving alongside vans overloaded with South Africans, and we were two Australians comfortably sitting in a new car, we were quite nervous about him creating any road rage while we were in the car!! Expecting a half hour drive, an hour later we still hadn't reached the hotel. We started having doubts about his directional instinct, and when he said 'it's too far' out of the blue, we thought he was going to stop the car and make us get out on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere! We stopped at the top of an intersection, where it was very dark. He was waiting to turn the corner, and had to wait for oncoming traffic to pass when he locked the doors. (It may have something to do with the three folks pushing a broken down car towards us!). It wasn't far down the road where we pulled into Misty Hills (an hour and a half after getting in the car). They had security at the gates, and a long driveway to the reception area. We were welcomed by Klassy (and his golf cart) and checked in for our first night in South Africa.