Stone Ranger: Another Shopping Trip to Tzaneen

Well here I am sitting in Wimpy (a chain of café style restaurants which do really good breakfasts), drinking cappuccino and typing on the internet. Life in rural Africa can be really hard sometimes! We do it tough here. Which reminds me of some of the ‘curious’ and sometimes amusing differences between Afrikaans and English. In Afrikaans, a ‘café’ is a supermarket, and generally the only coffee you can buy comes in jars or tins. It took me about three weeks to figure that one out, as every time I went in to Gravelotte (the local small town), I was looking around for a coffee shop. An orange is a ‘lemoen’, pronounce ‘lemoon’, didn’t that one confuse me for a while as every time someone asked me if I wanted a ‘lemoen’ I said no and couldn’t figure out why everybody was eating an orange. On our radios when somebody wants you to talk they say ‘staanby’ in Afrikaans, pronounced ‘standby’ which means send, anyway for about a week I couldn’t understand why people were being told to ‘standby’ then talking.

Anyway, back to the topic, here we are in Tzaneen on our monthly grocery shopping trip and we have extra money to cover our two new staff. Mind you every time I go into Tzaneen I spend a lot of money. Today I am going to buy a raincoat, given that mine is doing the rounds of South African bureaucracy. If you think I am still annoyed about the whole issue then you are correct. After talking to customs they said that you have to write ‘old clothes’ or ‘used clothes’ on the parcel. Even without that why do they try and collect 80% import duty on one raincoat. I guess overseas internet shopping is not a bit thing in South Africa as it would be taxed at both country of sale and by RSA Customs.

The other night we occupied a clandestine listening post in a ‘sloot’ (pronounced slew-it) which is a creekline that has been used by poachers in the past to access the property. A good plan Gary, except that I forgot it was also one of the hippo paths. Not only that, it was about two metres from the boundary fence which the hippos also use as a territorial boundary and consequently mark it by copiously defecating while flicking their tails from side to side. This causes a spray of ‘shit’ up to about 2 m high. So in the middle of the night when I heard the hippos coming towards us I decided that discretion is the best part of valour and moved very quickly. I figured that if any poacher wanted to sneak in while the hippos were there then he was a braver man than me!

Anyway, off to spend some more money.