Living for Disco

My friend and I go into Trip Travel to buy our bus tickets for Mozambique. We are very excited. I envision the procedure – we go in, sit down, say “Hello! Three return tickets to Maputo please!”, and then minutes later, we walk out in to the sun, and go for a coffee to celebrate.

“Hello!” I say, sitting down at the desk. “Three return tickets to Maputo please!”

I remember to specify that we don’t want to add a million unnecessary miles on to our journey by going via Cape Town. This seems to cause a minor problem, and we now have to book each leg of our journey separately.

We begin laboriously to go through the options. After about 7 hours, we have decided on a schedule, which involves spending a night in Jo’burg, trying not to get mugged or murdered. I keep telling myself that thousands of Jo’burg residents manage this every day, but still I am nervous, perhaps because I recently had dinner with some VSOs who had been based there. One of them managed to get violently robbed twice before they’d even had their security briefing.

It takes about three hours to book all of this. Then we start on the mammoth return journey.

When it is all booked, I assume, laughably, that the process is almost over. But no! We have to put names on all the tickets. This takes a further 48 hours, and involves another three Trip Travel staff coming over to offer assistance.

By this time, my head has been on the table for some time, drool slowly seeping from the corner of my open mouth, glazed eyes staring unseeingly at the 18-30 brochures on the shelf.

Finally we get around to processing the invoices. Each ticket must have its own invoice. There are 18 tickets.

“Will it take long?”, my friend asks, anxiously?

“Hahaha! No. It is quite a process but it will not take long.”

For the first time in this narrative, I am not exaggerating – it takes them one and a half hours to process the invoices. From within my semi-coma I notice that there is some concerned muttering going on, although they assure me that nothing is wrong.

Then comes the inevitable ritual with the highlighter. We sit, and they highlight all the relevant points on the ticket – each and every ticket – with pink pen.

During this process it transpires that one of the tickets has been issued in the wrong name. They rectify this by crossing out the incorrect name, and putting the right one in. Having traveled on the Intercape before, I am not convinced that this will work when it comes to the pettiness of the jobsworth ticket inspectors, and I don’t really want my friend to be trapped in Maputo for the foreseeable future. I ask them to get the Intercape office to fax through the correction.

The man at the Intercape office regrets that he is unable to fax this through due to the rain. I begin rhythmically to bounce my head off the table.

“I’m sorry,” I say, “but I’ve been through this kind of thing before. I really would like a faxed confirmation of the name change before I pay for this ticket.”

They call back the man at the Intercape office, who reiterates that the rain is causing untold mayhem to South Africa’s fax machines. They give the phone to me. Instantly, the man at the Intercape office agrees to fax the confirmation, right away. I wait for some time, and then finally decide to give it up as a bad job. I will come back on Monday, I tell them.

I return on Monday. “My god!” says the ticket lady. “Are you going to Mozambique with hair like that?” She recommends that I wash it out before I go.

I pick up the ticket, with the faxed name change confirmation. I’m not sure how my friend will feel about having to change her surname from Flynn to Flyll. I suspect that that will be easier, however, than requesting another correction.

Anyway, if the worst comes to the worst, I hear Maputo is a great city to live in.