The Dark Continent

In my travels I've had a lot of fun but I've also had the usual fuck-ups. Food poisoning in Madrid (dodgy hotdog which was all I could find to eat at Madrid airport), broken ankle in Amsterdam, cocking up currency conversion in my head and giving a Spanish taxi driver £150 when I should have given him £15, over-generous locals in Austria where I was virtually kept prisoner by the local rockers so they could practise their English on me – Christ, the list goes on. So I think I'll tell of my time in Johannesburg.

I was sent over to Johannesburg by the company I worked for to install and commission a bunch of servers and then get them to talk to the rest of the company's global network. A nice doddle of a job that should have taken me a couple of days at most. So I gathered my travelling kit (I travel very light and just buy what I need when I get there), sorted out the tools and software I needed and jumped in a cab to the airport. I was looking forward to the trip as I'd never been to Africa before and I'd always really wanted to go there.

The flight was long and uneventful and I eventually landed at Jo'Berg and headed to the Business Lounge to wait for my driver/bodyguard. Yup. I had a bodyguard. Over the previous years we'd had a few of our guys hurt out in Jo'Berg. Law and order seemed to have pretty much broken down so the company had arranged for visiting engineers to be looked after by a minder. After a while a pretty black girl called my name out and I wandered over to her and was joined by Yank called Marc. The black girl led us through the terminal to a pick-up point and we were met up by a well dressed black guy who introduced himself as Steve. He was our driver/bodyguard for the trip. We got into his limo and he went through the rules. The do's and don'ts to be safe in Jo'Berg. It pretty much boiled down to don't do or go anywhere without him.

After the lecture, we then set off for the drive to our hotel. I was getting late and I was knackered and wanted a couple of beers and a good kip. We got to the hotel without any problems, checked in and then went to our rooms to dump our gear. We had adjoining rooms with Steve in the middle one and we were told not to lock the doors connecting the rooms just in case. Weirdest trip I'd been on so far. When we'd freshened up, Steve took us down to the bar and we had a few scoops before crashing for the night.

Next day was pretty routine – headed off with Marc and Steve to a massive compound some distance from Jo'Berg. The compound was like a concentration camp with checkpoints, miles of barbed wire and a fair number of savage-looking dogs. Once inside the compound we were told that we were safe (actually, I'd never felt in the slightest bit threatened anyway) and the local on-site techie came to pick us up and we bumbled off to our work for the day. The server set-up went without a hitch and by the end of the day I had finished what I came over to do so the next couple of days before flying back were my own.

That night, Steve took us out to Soweto. Now that was a bit of a head-fuck. The sprawling township was a world apart from the city centre and was very, very busy. We eventually ended up in a Shabeen in the middle of nowhere where we were drinking weak beer and very strong brandy. Steve pointed out a couple of white guys, Germans across the other side of the room.

"They won't last long" he said. "Not bright to come down here by yourself – you two are OK, you're with me, but those two are just stupid."

I was a bit concerned and asked Steve if we shouldn't ask them to join us to keep them safe but he shook his head.

"If I did that, then I might not be safe," he said

So we carried on drinking and talking for the next few hours. A few bar-girls (hookers) joined us and, although we bought them drinks, we weren't daft enough to invite them back to our hotel. AIDS – the curse of Africa. In fact, never in any of my travels have I ever had anything to do with Ladies of the Night. Not from any moral standpoint, I've just never had the desire to pay for sex... (OK, I was married but that was different. More expensive for a start...). And so the night wore on.

Eventually it was time to leave and we stumbled into the night. I was pretty drunk as was Marc but Steve seemed to still have his wits about him. As we got outside, Steve nodded down the alley. Lying in the filth, bollock-naked, were the two German engineers. We got into the car and Steve explained that they'd been drugged, taken outside and robbed of everything of any value. The police would swing by eventually and pick them up.

Life is a little different in Jo'Berg.



© Legless
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