Carl Montgomery

most of you would know the trouble which is curently plauging Zimbabwe. here is my experience of this.

The few days ago i had the plesent expreience of running out of money. This left me with two options:

(a) Try to find a bank, try to get out cash which esentially puts my Aussie dollars into the hands of the current ruling regime.

or.

(b) hock my cloths on the black market at rock bottom prices and try and raise enough cash to leave the country by any means possible.

On princible, i chose (b) . What follows is one of those travel experience that is hard to put into words.

Upon explaining my predicement to a passing bus driver, i was wisked off to the local bus repair depot where after much haggeling of any salable items, i finally raised just enough to buy a ticket out of the country. Mind you this wasnt the usual comforatble tourist couch.

A lot of the people in Zimbabwe have been driven to the desperate situation of gathering any salable items they can, getting a bus across the border to South Africa, selling them one the streets for whatever they can get, then taking that money back to Zimbabwe to sell on the Black market in the hope they can survive.

I was stuffed onto one of those heaverly overloaded/overcrowded buses complete with all their baskets,boxes, cooking utensils bags, and any other salable item you can imagine. Next was 20 hours of this attempting to get to Jo’burg. Being with them and just as broke, I was josseled and harrased by border security as much as any other local trying to make this journey.

The sadest part of all this is that the Zimbabwe people themselves are probably some of the nicest, caring people you are likely to come across. It’s a crime that these people have been so badly let down by their current powers that be. Dispite the fact the others on the bus were as broke as i was, they were still happy to give me their food, drink, cigarettes and offer any other help to get me out of there.

After all this i’m now back in Jo’burg and fly back to Sydney tomorrow.

A few pictures of my travel companions follows

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 18th, 2005 at 3:01 am and is filed under Travels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.