Haha yeah you can't make this shit up.Grooter wrote:Mate you should write a book about this its fantastic
We got herded into the kombi by Mike, who was peaking.
He had gone from earth child to fugitive from a brutal regime in the space of seconds and was shitting bricks.
The doors slammed shut, and we were off down the road in a cloud of dust. He didn't slow down for corners, or people, which wasn't doing much for our state of mind either. The fear on his face gave a hint of what Sth. African authorities did to people they don't like, and they didn't like people with long hair and surfboards for starters and don't even think about the weed, which was stinking out the kombi just quietly.
The kombi hurtled down back roads to keep a low profile until we got out in the sticks again. The trouble was every road was a back road around here, and a kombi with 8 boards on top wasn't exactly inconspicuous.
We got a good distance between us and Port St. Johns and Mike the Mushy seemed to go off the boil a bit, but he was still tense and flogging the kombi.
Then the most remarkable thing happened. There were 3 people walking towards us down the dusty dirt road.
Two of them were black and the one in the middle was white, as we got closer we could see they were laughing and sharing an enormous joint rolled in newspaper. One of them was f**ken Hicksy!!
No time to ask questions, the kombi barely came to a stop, the side door slid open, several arms came out, grabbed Hicksy by the scruff of the neck and yanked him in.
The door slammed shut as we took off again. He could't find his passport, and had come back to find us. He had gone around the border check point on foot on a back road, bumbled into his two new friends and then us.
He was so relieved when I handed him his passport, all was right with the world again, well……
We pretty well put all that drama behind us, the further we got away from civilisation (if you could call it that) the more relaxed things got. Mike had one more stop to make in the Transkei, then it was an express all the way to Johannesburg airport, he promised.
We stopped at a general store in a shitty little town that consisted of nothing more than a general store and a few houses. It was at least 60 or 70 Kms from anything. Inside was a white friend of Mike's who owned the store. He took us out the back of his store to a kitchen area where we all sat down around a table and had tea and cake served to us by his black housekeeper. (by the way, almost every white household in Sth. Africa had a black housekeeper)
I went to lift the teacup to my face when this guy told me not to drink it, none of us were to eat or drink anything brought by the housekeeper. It was "mooti" (the double o pronounced like roof) black magic.
This guy was only the second white person we had seen in the entire Transkei, the checkout chick at Port St. Johns being the first.
The bloke explained to us that the local witch doctor had a spell on him, and was using the locals to administer more black magic on him. He was as mad as they get. His ramblings made no sense and we were starting to get pretty uncomfortable when he offered us all a length of woollen string to tie around our necks, it wards off the mooti. He was wearing the wool, but obviously it wasn't working.
Eventually Mike got us out of that place and bid his mad mate farewell. He explained to us that the housekeeper puts a drug in his food and drink, made up by the local witch doctor from a herb, which sends him insane. It's common practice around those parts, so they can walk into the general store and take what they want right under his nose. He thinks it's magic, it kind of is in a way.
We got out of the Transkei, the border was no problem, Mike seemed to know the guys at the checkpoint and babbled away in the local language to them for a while.
It was all black top highway now, and plenty of it. We took turns driving and all relaxed for once. The last stretch into the big smoke was my watch, Mike was due for a sleep so he gave me some simple directions, told me to wake him if I got lost and crashed out.
It was just getting light when I woke Mike to tell him I wasn't sure where we where. He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, looked around and freaked…again. We were in the middle of Soweto.
He didn't hesitate to jump in the drivers seat and drive like a madman again. The sun was just coming up and thousands and thousands of people were filling the streets to start their day. Apparently this was dangerous, I didn't see why but there's no doubt Mike did. He got us out of Soweto and back on track to the airport where we finally arrived with a few hours to spare.
We all said our goodbyes, made genuine promises we would never keep to say in touch and went our separate ways. Harry, Hicksy and I got back to Perth flat broke, we only had money to get halfway across the Nullarbor in my Valiant which was left at a relative of Hicksy's place. I can't even remember how we got home but we did. I think I sold my cassette collection to some young guy pumping petrol at a roadhouse in Eucla.
pics…Mike the Mushy (shirtless) Mike Sherman and his girlfriend Chrissy, changing a flat tyre somewhere.