Question #2 - Travel

My Uncle Nathan asked some questions about South Africa that I thought everyone would be interested in so I wanted to post the answers here on the blog. Here’s the second question. I’ll post different questions as I have time to answer them.

How safe is it to travel?
Travel is relatively safe. The drivers are pretty crazy but not as bad as some countries. For some reason, they love 4 way stops signs instead of traffic lights (which they call robots.) They have these huge 4 way intersections with 3 lanes in each direction and it is pretty much chaos crossing those intersections. It is kind of like playing the old Atari video game “frogger.” They have these taxi’s which are mini vans full of 15 people. The drivers are insane. They’ll cut across four lanes of traffic without looking, just to pick up a fare. You pretty much have to keep your distance from them. Easter is a huge holiday here. Huge masses of people travel for these gigantic Easter services. I think that over Easter weekend there were over 100 traffic related deaths. The country roads around here are very narrow and people pass in some very precarious situations. I’ve heard that where we live in Rustenburg it is safer as far as crime and car-jackings than in the bigger cities like Johannesburg. I’ve been told that in Jo-Burg the crime is much more violent and without any regard for human life. I’ve only heard of one car-jacking in Rustenburg since we’ve been here. It was a brand new BMW and the driver resisted and was stabbed. He died on the scene. We are careful to lock our doors and keep our windows up. It is also acceptable to do a rolling stop through stop signs, so I do that to prevent being a target for car-jacking. At robots (stop lights) I try to not pull close to the car in front of me in case I need to maneuver out of traffic. I say that to say that I am careful to not be a victim of crime on the roads, but I don’t really feel in danger. There is a lot of wealth in South Africa and there are a lot of BMW’s and Mercedez on the roads. I think that someone is more than likely to car-jack them than a beat up pick-up truck. Safety is an issue everywhere you go. Everyone from lower-middle class on up has security systems, security gates, barbed wire, burglar bars, etc. Stores have tons of security guards around. The armored cars for banks look like military tanks and I’m told that they carry machine guns. Everywhere you look you see barbed wire. All of that kind of makes for an unsettled feeling. Subconsciously I think that makes us feel a little tense and unable to relax. But in reality I think that most of those things are remnants from the apartheid era and the high crime that followed the fall of apartheid. I don’t live in fear for our lives, but we do take some precautions to be safe.