Pinot, Bretzels, and Cathedrals

The first time I tried for a driving license I failed the parking test. It was after 6 weeks of training with a retired traffic officer, (because the reality of learning to drive with either of my parents was never going to be the best idea when I was 18), on the day in question that January during my last school summer, I headed down to the Maritzburg testing grounds way down the other side of town in Mkhondeni.

I don’t know if the test is the same now- 27 years later, but hopeful candidates would have a yard test before being tested on the open road. The yard test included a quick 360 degree vehicle inspection, a 3-point turn, and 2 parking tests. The latter three manoeuvres would not allow for hitting a parking pole. If you were bad enough to do this, it would require instant failure. Do not pass begin. Do not collect two hundred rand.

Having mastered the art of an ‘alley docking’ park on my first attempt while in training , my trainer hadn’t pursued those practises, and as you would expect, while doing the alley dock in my test, I bumped a pole.

So yes, my first driving license attempt was a failure. My training officer later dropped me on the side of the road somewhere in Scotsville a good half hour before I expected to see my Mom who was coming to collect me, and that was a sad sad moment. So sad and in shock, I wasn’t even crying.

Getting a driving licence at the age of 18 is a rite of passage for a fair portion of South Africans. For us in the farming community, it was a ticket to freedom. For many who had been driving tractors from the age of 8, or driving parents home from the club, it was a legal notch that needed to be filled.

Mind you, it’s not to say that a gift of a car actually came with a successful pass, but like any 18 year old- it’s that serendipitous moment when we didn’t need mom or dad to drive us to the movies. Or pick us up at Take 5 at 2 in the morning.

Later that January, without a driving licence, I moved down to Durban for my year of studies. The absence of a licence wasn’t a problem I guess. It was the year I lived in a small private residence about 1.5km’s away from the culinary college I attended and my house mates and I would walk to lessons every day- even in that humid Durban heat.

4 months later I redid the test out in Rossburgh in Durban. I’d redone lessons, this time with a cool older woman, but mainly focused on the parking stuff. Durban, being a seaside town at the bottom of the ‘berg, was not a flat city and Rossburgh itself was typical hilly. I’d been cautioned about having to do a hill-start so as you would expect from me, I was nervous.

Naturally I passed, despite stalling at a red traffic light, and overshooting a yield intersection. But I think the testing officer just put it down to nerves. And this was 10 years before the lucrative bribery corruption that is now a side-hustle of the licensing business.

Still, having a valid driving licence didn’t come with a car, so my year living in the city was spent catching lifts with classmates who had cars, and my darling aunties who also lived in Durb’s coming to fetch me if I was sleeping over at their house for a weekend away. How we ever managed to coordinate these efforts was either very simple or complicated as we didn’t have mobile phones. I would get a lift home to the farm every other weekend either with Kerry who was studying to be a teacher, or Colin who worked in Durban and would drive back to their farm in Boston on weekends, or The Judge, if he was presiding in Durban, and was commuting. Aunty Cathy would pick me up for a night at hers, or I would do the long walk down to Adele’s on the other side of Musgrave.

City life is different to rural South Africa and when I finished my studies that November, I took a job offer in the North West Province, at a luxury lodge in the Madikwe Game Reserve. It was 800 kilometres from home, and Mom and Dad drove me up there. It was a 2 day trip, and with a host of new experiences on my palate, I remember very little. I think it was the last long road trip in our 1982 red Mercedes Benz.

Working at River Lodge was a cosy family type set-up. We worked 6 weeks at a time, day in and day out, from sun up to sun down and beyond. We didn’t get much of a chance to drive anywhere. And if we had quiet nights at the lodge and didn’t need all staff to serve dinner, the ranger-guys I worked with would borrow a game-drive truck and we would pack a cooler box and enjoy a night under the stars waiting for the lions to call.

However, when the time came for me to take my 10 days off, I was stuck at the back end of nowhere and trying to get home became a mammoth undertaking. In the end, I had to wait for a colleague with a car to give me a lift to Jo’burg or Pretoria and from there I would take the Greyhound bus to Maritzburg where Dad would collect me at the crack of dawn (4am is when the bus would pull in, as I often took the night bus). Even so- the little complications that arose from these plans had its own challenges. It was possible to phone the Greyhound ticket office to book my pass, but when it came to paying for it, I was stumped. In the end I had to phone my Dad to buy it for me, and this was the days before emails and smartphones- I suspect I arrived at the ticket office with a fax in order to collect my paid-for ticket.

What was the first thing I did on that first trip home after 2 months?

I applied for my own credit card.

The passing of time in 1997 was marked in pockets of time away from work. Each period of 6 weeks was marked with something or other. After the credit card application , my next journey home was labelled The Blistered Foot occasion- an enormous infected wound on the upside of my foot after a dollop of boiling caramel took a few dermal layers to their death. I walked around shoeless for a month, and that particular trip back to the farm started in an open Landcruiser that was going in for repairs. That chilly early morning departure that April, the sun just rising over the Madikwe hills, my foot resting on the dashboard where I could try keep it warm, since there was zero chance I was getting a hiking shoe over the wound.

A trip 4 months later was delayed as I couldn’t get a lift to Joburg (and by then the Zeerust Greyhound line had shut down). By the time I eventually booked passage on the bus, my grandfather was in hospital. I must have had a afternoon trip then because my dad picked me up and drove me back to the farm at 9 in the evening, telling me how my grandfather was not doing well. I knew about this- he hadn’t been well for a month, but I hadn’t tried to take my leave earlier. That night I crashed into bed, exhausted after the long commute, with the promise that we would go and see him first thing in the morning, complete with a set of photos that I had printed from the camera him and my grandmother had bought for me on my previous holiday. I woke up early the next morning, with a weariness on my shoulders. My dear grandfather, Errol Carr, had passed away in the early hours of the morning. I grieved long and hard that break, wearing all the matter of black clothing I could find, and carrying all the guilt of my naïve 19 year old self that I had waited for the chance to get a lift.

Somehow or other, the next pocket of holidays seemed to have been spent travelling, as my photo album has photos of cousin Heathers 21st birthday in Jo’burg and some photos from Mpumalanga where I must have gone with a colleague to another lodge for a night or 2 with the reciprocity offer, and by the time I started preparing for the last trip home in 1997, my Dad had decided it was time to offer me the use of the little Nissan bakkie he’d bought for us. Blue- the name she was given, was a gentle but sturdy run around ‘bakkie’- for lack of a better word. (It’s a South African version of ute, I guess). I took ownership of Blue for a trial period- my Dad rightfully had concerns about his precious oldest daughter travelling the 800km’s on my own. The initial trip was to see if I could cope with the journey, so long as I broke it up into 2 days of travel.

Blue was small, a zooty 1400 bakkie, seating for just 2, but she had a canopy on the back and a radio and tape deck up front. And I remember this very distinctly because at some point my favourite music band- U2- had come to South Africa for their first concert ever. I hadn’t been able to attend, but for some weird reason, the government broadcasting corporation the SABC- had ‘streamed’ the concert live on the radio. Did I tape that entire concert? You bet I did. And I played that tape over and over again, both sides, until the tape stretched. When the time for my first solo trip arrived, I packed my bag, bought myself a very cool Stanley flask for coffee, made sure my very round John Lennon style sunglasses were in the glove box and a box of tapes up front. Those were the days that it was possible to take the alternate routes across certain parts of the N3 highway to avoid paying toll fee’s but oh, the freedom of hitting that route with the window down, the speedometer all the way up and the tchoons of my favourite music blasting their way into the blue South African skies.

One period of using Blue proved to my Dad that I was able to travel the distance. It’s probably a good thing I never told him of when Mozi and I were hurtling back to work after a night at Sun City, taking the corners on the dirt road a little to fast and tight, and losing the wheels in the dust, spinning across the dirt road and crashing into one of the many infernal sickle bush shrubs that lined that overgrazed barren land, all the while hearing Celine Dion belting out its all coming back to me now…

April 1998 I took ownership of Punkin, a pumpkin coloured Toyota Tazz that my Dad had found as a demo model at the Howick Toyota dealership. The money I had been investing in a unit trust for 12 months now became loan payments and I had a nifty little (very noticeable colour) hatchback car to run around in. My very first trip back to the North West also saw my very first speeding fine- late Sunday evening, sun setting over the Marico valley, and I cruised out of Swartruggens from the stop street, hitting 90km’/h while still driving in a 60k’ zone. It was a fine I was able to finagle out of after writing the traffic department a courteous letter of apology.

The driving seat of Punkin sat a little higher than the Datsun so having my arm hang out the window on those hot journeys every 6 weeks saw me arrive at my destination with a suntanned arm, and a lousy stripe across my face profile where my sunglasses arm rested on my ears. For a stop-over en route, I told my Dad I would spend the night with my friend Michelle, who I worked with and whose parents lived close by – 2 hours drive away near Sun City. (This was by far from ideal given his reasons for enforcing a lay-over, but he took it anyway). We would roll in to the Pilanesberg 2 hours after finishing work and assemble the Sun City friends, have pizza dinner at Leonardo’s, night club action at Traders, catching the Sun City shuttle back to other hotels where we would crash until the next morning. People knew me by my car. Living in the North West Province, 🇿🇦 meant low density populations so we travelled a bit when we got some down time, either to the other side of the park or we would nip across the border and go out jolling in Gaborone. This often meant we missed the closing time for the border post, and yes, I can admit to sleeping in my car on more than one occasion at Derdepoort border crossing to be the first one to cross at 6am when the old cockerels raised the police from their barracks. I’m certain even they knew me in my car.

5 years later, having left Punkin with my brother for 2 years while I was in London, I took her back into my home when I moved to Jo’burg. Alas, when things started needing repairs and I was worried of a breakdown after finishing work at midnight, I decided to trade Punkin in for a newer car.

Was this the most grown-up thing I did at that stage in my life? Walking in to a Volkswagen dealership asking to see their previously owned cars and filling in paperwork for a new loan and insurance? Maybe. But I drove out a week or 2 later in a sexy red Polo Playa 1600 hatchback- and she gave me many happy years of driving.

Do red cars go faster? I like to think they do. Damn, I loved that car so much. Nifty and small (not that small parking spaces are such a big deal in South Africa) but she had an awesome engine capacity and never left me gasping for breath trying to scoot up William Nicol in morning traffic. I found out much later that that version of the Polo was one of the safer small hatchbacks on the road at the time.

I drove that Polo all the way until 2011, 8 years is a good run I guess. We’d had some run-ins with other vehicles- I gently nudged a ‘bakkie’ in traffic resulting in what appeared to be minor scratches to the bumper, but a shifted radiator and air-con tubes severed which all cost me more than I hoped months later when summer arrived. But again, once you start paying for repair jobs more frequently, it’s time to cut your losses. Or maybe it was that she was never quite the same after the contents of a packet of fresh fish spilled into my boot. Let me just tell you, there is absolutely nothing that removes the smell of rotting fish from a car.

Nonetheless my next car purchase was boring- another Polo, but a sedan in silver with a smaller engine capacity. It was a sad day but the stability of a new car was more important by then as I had 2 young kids.

2 years after that we moved to a France and it’s weird to think back to that moment when I walked away from the dealership without my keys swinging from my fingers that I would not own a car for more than 10 years after.

2013 was when we moved to France. The same year my South African drivers licence card expired, and I didn’t get round to renewing it as Anton had said we would exchange it for a French card when we settled. Alas, this little slip up has had far reaching consequences as when we eventually settled in our permanent residence and could do the application for an exchange, my SA licence had fully expired and the French authorities refused to accept it as valid. It would require a new licence card and this needed to be done within 365 days of our arrival in France. And you know that this wasn’t going to happen- getting any rapid service for a licence card out of South Africa in 2013/4 would have been magic, not to mention me being able to afford the cost of the plane tickets to go out and renew it. So we left it. I became a person who couldn’t drive. Not that I had much intention to- let me be honest. Imagine- driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road, in a foreign city, in a foreign language? That’s just every single one of my anxiety issues rising to the forefront of my life. No. There was way too much at stake to warrant trying to drive.

Thus began my decade of bicycling and using public transport.

There’s a thousand worse places to be stuck with this problem though, and it hasn’t been terrible. Firstly, this city is recognised as being one of the top European cities for bike usage- we have a fantastic dedicated network of cycle paths that make commuting safe and being a city, it has a great public transport network, as expected of any European city. And yes, waiting for buses in the rain is annoying, trams during rush hour are a nightmare, there are pros and cons to any transportation in the world. Driving in rush hour traffic, day in and day out can be justifiably tiresome, whereas if you’re on a bus, it’s possible to simply relax while somebody else stresses. Biking is liberating- it’s the quicker option, but it depends on your bike – or how much you love it- and obviously in the rain and snow, you don’t really want to be there.

One benefit to my being without a licence is the hours I’ve spent commuting on a bus with my kids, and they have learned how to commute on their own- at a younger age than if we weren’t in the city.

However, as time will always remind you, nothing stays the same and it took a foray into the world of house hunting last year that made me realise what I have been missing. We’re in the market to buy property. Or the intention to anyway. We’d found a cute house outside the city, a train ride away, but not accessible on the bike or bus/tram network. With my working hours being anti-social, it would have proved impossible to work evenings and get home on my own, and already terrified to look for a new job, we decided against buying that house.

But it did raise the idea that I’m stifled. Even without looking at my job restrictions, I can’t even go travelling outside the city limits on my own, so now early morning photography in the mountains, or even being able to drop off baked products as I have spent the last 2 years doing.

Thus we have set myself a goal to actually try do my French drivers licence. I’m going back to basics, I’m having to read and learn the French Code- the theory of a learners license for which i need to pass the test with a favourable result of 36/40 correct answers. There is very little space for manoeuvring- and given how I have observed the French actually driving, I wonder how it is actually ever passed?

The theory is mostly what you would expect from it- road signs, driving etiquette, safety rules- for the most part. But much as I have discovered these First World country nanny states to be, it’s the safety rules that make passing the Code more frustrating than I expected. The laws contradict each other depending on various situations (I am forbidden from hooting if I’m in a city, but I’m expected to hoot if I see danger in the countryside). I’m expected to know the difference between disc brakes and drum brakes, and mathematical sums need to take the forefront of my mind to determine my required safe following/braking distance. Rules of penalties differ depending on what method of driving lessons a learner has undertaken their test- it could take 2 or 3 years depending for a learner driver to achieve their full array of allocated points. Speed limits also differ depending on whether you’re a learner driver or not, and do you think I can remember the difference between the colour coding on the beacons? Red, grey, blue, one stripe or 3?? Or what a sign board will determine depending on if I’m driving in a built up area or outside an ‘agglomeration’ (a word that seems to have no obvious English translation).

I spent my 6 weeks of surgery recovery online trying out test after test, reading up on the laws if I didn’t understand them, but having gone back to work and I’m not doing it daily, I’ve lost the momentum.

Meanwhile, my incredible husband has bought us a second family runaround car. After a trip to Italy last year, I’ve become obsessed with red Fiat 500’s (because it actually always had to be red) and when we found a second hand one for sale (and available cash flow) we bought me a car. I say me, but the reality is that Alex might end up driving Red legally before me. She’s (Red, the Fiat) a small nifty small car that fits grocery shopping and the kids in if the weather requires them getting a lift. Also, Thandi loves Red and (illegally) rides up front like a Boss if given half an opportunity.

The opposite side to this conversation, however, is that it’s unusual for families to have more than one car, and we’ve received some unexpected responses when I mentioned it. I guess it’s the European perspective surrounding lack of space plus the impact it makes in the environment- all valid reasons, but we all have different lives don’t we?

Do I miss driving? A little I think. I miss the open road, not so much rush hour traffic and having to deal with others on the roads. And on one hand, perhaps this was a real ‘a little spoilt’ purchase – I would be too terrified to navigate my own self through from our home to friends houses on the other side of town- but also if you think what I’ve physically taken away from myself by not driving freely – it’s akin to having a fundamental right and privilege taken away from me (if I let myself dwell in it too long.)

And so I continue to practice the theory of the Code, a little more difficult now that I’m back at work for 40 plus hours a week. But needs must be met right?

And on that note, I bid you bon nuit, ciao ‘til next time.

Wishing you all the best, hope you are keeping well.

My love,

G.

Xxx