Meeting People
By PG Jonker
The thing about leasure travel is not only the travel. You tend to meet interesting people too. Like the ladies I met at the Municipal Dump the other day.
OK, you may reason that driving down to the municipal dump does not count for leisure driving. However, if you have been the one who sawed and pruned the trees yourself, and loaded the stuff on the bakkie yourself, then by the time the bakkie is loaded to capacity it is an absolute feeling of leasure to sit back in the driver’s seat, relax, and drive down to the dump. Therefore, I submit, driving down to the dump does count for leisure driving. But I digress.
On this sunny winter Saturday I offloaded my stuff at the dump. Hard rains caused the only exit to be a two track spoor in the mud. While traversing the spoor I noticed three girls in the early twenties standing nearby, very nicely dressed. Very nicely, to be precise.
Now I did not find it strange to see these girls there. The neighbourhood where they presumably hail from is right adjacent to the dump, with a gate between the dump and the houses.
So when I passed them close by and the one wondered ‘How about a lift?‘ I thought I can just as well prolong the agony of another cession in the garden and take them to town, which is only about a kilometer away.
“Where to,” I asked.
“Where are yóú going,” asked the more confident one of the three.
“I’m going home, where do you want to go to?” I enquired again.
“Is you wife at home?” she asked.
Now somehow this discussion wasn’t going exactly the way I expected. Suspecting that my pure intentions might have been slightly misunderstood, I put my bakkie in gear and drove off. I kept watching the three in my rear view mirror, trying to figure out what has just happened.
At home I told my wife. She just shook her head and told me, “You really know nothing, huh?”
Not too long after that on a proper tour [more extended than the Saturday jol down to the dump] I pulled in at a petrol station in Katima Mulilo after dropping the rest of the family off at a shop.
While waiting for the pump attendant this very nice young girl walked past. She smiled at me, I smiled back. I mean, that’s mos the right thing to do. Her smile broadened, she hesitated and give me a little wave. It was not quite a normal wave, so I was not sure how to take this local friendliness further.
Just then I was interrupted by the pump attendant, and I had to attend to the task at hand. OK, you may think there should not be much of a task at hand, but it did take 5 of us an inordinate long time to get the oil cap off the 3.4 V6 engine of my bakkie. The young girl, in the meantime, went along her merry way.
When I picked put the family at the shop afterwards, I told my wife about this really friendly local girl.
Sayeth my wife: “You really know nothing, huh?”
Now I ask you…..
PGJ