Taxi Van

This past week I had one of the most thrilling experiences in my life, or at lest in the past five years I can honestly say.
So it started at 10 o'clock in the morning last week, Thursday. A trip to Cape Town, South Africa. We had planned on just simply boarding the train in Stellenbosch, taking a taxi ride to the beach, and enjoying the day on the beach. Little do we know as Americans about how the train and taxi system works in Africa until after you experience it for yourself. The description alone may not even come close to what it is truly like.
To start, my experience with trains has been good to this point in life. Europe, my first time on a train, was beyond what I had expected. The seats were nice, comfortable, and the train moved quickly from town to town, and even bypassing some. New York, my second time on a train in a different location. It was good, slower than the Eurorail, however, the seats were nicer, there was so few people that I had a seating section to myself, and they had power strips so I could watch movies on my laptop the whole nine hours.
This last Thursday, however, was a totally different experience. The train looked almost as though it should be out of commission. The outside is a sight to see, but the inside, it was not so much. The seats were small, not too comfortable, and the isle was maybe a foot and a half wide. Still more, this train was the loudest and most bouncy and squeaky train I have ever ridden in. The train stops here in absolutely every town, maybe 15 or so, between Stellenbosch and Cape Town, which is hard to imagine because by car the ride is a half an hour. The train ride alone took us an hour and a half, solidly. The slowest train I have ever been on. And the train station itself in Cape Town is just as crazy as the train ride itself. It is total chaos there.
The Taxi Van. An experience that everyone should know and share with each other. At first, it seems sketchy, a little frightening maybe, your kind of unsure really. So, you have a van, a driver, and a wrangler (the breakdown), and up to 16 passengers squeezed in like sardines. The whole time we were in the taxi van to the beach, the driver is pulling over every few street blocks dropping passengers and gaining more passengers. and while all of this is going on, the wrangler in our first taxi van was yelling out the window and running around the van in the street every time we dropped passengers off. As if all of this was not enough, we were dropped off at the wrong place in town by our first driver.
Now, back up real quick to when we first got on the van. We were in the van for approximately 15 minutes before the van moved trying to max the number of passengers. There are other van wranglers trying to steal passengers from vans while the vans are waiting to take off as well. There was one wrangler in particular that did not want to give up on the five of us. He tried to get in our van and talk to us, he came up to my window after he got kicked out of the van, and just kept persisting. It was a crazy moment in time.
Back to the present time. We were dropped off at the wrong place. So, what else do you do than try and get another taxi van to get where you want to be, right? Out of all the taxi vans in Cape Town, South Africa, what other van would choose to pull over than the one van you try to avoid riding from the beginning. You remember the persistent wrangler I described from the beginning of this trip in the taxi to the beach in the last paragraph, well, you may have guessed, it was the same van that pulled up. The van that we tried to avoid at the beginning was the van we hopped on next. The look on the wranglers face was great. We were of course in shock and awe of the whole happening until after we got out of the van. Funny enough, that second van was the best of three vans we had to ride that day. Funny how things like that happen.
The worst part of the trip though, which is impossible to explain here, is the traffic of Cape Town. Unless you have driven in Europe in a crowded city, India, Africa, you just can't understand what the traffic is like.
It was quite a day. What seemed like a great day at the beach ended up as  three hours at the beach and about four to four and a half hours just getting there and back.
I believe that this is an event that everyone should and should have the privilege of going through.