To put it gently, by the time A and I arrived at the Intercape bus station at 10 pm in Johannesburg we were in no condition to deal with the shitshow that was about to hit us.
Though all our friends had been allowed to receive their visas at the Mozambican border for some reason the bus conductor this time was adamant about not letting us on without our visas. We yelled, we cried, we were generally drunk. Somehow I ended up being good cop and paid the people for a ride to the border while A cussed them all out in Spanish (which the entire bus understood because they all spoke Portuguese). Once on the bus the driver returned my money to me saying "look, I want to work with you on this one ok. If you run to the border and get your visa before the bus goes through we'll take you through". Appeased, I fell asleep.
At 3 am we awoke to run through to the border. After waiting for a measly 10 minutes I was issued my visa and ready to head back to the bus to continue my nap. Too bad it's never so easy.
In a border - where their only job is to stamp passports and print visas at 3 am they had run out of toner. They couldn't print A's visa. There were no replacements -- the next replacement for toner would come around 2 pm that day. We were going to be stranded on the border of South Africa and Mozambique at 3 am.
To make a long story short -- after much protest the border finally wrote A a handwritten visa and promised to send a real copy to the bus station in the capital for us to pick up later that afternoon. However, before we arrived we received news that they had lost her photo and fingerprint information and had to take another bus back to the border and then take the local transit (jampacked with people carrying bags of flour, chickens, who knows whatelse) to the capital city ourselves.
Just writing this entry has tired me out. whew.
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