Waypoints

April 8th: Hoping to beat the traffic into town we left early this morning. The plan for the day was simple, go to the Nissan
Dealership, arrange a service. Go back to Shoprite. We managed to book a service for 7:30am on Thursday (I am definately
going to be busy that morning). And then we were at Shoprite again. We ambled about, purchased some necessities, and
some not so necessary, before heading onto another smaller, local shop, the "Koala". We had heard that if we parked in their
parking lot we could pick up a decent wifi signal, and as you may have gathered by now, the need to update this site, as well
as check up on local news is getting quite desperate. When we arrived there there was a decent signal, so I sat, hidden in the
back seat of the car, which by now was functioning as its own mobile oven with me as the roast, and worked on this damned
site! If starvation hasn't led to the emaciation of James then this bleeding sweat and stress inducing site has! whew, now that I've vented I feel a lot better.

April 9th: Went into town early again. Yes, back to Shoprite. Then at 2pm we returned to the Nigerian consulate to get our
visas which, in the end, were only completed at 4pm. Fearing for another two hour traffic excursion we motored it out of the city

as quickly as possible, using alternative routes and byways to avoid the bulk of the congestion. This time we managed the
trip in an hour. Because this was to be one of our last nights with Johan he has decided to cook for us. He has been talking
up the brilliance of his pinnakaas (peanutcheese! hahahaha - it's the dutch translation for peanut butter) sauce, chicken and
indonesian spiced rice dish the entire trip, lets hope it lives up to expectations.

April 10th: This morning Pat and Sarah left before the crack of dawn to go get the car serviced. Surprise surprise, I stayed
behind, I had a lot of work to do. Johans pinnakaas recipe was actually really very nice, so nice in fact that I had the leftovers for breakfast. At 4pm Sarah and Pat returned with what appeared to be a brand new car, it was green and shiny with tinted
windows, not the crap brown, smoky heap I'd become accustomed to.
Being our last evening in Kokro Bitey, and since we had promised people we would cook a poetjie, then this evening had to be
designated as the night for people to "chew on the gristle of our heritage". And chew on the gristle they did. The size one
poetjie pot is only designed to cook for a maximum of four people, we had to cook for ten. So the whole poetjie experience
diminished into a common stew experience. The other setback was that the beef didn't get to cook for long enough and
became as chewy and tough as a geep. I fear we may have instilled more indigestion than a desire to visit SA and repeat
the experience. One upside to the poetjie however, is that it still took a few hours to prepare, and during this time the future
Big Millys owner, Mat, kept plastering himself and us with booze, so that by the time the food arrived everybody was
inebriated enough not to fully register the state of the food. You gotta love the poetjie.