2007.02.01 | bus trip to kynsna

right, so i figured i'd try this whole blogging thing. seeing as andrew created a blog for this trip to thailand, i thought that i'd make one for my trip to poland. for those of you looking for tails of relentless prostitutes, brothel/massage palours and fun gay bars; i'm afraid you'll be greatly disappointed. you'll have to read andrew's blog for those sorts of stories. well not that i'm avoiding these things, it's just that the odds of it happening are rather slim.

so this is it, day one, the 31th jan. it's 18h30 and i'm currently on the bus to knysna (for those of you that know my plans, you'd know i'm off to knysna before my trip to poland). so far, so good. the bus is not full (at least not yet), which is great, but i suspect there will be more travellers getting on at bellville and somerset west :(. baby count: i think only one (at least that's the only one i've heard so far. hopefully it will be quite for the duratuin of the trip. battery status: 3 hours and 44 minutes remaining.

i'll try and post pictures when i can (i.e. not using gprs). the picture quality will be rather shit though, as all i have is my cellphone camera. i hear there's a great russian market in poland where you can get cameras and such for cheap, but that's a bit too late.

seems we've hit belville, just about to see how many more people are getting one. ekkk, quite a few. hopefully most will be family members that are staying behind (i've become quite attached to my double seating arrangement.

*BABY ATTACK*: the first on the journey. luckily this one was a short one at 1m59s49.

didn't get away with having two seats to myself, but at least it isn't the worst case
scenario. damn, why aren't there any hot chicks travelling on the bus, or any bus i've been on for that matter? and why is there always at least one tourist (normally german :)?

i've kind of been babbling on in a minute for minute fashion. not sure everyone will appreciate this writing style so let me know. i suppose it's cause i've got nothing better to do than to write down everything that's happening as it happens. i could try and cut down the info to just the "important" parts, or at least label the rambly bits. damn, i had something it write about but i've forgotten now. really need to put this things down the minute i think of them.

21h20 and we've just got out of caledon. seems we went in for no reason what so ever (no passengers were picked up). boy does something smell wrong on the bus now. the driver stalled the bus twice trying to go up this tiny hill, so there might be some technical problems. at least the bus is moving now, but well see how long that lasts tho. interesting fact: the bus i'm on is actively monitoring the brakes and acceleration which is transmitted to their control centre somewhere. i wonder to what extent the monitoring is done. can it detect brake failures and the like? and what good would it do if it did?

22h30 and we've just left the first "pit stop". after a huge din of all the convenience store packets being ripped to shreds, they've decided to play the movie "mama jack". volume is quite loud though so it looks like there will be no sleeping till the movie ends. also it turns out that whoever designed the audio system on this bus never tested it when the bus was in motion. on top of the loud leon schuster noises escaping from the speakers, there is a loud noise hiss directly related to the amount of gas being applied to the engine. you would think that the engineers would have been able to include some sort of audio filter, at the very least a low pass filter. alright enough ranting, time to get some sleep

*BABY ATTACK*: argh… the mother of all baby attacks has just occurred. it's quarter to one, and it's a loud one.

finally made it to knynsa at around 3h30. i think i've picked something up from that bacteria farm of a bus. but at least i'm here, and now i can get some real sleep :).