The End of the World Cup...

The last week of the World Cup trip was dominated by an epic drive from Jo'burg to Port Elizabeth, via Durban. This brought home to us in no uncertain terms the sheer vastness of the country. Nothing will ever be as soul crushing as hearing our Sat Nav smugly tell us to turn right and go straight for 600 km. The initial stage to Durban was painless enough at a mere 6 hours drive, and the time flew as we appealed to our not so inner child, trying to find amusing street names in the map. Boner Street was a clear winner.

Once in Durban we spent the night with the family of one of Charlie's colleagues. The mother became my new personal hero in not allowing our beers to become less than even half full and bringing a continuous supply of dried meats and nuts to within our reach. The only down side of the overnight stay was drawing the short straw and having to share a bed with Tony. In damage limitation I insisted on going head to toe, from which point the others referred to as 69'ing. The experience of seeing this hairy fart machine closing the bedroom door, undressing and sliding into my bed isn't one I wish to dwell on. The spooning was adequate at best.

The journey the next morning was a solid 13 hours of pained misery. I get bored fairly easily, but during this period I transcended bordom to a hellish state of purgatory. I imagine it's a similar feeling that you hear about from people who are put into waking comas for decades, who end up creating minutely detailed novels and plays in their own heads. I didn't go that far but came up with at least a couple of exciting new sandwich ideas.

Once we finally arrived, staggering, unshaven and resembling pitiful, nomadic desert people, we headed to yet another steak house before collapsing. By this point I had eaten nothing but steak, chips and winegums for nearly two weeks and, feeling the onset of ricketts, begrudgingly ordered a vegetable side dish. Clearly this was not a frequent request, as the waitress had to actually go to ask what vegetables they served. As it turns out they were so pumped full of cream I might as well have ordered green ice cream with a side dish of heart failure.

The next day was the final England group game, where only a win would offer a boundry between embarassment and outright comedy. The fact that most people were not convinced we would walk the game, against an opposition that have existed as a country for the same length of time as most of my boxer shorts, should provide a good idea of the level of expectation. In the event, I got a little carried away by the weather and fact I could finally wear one of the several pair of shorts I'd brought, and may have slightly over imbibed in the insanely cheap local beer. Slightly, to the point I spent the first ten minutes unwittingly cheering for the wrong team.

The next morning, the victory in hand alongside a force 10 hangover, we made our way back to Jo'burg through the unending nothingness of South Africa's middle territory. Slight kinks in the road became noteworthy after hundreds and hundreds of straight, shitty road. It was after several hours of this when we came across something unbelievable. There, slap bang in the middle of an empty, massive desert, having gone for miles with no sight of another car, was a goddamn traffic jam of such proportions that people were out of their cars and wandering about. We got out to investigate and found that things were far worse than we had imagined. Rather than heavy traffic, the delay had been caused by the only road being closed down for repairs, in the middle of the world cup, in the middle of the day, 70 km back to the nearest town, which was about 20 km more than our remaining petrol would take us. We were going to die. After frantic requests for information we found out to near orgasmic relief that the closure was temporary and, we the lucky ones, had joined only 30 minutes towards the end of a 2 hour wait for those at the front of the queue. Life had been handed back us, colours were brighter etc.

The only other point of note for the entire journey were properly African towns in the middle of nowhere, of such undiluted shittiness that they made Aldershot look like a wonderland of ecstatic beauty, to be heralded as a pinnacle of human achievement in any and all fields throughout the epochs of time.