Manu in Wonderland- Adventures of a past seawoman and future criminologist

“Why do you need to know how long it takes to reach the station? The important thing is just to arrive, isn’t it?”. Maybe… but I am European and I had troubles to understand the concept of time that this guy was trying to explain me. Somehow I managed to arrive two hours earlier than the departure time, but only later I realized how pointless it is to keep track of time in Botswana.
I was crossing the busy, grey, fragile bridge of the railway, when I saw TheBusOfMyDreams: it had a light old blue color, it was big, fat and “smiling” like the buses drawn on kids’ animated cartoons; it had fridges, chairs, cupboards and suitcases on top of its roof. I was not sure that it was directed from Gaborone to Bulawayo, but the driver ensured me he was waiting for me. Someone informed him I would have taken that bus. How could he know my name? Even I did not know I would have taken that bus!
I entered TheBusOfMyDreams: it was not anymore the bus of kids’ animated cartoons. It turned to be a documentary from the so-called Third World. Before reaching my back-seat, I jumped suitcases, bins, people, food without breathing because the smell was intolerable. Everyone was there: the little one, the drunk one, the sleeping one, the shouting one...
From this moment on, Caribbean music was played loudly in my ears: it was a nice music to dance and laugh; with the eyes closed you could even have believed it was happening. But then, with open eyes, you could breath and internalize the contradictions of the surroundings.
TheBus left with one hour delay, but no one protested because time is a Western concept, thus my concept, my problem. It was 9.30pm, which meant I was sitting in TheBus since three hours already and I would have stayed in the same position until 10.30am. I just did not know that yet, since the estimated time of arrival was 7am and I still believed it.
We stopped several times to pee all together close to the road. The music continued all night long because the drunk one asked for it every time a song finished. No one complained, neither did I. I slept, I woke up, I eat, I peed, I thought. I finally passed the border with a huge orange perfectly round sunrise just over there, behind the sign “<-- Zimbabwe”.
After one of the several pee-stops, I ended up sitting close to Shaun. What a story, big-Shaun’s life… In Bulawayo, I entered his house and mum Evelyn fried an egg for me, my second egg since I was in Africa. The best egg ever. What a woman, Shaun’s mum…