make it a 4-wheel drive

This beautiful Sunday began (and ended) with the story of public transportation in Lesotho. If Peace Corp officials were with me on public transport today we would all have cars. Around 10AM I set out to pick up a kombi for the two and a half hour journey back to my hut. Five hours later, a kombi (van) showed up. During my wait, two trucks passed me (no luck hitching, both were totally full). Wow, I am isolated. The Kombi might have come at 3PM, bus this is Lesotho where vehicles do not move until they are full. Luckily, we only waited 30 minutes for the kombi to fill up. I am incredibly thankful the time was so short; the wait can be longer than two hours. We drive about 30 minutes and stop for an hour for unexplained reason to me. Sit. Pace. Sit. Pace. Come to find out we stopped so my driver could consume past the legal limit of alcohol. I am 30 minutes from my starting point, and two hours from my destination. It’s 5PM, the daylight will be gone in a little over two hours. I have no choice but to continue. Picture curvy, dirt, mountainous roads with no guardrails and steep cliffs… all with an intoxicated driver. Part of the experience? May be a part, not a part I enjoyed. This is the only point in my almost four months here I have felt extremely unsafe. The driver was in no hurry. He kept stopping the kombi to chat it up with friends along the way. I made it back to my site as the sun was setting, about 7PM. I made him drop me off at my house. I am not sure if staying in the car longer was the best idea, but I was in no mood to walk the 25 minutes home for the bus stop and I figured I had already made it this far. Alive and well.