We’re on a 26 hour train journey (someone asked me if that meant it was an overnight train and I wasn’t sure how to answer) from Cape Town to Johannesburg. The Shosholoza “Express”. In fact, let’s go with The Shosholoza “””Express””” as I feel it needs several more sarcastic inverted commas. It will arrive between 2 and 6 hours late if anyone and everyone is to be believed. We have already (7 hours in) had stoppages of over an hour for a broken down train ahead of us to be fixed and signal failure. It is sun-burst-hot in our compact and bijou 2 person cell.

We have a padded bench and a small fold down table which sits on a tiny sink with hot and warm running water, 4 hooks, 3 pegs and, halfway up the wall, a fold out narrow bed to call our own.

The compartment is a shade over 6 feet long by 4 feet wide. A mirror on the door and a small mirror above the sink give the impression, if you sit in the right spot and catch the right engle of reflection that the cabin is actually vast (at least, really really long and thin). But you can’t fool yourself for long. On the plus side, there are excellent showers and proper loos at the end of each carriage and tickets only cost £34. (For the train journey, not for the loos.)

There is a thickish black bar half way down the carriage window separating the top pane from the bottom one – I’m just the wrong height for this compartment – when I sit on the bench and look out of the window it’s like the whole of the South African countryside is posing for a pornographic picture.

The train does have air conditioning but, unfortunately, and sweatily, the train company do not switch it on as it “costs too much to run”. But, on the huge plus side, there is a wonderful breeze in the long corridor which runs alongside the cells – so most of life takes place out there. Ella is in her element! It took the train to come to a standstill in the simmering aridity of the Karoo for the ice to be broken – give people something to moan about and from then on, getting to know one another is easy.

The couple in the compartment to our left are Vineyard Church members, the next compartment on, Pentecostal. To our right an old guy is spending the journey reading a huge old bible and in the cell to his right, a lady who has an itinerant ministry in the Pentecostal church. As a country, it seems that (especially among the poor), faith plays a much larger role than in the U K.

Sitting in our cabin it feels that for the first time since we touched down just over a week ago I’ve got time to reflect on how what we’re doing feels now that we’re so far from what has been our ‘normal’ life for the past many years.

So far, the sabbath year seems like an incredible opportunity – and a real gift. A gift of time. Time to look back on 20 years of ministry and look forward to 20 more. Shedding so much “stuff” and becoming voluntarily jobless and homeless has brought with it a huge sense of release and possibility. We really could do anything. It’s incredibly liberating to know that we would be free to pick many different paths – to choose something we feel would both honour a commitment to living out our faith and using the experiences and wisdom we’ve gained over the first half of life to make the most of the second half.

Many don’t stop mid life and ask – am I doing (or, still doing) what I should be doing or am I simply doing what I do and is this what I want to do for the next part of life.

A fair number of people have bandied about the mid-life crisis phrase and spoken of it as a time studded with and prompted by something negative – but a time of crisis is primarily a balancing point: a point which causes a decision to have to be made. The event or events which bring about a crisis point may be negative or positive (the loss of a loved one, winning the lottery) – it’s what direction we choose to depart down following the ‘crisis’ that matters.

Someone told me that the Chinese word for ‘crisis’ and ‘opportunity’ are the same. (Trust the deep thinking Chinese to nail it.)

I feel incredibly excited that we have put in place the opportunity to look at the questions that mid-life should ask us all to answer. We spend the first half of life learning who we are – what we can do – what fears drive us – what we are sub-consciously trying to prove/escape from/achieve and perhaps the second half of life should be spent using that experience to live with confidence as the people we should by now know ourselves to be.

And who’s to say that Joseph (previous blog post), who has spent decades surviving on tiny tips from people who he has helped in tiny ways, most recently (for the last decade or so) by watching their cars for them while they shop, a 2 rand (12p) tip is about average. He welcomes all with a huge smile and tells them God loves them and quotes a bible verse or two and in a 45 second encounter has left you 12 pence poorer and a little bit richer.

During his mid life he responded to God’s call to “Go and tell people the good news of my love for them.”

Who’s to know whether his life has had more or less impact than yours or mine. More or less worth.

We”re heading for Johannesburg which is a place where, if the internet is to be believed, you will be robbed, stabbed and conned even as you are stepping off the train. I don’t tend to believe the internet and figure that if you type in “what could go wrong in Johannesburg” you’ve got to be prepared for some scare stories.

But we don’t get there for another 20 hours or so – and a long journey lays ahead, mostly through what we’re in at the moment, a fairly barren area of South Africa called the Karoo – which is probably one of the top ten worst places on the planet in which to play I Spy. Mile after mile after many more miles (about 500 of them) of scrubland and the occasional rock.

We are learning the joys of only traveling with a carry-on bag each: we can take all our stuff with us when we go to the buffet car, and packing when leaving one place to go to another is dead easy. However. It has meant compromising on some things – Ella poses with our only towel. Ultra-Super-Absorbent (or so it said on the pack) but not exactly the kind of thing you can wrap around you and wander back from the shower in.

The train manager just came in to see if we wanted to upgrade to a 4 person cabin as there are some available now that we’ve left the last station we’ll be stopping at today but it’s many carriages away and for all its failings we kind of like our little sauna. And the people around are fascinating. We could have forked out a lot more cash and gone on the premier train but I’m glad we didn’t. I bet out of the two services we’ve got the more interesting travelling companions – the lady a few doors along has brought her two parakeets with her and a shed load of plants – her cabin looks like a jungle.

Inquired or enquired about hiring a car to drive along the Garden Route (well trodden/driven road between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth) from Rent a Cheapie. Their website declares that they offer unlimited mileage on all cars. This seemed pretty good as the hire price was already very reasonable.

It turns out that the mileage is not actually quite so unlimited as it promises. If you go more than 200 km from Cape Town then there was an extra 799 rand to pay. When this became clear during my telephone enquiry it led to the following conversation.

Me: But your website clearly states free unlimited mileage is included in the cost of hire. You make a big thing of it. “Free unlimited mileage”.
Him: It is
Me: No it isn’t.
Him: It is.
Me: O K, we”re going to be driving to Knysna today (several hundred km). Is that free mileage?
Him: No.
Me: Not free?
Him: No. You draw a circle round Cape Town of 200 kilometres and you can drive anywhere in that circle absolutely free.
Me: Most of that circle is in the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic Ocean makes up the majority of your free mileage zone.
Him: You can’t drive into the Atlantic.
Me: I’m not going to. I want to drive to Knysna.
Him: That will cost an extra one off payment of 799 rand.
Me: And then the extra mileage is free.
Him: Yes.
Me: That’s really not free unlimited mileage then, is it?
Him: It is if you pay 799 rand extra.
Me: And then I can drive as far as I want?
Him: No. If you go across the border you have to pay much more.
Me: For free mileage.
Him: Exactly.
Me: Why isn’t it called kilometerage?
Him: Pardon me?
Me: Never mind. Could you tell me if there are any other, what I like to call, “hidden costs”?
Him: (in an outbreak of uncharacteristic openness) Yes. Lots.

After a long list of possible extras we could pay for, none of which, thankfully, we needed, I told him I would let him know. It then turned out, having rung several more hire companies, that theirs was still the best deal, even with the non-free free mileage so we went down and hired from them and tootled off in a car in which I can now drive for as many kilometres as I like (so long as I don’t drive across the border, and keep out of the sea).

We headed off along the N2 which is the road that runs all the way from Cape Town to Knysna. It’s one half of what’s called The Garden Route and we were told we would find it stunning. Now, don’t get me wrong, the mountainy bits were pretty enough but most of the rest of the way was nothing to write home about. (And yet, here I am……)

As we got closer to Knysna things got a lot more impressive. Long, curved sandy beaches. Sun-kissed wouldn’t do them justice. More like sun-snogged. Dramatic cliffs. High, steep sided gorges with a picture book perfect river running through them – the sort of river that makes other rivers feel just a little bit inadequate. I’m suspecting there is a lot more of this scenery to be seen.

Looking forward to seeing it.

Bringing to bear all the expertise which comes from an entire three days in a place, for sure, apartheid is a thing of the past; but it’s also for certain from what I’ve seen so far in one small corner of the country, that whites, blacks and coloureds form three very distinct groups economically. Stop and look at who is driving on the highways, who is working where, who has what would pass the test of being able to call themselves free.

Bur, it’s early days and I have no real concept of how things were before – so I’d like to dig a little deeper.

Knysna – Monday Jan 19th, eve

Lack of internet availability in places has caused a couple of minor inconveniences, one of which was that we didn’t know if the people we thought we were due to stay with in Knysna knew we were coming. Minor detail, of course – but Ella had emailed last week to say we would be arriving on Monday, if that was OK, but we had no idea whether they had replied or whether it was still OK for us to come as we’ve never spoken to the couple and correspondence thus far has been a little on the vague side as our plans for this first week were not finally firmed up until the last minute.

Turned up to the address we’d been given in an earlier email. We went up to the big metal gate and peered through and tried to look as welcomable innable as possible. A lady looked at us for a long time from behind the almost closed blinds of the sitting room. I think she thought she couldn’t be seen but with the light on behind her she might as well have been standing outside waving a flag.

We just kept standing there as we didn’t know what else to do. There was no bell to ring. No intercom thing. No side gate to go through. She waited. We waited.

We waved. She knew she’d been spotted and that her non-existent cover had been blown. She snatched up a small scruffy dog and came walking down the drive holding it as one might a machine gun. She was very Dutch.

This became clear when she started talking. We soon discovered, having said “Hi, we’re Jon and Ella: we did email: we hope you’re expecting us because otherwise this is going to be a little awkward……” that it was going to be a little awkward.

She was not expecting us at all.

It was made a little less awkward when we found out that although it was almost exactly the same address as on the email we had – she and her husband were definitely not called Steve and Dee but she thought that there might be another road similarly named to that one on a development the other side of town.

She fetched her husband who was even more Dutch than she was and he took to describing where we should go using a series of noises which sounded like he was trying to shift something stuck to his lungs.

He kept talking and I kept nodding until it seemed a long enough time had passed that I could walk away without seeming rude.

Using my awesome sense of direction and a phone call we ended up in a sufficiently useful place by the side of the road that our correct host could drive to and rescue us.