When we left you, dear reader, we were on a long, slow train journey through the Karoo and on to Johannesburg. We pick up at the end of the journey…..

Arriving at Johannesburg train station we thought “As long as we stay with the crowds we will be fine.’ A tad unfortunately, we had somehow managed to lose our train tickets. When I say lose our train tickets I mean we threw them away. They were not the world’s most interesting looking pieces of paper and we thought that they had served their purpose since the train manager had stamped them 28 hours and 1400 km earlier and now that the train was nearing the station and the chap came round collecting our rubbish we lozzed them in along with banana skins, drinks cans and a couple of pages ripped out in frustration from the Times Cryptic Crossword book my mum gave me as a leaving present thinking it would pass an hour or two. Even working backwards by looking at the answers in the back and then reading the questions brought very little insight.

Also of very little insight was the throwing away of our tickets.

We shuffled along the crowded platform towards the bottleneck at the foot of the single escalator where guards were forcing the flock of hundreds of travellers to become a single line by taking their tickets. Everyone else dutifully handed theirs in and walked off away from the bowels of the station and up the escalator to freedom, looking all sort of happy and smug at having retained their tickets just long enough to give them away to the correct person. Leaving us to discover how rapidly an already unsmiling guard’s face could become an unsavoury mess of gall, bitterness and personal affrontedness. We couldn’t have asked for a more “this is NOT going to end as happily as you naively think it might” look if we had been left to look after his granny and his Porsche for a fortnight while he was on holiday and got the care instructions for the two mixed up.

We were escorted by armed guard to the security section.

On the bright side, we were probably in one of the safest places in Johannesburg at that point so we didn’t have to worry about getting stabbed or mugged (see comment on last blog) – but getting conned looked like it was coming right up. They insisted we buy tickets again even though we could show them our confirming email from their company showing we had paid in Cape Town and the train manager could vouch for us as we’d had several conversations withy them and they had stamped our tickets (albeit 28 hours and 1400 km before). This held as much interest to them as a toothpick to a jellyfish. They wanted more money.

Fortunately, when talk of hand-cuffs was moving from something I had unwisely joked about to becoming a distinct possibility Clive burst through the doors. (I say ‘burst’ purely for dramatic effect as he actually just walked through the solitary door but as he was going to be our saviour he definitely symbolically burst through.

Knight-like.

And unless I’ve mis-remembered there was a fanfare playing.

Clive looks like what he is – a successful businessman, Jo’bg born and bred and I doubt even his mother had ever managed to stand in his way. With an impressive fold of the arms and a stance which suggested he “knew stuff” he whisked us out of there faster than an SAS snatch team. We’d never met him before but, as a friend of a friend of Ella’s sister he had kindly offered to host us for the night when we’d emailed him the week before having decided to stay overnight in Jo’bg and fly up to Harare the next day in case the train was late.

Clive runs lots of businesses and has very cool cars. We told him about what the internet had said about how dangerous Johannesburg was and he said that he has lived there all his life and has only ever been mugged once – and that was in London. Having swam in their pool and giggled about what temperature it might be in England (sorry, England) we were taken out by Clive and Joanna to a meat-eaters’ (which I reckon could correctly have an apostrophe before the s, after the s, or not have one at all and each would be correct) paradise that evening. Not Carnivore, which Zoe suggested on one of the blog comments – but they were fishing in the same pool, or at least hunting in the same reserve. Crocodile tail pie and warthog curry were excellent and very reasonably priced, and Ella had kudu, which I thought was a little dear. (Falls off bed laughing)

Flight from Johannesburg to Harare was uneventful apart from a wonderful moment at the departure gate when we were told the plane was delayed. Someone asked the lady at the desk if she knew for how long and she replied: “I have no idea. Unfortunately we cannot find the plane.”

I hoped we would all be asked to help look for it but that was not to be.

What is it with having to buy a visa in order to be allowed in to a country? You get it at the airport and there may as we’ll be a sign above the booth that says: “licence to print money”. 55 U S dollars each. It’s not as if people coming in are not going to be spending money in the country while they’re here. Oh, and thanks “experiencezimbabwe.com” for stating that Visas cost 50 dollars on your website which you proudly say was updated only last week so there’s me thinking I only needed to withdraw 100 dollars in Jo’bg airport…. Ahh, no – you’ll be needing more than that.

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.