Beit Bridge Border: Touts, Robbers and Corruption – by Ellen

For three days we tried failed to get through to Emirates to see when we could get home. Eventually we decided to head back to South Africa regardless. I (foolishly) texted my mother to let her know we were going over the border the next day. Half an hour of googling later, she was sending me very informative texts about the touts, robbers and corruption at the Beit Bridge border post. As if we’d not heard enough horror stories already, ranging from ‘oh, nightmare, you’ll be there for hours’ to ‘just don’t go under any circumstances’. We got some advice at the hotel that 11am on a Thursday was the best time to brave the crossing. Super – that’s exactly when we were due to get there! Steeling ourselves for the worst, we set off.

Twenty-five minutes later we were back on SA soil, after possibly one of the easiest border crossings we’d encountered so far! Who ever had been spreading the rumours about the horrors of Beit Bridge obviously hadn’t ever crossed from Namibia to Zambia...

Just minutes after discussing how nice it was to have left the roadblocks behind, we were stopped at a roadblock. We resisted the temptation to point out our lovely new reflective stickers. It was at this point that the car decided not to start. It had been a little reluctant for the last couple of days, but this was a refusal. Third time lucky though. The policeman suggested that we needed to check the battery fluid. Vowing to find a garage as soon as we got to Polokwane, we set off.

Just minutes after discussing how, even though there was a police road block, there wasn’t any scary military presence around, a military helicopter flew very low overhead. As we approached the Toll Gate we saw people in bullet proof vests carrying machine guns, running in formation, and crouching and aiming and...oh, just practicing. Phew.