An old lady, wearing only her bathrobe, came out of her house and started walking through the front garden.

“I came to see who is taking my daughter!”

The occupants of our taxi — not a cab but actually a minibus in South Africa — greeted her, and our driver, Steven, grunted his name.

“Steven.”
“Why are you looking so miserable? Sad to leave PE?”

Well, it was a bright sunny day, the first after a week of rain, and we had just left David, Bashir, Peter the wise cat and Molly the silly dog, so yes, we were a bit sad. But her smile was kind of contagious.

Steven’s assistant, who had been putting the daughter’s bag back in the trailer, came back with a broom.

“It’s my broom! Where’s my bag?” asked the Canadian lady sitting beside us. The assistant waved towards the trailer, closed the door, and we started again.

We passed a small group of cows at the corner on our way to the next person to be picked up. “This way you can make a city tour as well,” said our neighbor. True enough, apart from a beach and two hills, we had not seen much of Port Elizabeth before leaving it.

We left the bright residential district for another, speeding at 80 km/h right next to a jogger coming in front of us on the wrong side of the road, whose only reaction was to greet us with a sign of the hand. We waved in and out of the traffic, making our way between villas, more cows, and goats, dodged an open bag of hay. Slowing before meeting a police car, we noticed the cop in question was actually standing a good twenty meters away from his vehicle, under the shade of the only tree in the vicinity.

We stopped again. The three chickens we had almost rolled over happily cackled their way away.

One more person to pick up. Steven honked, and a dog sleeping in the middle of the road peacefully stood up and cleared the way. Under the entrance of a communal building, a group of cows was also taking advantage of the shade, following the example of the policeman.

All around us, up on the hills and down in the valleys, as far as the eye could see, only residential areas were visible. Houses and villas, children playing around, dogs crossing the street, goats grazing some grass. After a stretch of road, we had to wait a little longer for the last one to show up, not far from a basketball field where children were playing on only one half of the terrain. The other was flooded in a lake of rainwater.

“I can’t sleep,” said Ladina after I told her about it. “I am going to miss so many things.”

And we finally left PE, in a colorful taxi bolting through the wilderness of the Karoo region, with people speaking Afrikaans and English seemingly at the same time, and South African pop/dance music blasting at full volume on the autoradio.

“This is the real clubbing experience!” told me Kaya. I did believe him; he is South African, after all.