(Re)Learning To Drive
Posted: 1/29/2005 10:50 PM (Permalink)
By far the biggest thing that worried me about going on this trip was that we were renting a car in a country where they drive on the left side of the road. Well, after 3000 plus kilometers of driving I thought I’d report on what it’s like.
There are good reasons to rent a car if you travel to South Africa. It’s a big country, first of all and while I think it would be possible to use buses and trains to get around, having a car makes things much easier. Even if you were only planning on staying in one place like Cape Town for the whole time, a car just gives you a lot more options.
Renting a car is expensive though. It was our largest expense of the trip. Gas (er...sorry, petrol) cost about twice as much as it does in the US. Also, South African roads can be hard on a car. We had to replace ours once and also got one flat tire. I’d recommend loading up on the insurance because if you drive very far, you’ll probably need it.
When we got the car at the airport (a Nissan Almera shown here), we had to decide who was going to be first to drive. I decided to volunteer. The first thing to get used to is using your left hand to operate the shift lever. We had an automatic transmission, so that made things a bit easier. Since I’m left handed, I rather liked being able to use my dominant hand to shift and grab my drink from the cup holder.
In the end, it was pretty easy to get used to driving on the left. It helps that everyone else is also driving over there so most of the time you are just following another car. It felt like the time when I was first learning to drive. You just pay a lot more attention to what you are doing and it gets easier and easier the more you do it.
One thing I noticed was that I had a tendency to drive too far to the left. Laura did this too so there must be some reason behind it. I think it might of had something to do with the fact that you are sitting on the right side of the car with cars coming at you on the right. This is kind of freaky so you end up over-compensating by moving left. This little tendency was a contributing factor in our flat tire adventure. We’ll talk about that later.
One last word about the roads. They are more dangerous than what you have in the US. Auto fatality rates are quite high. There are almost no divided highways in South Africa at least in my experience and most of them, even the major ones, are single lane. The major roads have wide shoulders and slower cars are expected to move into the shoulder to allow faster cars to pass. Thankfully, there is often an extra passing lane in areas where it is appropriate (e.g. on hills) so that you don't have to get in the oncoming lane to pass those slow trucks.
The further east we drove, the worse the roads got. There were lots of bone jarring dirt roads and there is a danger of running into animals. We almost ran into some sort of deer thing one night and there are areas where livestock (sheep, cows, goats, etc.) are wandering around next to and even on major highways. There are quite often people walking along the side of the road also so you need to be careful.