Travel, as always, takes a long time. More than 38 hours this time. We left our hostel at 11.30am on Wednesday and got to our new location at 9.30am on Friday. Add in a 6 hour time zone difference and that’s a 54 hour journey. They’re getting longer…
Travel from the hostel to the airport had a slight hiccup for myself, Jamie and Tiffany, as we suddenly realised (looking up from reading our bibles and waking Tiff) that none of the squad were on the shuttle any more, as it pulled back out of the airport… woops. We got left behind 🙁 Haha, we were fine, we just got off at the next stop and there was a free bus back to the terminal we should’ve been at. No problem.
The itinerary included a 3.5 hour flight from Beijing to Hong Kong, a brief layover there, before a 14 hour flight to Johannesburg, South Africa. But, that was not it. Oh no. You see we are in a small town called Muizenberg just outside of Cape Town this month, so an 18 hour bus ride ensued starting that afternoon, including hoping that a sleeping pill would aid me (I don’t reckon it did as I think I slept as well [read ‘badly’] as I seem to without) and that lying in the aisle in the middle of the bus would be better than crouching up into my seat space (which I think did help somewhat, who knows). A half hour train ride and here we are. In a hostel five minutes from a beach again 😛 The sea is somewhat colder though… (we’ve already been and tried) and we will definitely have a full schedule of ministry activities to keep us busy. On the plus side, we’re actually based as one of four teams at this placement this month*, so we had plenty of friends to travel with, occasionally making other friends as we went.
So here we are again – excited and in anticipation of another month of ministry potential. Please be praying for us as we get into a new (and different again) location, with new relationships to build and a new schedule to adjust to (not to mention jet lag). I look forward to being able to update regularly online this month and speak with people over skype / facebook / email / etc. I’ve missed you all this last 4 weeks particularly.
* Which our team finds funny because we were on our own for the first month, part of two teams the next month and then part of four teams this month. We’re wondering if next month will just have the entire squad in one place 😛
