Precipice - Matt

First of all, I would like to front load this post by saying Sam and I have come out of today even more committed to the realization of our goal of arriving in Cairo carried on the wings of a tuk tuk, even facing the immediate threat of failure at such an early stage. We went tuk tuk shopping today.

Woke at 6am. Figured out the strange bus system of people yelling at you from short VW buses and you yelling back to pick up a ride. Got to the dealership by 8am. What followed was a series of revelations that puts us on precarious footing as to whether or not we can even legally buy a tuk tuk in South Africa. First, we meet Paul, with whom we've been in contact with for the past few months discussing our trip, who tells us that tuk tuks are classified as motorcycles in SA, requiring a motorcycle license to operate.

Since neither one of us "technically" has a motorcycle license I guess that's the end of our trip, huh? Not so fast. Turns out in SA you can sell any vehicle to any unqualified person with no problem from a business view and if caught operating a vehicle you don't have a license for, say a motorcycle, the police will fine you 250 Rand, or 18 dollars, and then send you on your way. Mostly this law is in place for vehicles operating in a business capacity, such as taxis. Well, Sweet. Next problem.

To buy a vehicle you have to register it with the government, but to register you need to have an address in SA that you can point to as your own, not just some random address like your hostel, a tuk tuk dealership, or the place you're volunteering. To get around this foreigners may apply for a Traffic Register Number, which can take up to six weeks but more likely will take around three weeks.

Being stuck in SA for six weeks would alter our trip in a big way. We would not be able to stop in Kenya and take a break from the road or work towards connecting schools in that area to the schools in the US that are following us. Also we would lose our buffer for any unforeseen delays. Three weeks is a much smaller issue since it would only be a week longer than we intended to be in SA.

Tomorrow we will go to the Registration Authority and sit in line for hours to apply in person, give big brother our thumb print and some fees in hopes that he over looks the fact that some people decided to call tuk tuks motorcycles instead of cars.

Sam and I are charged up and ready for this. Not because of the stakes but because of the welcome we have received. Everyone we have met thus far has been incredibly excited about our trip, if not a little surprised. But even more than that, the folks at the ATUL tuk tuk dealership have been amazing. From the moment we realized there may be bureaucratic difficulties, like 8:05am, Paul has been on our case working with the SA government to figure out how to achieve our goal. While Lallie, the mechanic/driver trainer, was taking us through the ropes of tuk tuk maintenance Paul was figuring out what needed to happen to get around each successive problem. Beyond that, Chris, the semi-retired owner of the company, took us to the factory where the tuk tuks are assembled and introduced us to Patrick. He is the fully retired owner of some four or five businesses including this one (don't ask me how that works) who runs the assembly business, who gave us a tour of the factory, a history of ATUL and tuk tuks in general and went into much unasked for detail about these machines. When we got back to the dealership Chris took us out to a light lunch.

Now, I understand these people want me to buy their product and there's a chance we're just being sold by some excellent salesmen. But the dealership Chris runs sells over 100 tuk tuks a year and Patrick's business does way more than that. These two guys don't seem like they're hurting for money. In fact, they seem to just really like tuk tuks and probably wouldn't know what else to do with their free time. They also understand that our trip is a wonderful PR opportunity for them as well as just a cool adventure.

This has gotten a lot longer than the "a few paragraphs explaining the situation" that Sam told me to write so I'll just end with this. Tomorrow is a big day for us. We'll update as soon as we can, but no news is good news because it means we're barreling down the road in a brand new tuk tuk.