On the road

After being on the road for 137 days, you are guaranteed to encounter some amusing things. Driving through South Africa promises countless funny signage and sights, a lot of which we have been lucky to see first-hand. I thought it’d be fun to share a few of those I’ve captured with you (as well as some we haven’t seen ourselves) and, with any luck make you giggle.

I think my personal favourites have to be:

As well as the numerous comical things you will see along your drives in South Africa, there is always going to be the inevitable ruthless driving, dangerous over taking and general absent road rules. The culprits for the above typically land with the taxi drivers, those driving the ‘taxi’s or shared minibuses that you see on so many South African roads. Taxi drivers have a somewhat unsubstantiated arrogance in their manner, leaving them to believe they rule the roads and can drive in whatever way they choose. They stop to pick up passengers in the most antisocial places, never indicate and seem to have one hand on the horn at all times. As well as this, there is definitely the united belief of 'the more the merrier'.

Taxi hand signs have been nicknamed South Africa’s ‘12^th official language’ due to the millions of commuters who use this inaudible, unwritten language every day to indicate to drivers where they want to go. This peculiar yet effective signage, unique to South Africa, has been established and modified over the years but we warned, don’t even think about using a taxi if you aren't accustomed with the ‘secret language’ of its hand signs.

Each sign indicates a specific route, the majority of these being used in the Gauteng province, usually in and around Johannesburg. Susan Woolf has done extensive research and has been committed to ascertaining the meaning and origins behind this exclusive non-verbal communication. Eventually she came up with 14 simple tactile shapes that combine to form all the hand signs for Gauteng.

I’ll give you some examples of these hand signs to better illustrate it.

Local to the area

Gauteng to Johannesburg CBD

Once you have been in South Africa for a while, you begin to notice such signage occurring at the side of the road and it is really fascinating to observe the conduct. I have been practising but am not quite confident enough to brave one of these taxi experiences alone just yet!