Boock's blog: Doing Benoni in style

SOMEWHERE IN SOUTH AFRICA - Having spent close to three hours negotiating a supposedly thirty minute trip from Johannesburg International Airport to a Sandton hotel, I immediately knew where to point the finger of blame.

The car was obviously not up to it.

The damn thing had all the electrical whizz-bits but shared no feeling of 'one' with its driver, and had no idea of where we were heading, despite it being a local. It was as if it were equipped with anti-GPS software.

Determined it was jinxed or at best contrary, I decided overnight to return to the airport and exchange it for a more sympathetic model, hopefully something that - like Herbie - would better understand the nuances of its driver.

This posed no great difficulty in theory, as Johannesburg International Airport is handily stationed between Sandton and Benoni, where I was headed to catch a glimpse of the last day of New Zealand's warm-up game at Willowmoore Park.

You have to hand it to those rental car folk who work at airport branches, they must have seen it all.

On this occasion they nodded and shook their heads at all the right times as I recounted the many heinous crimes of the vehicle. The poor souls even extended themselves to a few sympathetic 'ohs' and 'ahs'.

They then upgraded me to a Mercedes Kompressor. I kid you not.

Now the Merc is undoubtedly a fine vehicle but the offer still posed some problems.

For a start, it just wasn't the done thing for a reporter. A solid old Morris Oxford with good vinyl perhaps; a straight-as-an-arrow Toyota, fine.

But this was above one's station. The only print media types who drove marques were motoring editors and the recently redundant.

It was akin to a brick-layer turning up for work dressed in a three-piece suit and spats. What of the fraternity?

I grabbed it straight away, of course.

The old cliche about a gift horse came to mind and it wasn't long before I found myself sitting in the cockpit of the vehicle, pouring over the users manual in an attempt to find out how to release the hand-brake.

For readers' information, the Merc doesn't have a hand-brake, it employs a stand-alone foot-brake, with a hand release on the lower right-hand dash.

It took me only 20 minutes to work it out and then I was off, amid an outcry of beeps and warning alarms.

Now the trick when you exit the airport en route to Benoni is ensure you take the right-hand lane that's clearly marked as the R21 to Boksburg.

Under no circumstances take the left lane and the subsequent R24 to Johannesburg. Let me say this with some authority.

All this is incidental of course, because unless you find yourself in exceptional circumstances there will be no earthly reason to go near Benoni. It's dubious claim to fame is of being the only South African town ever to be bombed from the air, and that was by its own airforce during a miners' strike in 1922.

It's harsh, I know, but the immediate impression is that they didn't do a good enough job.

The place is still there, as grey and colourless as industrial Dunedin on a bad day, only about 100 times bigger.

Jerry, as I have named the car, apparently felt the same, which accounted for him taking the R24 out of the airport, and then somehow leading us on to the N1 to Pretoria.

He then took an unscheduled off-ramp that took us onto a unknown expressway that led directly to Benoni.

In other words, how I got there I'll never know.

For the record, the same applies to the trip back to Sandton that evening. As people have often told me, sometimes the planets are simply in the right alignment. But then, they'd never met Jerry.