border

"I got here at 10 last night," the bus driver says.

It's four on a Thursday afternoon at Beitbridge border post, aka Hell. Three days ago South Africa abolished visas for Zimbabweans, offering them a three-month worker's permit on production of nothing more than a passport. Guess what? A few metres past the infamous bridge, hundreds of Zimbabweans -- 700?, 1000? -- are queuing.

We'd wondered what it would be like. Naively, we'd believed the Herald. "Subdued," the paper had said the traffic was. And it was... on the Zimbabwe side.

There are women sitting on the ground, huge carrier bags next to them. Others are texting madly. A young Chinese couple succumb to a "fixer". He sneaks them through to the courtyard of the immigration building, but no further. A white threesome in front of us are trying every 'phone contact they have.

"It's got to be someone reliable," the woman insists. She pulls out a novel. There are no toilets, no drinking water, nowhere to buy food: a recipe for cholera. "There's going to be riots soon," an elderly woman

My mother-in-law does not take to queues kindly (though she is from Zimbabwe, where I Q is a national obligation). She marches to a policeman, pleads seniority (she's 67) and smuggles all five of our passports to the desk. In three hours -- miracle of miracles -- we're through.

Less than a kilometre from the border post, we stop at a garage while our cellphones still have coverage. We buy ice-cream, magazines, fruit lollies, mineral water. And we turf in-laws and infant out of the car so we can scribble a script on the back of a medical letter and file, one last dispatch before two weeks of freedom: "There's chaos at Beitbridge border post as the buses keep rolling in..."