South African Visa

All is now sorted out though not without a lot of waiting around. Thoughts of de ja vue as I waited in the shabby Barrick St premises of Home Affairs for 4 1/2 hours just to hand in an application to extend my tourist visa for a further 90 days. Virtually nothing has changed from the days last century when I had to go through a similar ordeal to get my work permit extended on an annual basis though only the ques were shorter then. Apparently the process is to hand in your application and pay the fee. Then you wait for up to 2 weeks for them to call you to come back in to have the visa applied to your passport. You then hand in your passport and wait for this to be processed and returned. There was a huge number of people waiting for their passports and apparently a small rioted had occured at 4 pm on the my first day there as not all were returned prior to closing. Anyway, I put on my best "silly hat" performance and on reaching the counter was nice as possible to Pamella, the young lady accepting my application and payment. She then said I should come back the next morning and hand my passport directly to her. I did take along reading material should the long wait ensue again but within 1/2 hour, she returned my passport with my visa extended to 8 Apr, the day I originally planned to leave.  I did to get to chat with a few of my fellow que members, mainly students from other African countries studying in South African universities. One young fellow, Henri from Cameroon, had completed his law degree at Cape University and had been accepted into a masters course but his wish was to gain a place, and a scholarship, into a Geneva based university and then onto a UN job in the same city. His friends were from Nigeria and Congo. So maybe the silly hat trick worked, or maybe tourist visas are easy to process or maybe it's the fact that age is repected much more in Africa than the developed world!