Petrol

We've put this off for a long time, but today, after filling up the gas tank, I finally took the time to grab a pen and write down all the relevant stats I need to figure out how much we're payin to fill up the car

The reason we've been dreading this moment, of course, is that gasoline is more expensive pretty much everywhere else in the world than it is in the states, but the combination of measuring the volume of gas in liters and the price in South African rand meant that we really had no idea how much we were paying per gallon.

Nor could we really figure out our gas mileage.

But this afternoon, curiosity won the day, and I scribbled down these numbers:

* 5.29 rand for a liter of leaded petrol (yes, our car takes leaded gas.)
* 17.29 liters to fill the tank
* 562.7 kilometers worth of driving on the last tank

And then I got home and looked up the conversions. There's 3.79 liters to the gallon, and 1.61 kilometers to the mile. The rand is at 6.8 to the dollar, which means we're effectively getting about 6.7.

(On a side note: we put some money into a South African bank account right when we got here, figuring the dollar would continue to tank, but have never drawn on it, since the South African government is actually actively trying to drive down the value of the rand against the dollar to increase exports, and the dollar has improved about 15% since we arrived. Which means things are getting cheaper if we continue to take money out of our American accounts via the ATM--where the fees are cheaper than if we withdrew from an ATM at a bodega in Brooklyn.)

So what was the verdict today?

* We're getting about 28 miles to the gallon...almost exactly what my Honda Civic gets back home, though we drive far less in South Africa.
* It cost just over $37 to fill up the tank with 12.3 gallons of gas.
* Today, gas cost us almost exactly $3 a gallon.