We've been moving quickly from city to city lately, so I haven't had much time for posting...and an unfortunate incident at the bus station in Johannesburg (I knew that city was trouble) has left me relying on Justin for all my funds for the moment, so paying for internet is a bit of a luxury until things get straightened out. A (very) quick update, though:
-We left Wilderness and ended up at an out-of-the way beach called Buffalo Bay, transported in a truck by a jovial rascist in pajama pants
-We squished into a two-door hatchback with all our backpacks and three French guys and visited a rainy Rastafarian community outside Knysna, South Africa, where we were lectured on Hash: The Plant of Today
-We froze on an all-night bus ride to a place called Grahamstown, found they had no coffee in the whole damn place, and so immediately left
-We took another all-night bus, then an all-day bus, to reach the mystical mountain range called The Drakensburg, aka Coldest Place on Earth
-We hiked one of southern Africa's highest peaks, located in the tiny nation of Lesotho
-We biked 40k to buy six eggs and some candied popcorn, though the latter turned out to be so gross that Justin forcibly gave it to a stranger on the street
-We spent 12 hours in Johannesburg, where we watched Cote d'Ivoire fall to Brazil and slept in a hovel that smelled of rot and dirty cat litter
-We rented a stick shift and then both learned how to drive it (Justin first, on the way out of the parking lot)
-We drove the rental car to Kruger National Park, where I took my turn at the wheel, stalling and lurching across hundreds of miles of pristine grassland in full view of buffalo, rhinos, cheetahs, and some surprisingly menacing elephants
-We went back to Joburg to catch a bus to Botswana, but ended up staying for two days as an enterprising thief handily dispossessed me of everything but my clothes at the bus station
-48 hours and one loooong visit to the American embassy later, WE'RE IN BOTSWANA!!
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Mexico's Mom
I'm now in the cold but beautiful town of Wilderness (its actual name), staying at a very random farm/hostel/perpetural techno party, and football fever has beset us all!
Justin and I spent most of Thursday on a fantastic bike ride. A guy who worked at our hostel in Oudtshoon drove us and two other Americans up to a frigid starting point called Swartberg Pass in the mountains outside of town. The drive was breathtaking but terrifying: our driver, like all others I've encountered in this country, drove way too fast, zipping around corners and flying past pedestrians, all in a 15-passenger cube van with a bicycle trailer on the back. This was bad enough on the regular streets outside of town, but when our road changed from cement to gravel and began switchbacking up the side of the mountain, I got downright nervous. The gravel changed to mud near the top, prompting our driver to weave back and forth across the narrow road in order to maintain traction. We passengers from the Nation of Civilized Driving sat in tense silence as the van's front wheels zigged toward the mountain and then zagged back toward the cliffside, so close that we could actually see over the edge before our driver aimed the van back the other way. When we finally rounded the last bend and came to a stop, the irony of the Afrikaans sign labeling the area as "Die Top" was not lost on us.
The driver set us loose on our bicycles, and the first few hours proved lovely but frigid as we descended the mountain and made it back to the relatively flat land of the desert area known as the Little Karoo. A few hours of riding brought us to the Cango Caves, an absolutely amazing network of underground caverns. Two tours were available - Standard and "Adventure" - with the latter involving crawls and squeezes through sections with such claustrophobia-inducing names as "the postal box". While the latter option sounded exciting, I've been known to feel mildly panicky in spaces as large as small cars, the window seat on airplanes, and in bed with the blanket over my head; in other words, though I was indeed tempted to try some super-spelunking just to see if I could do it, I also didn't want to hold up an entire caving group while having some sort of subterranean panic attack. We opted for the standard tour, therefore, and were not disappointed.
The roomy mouth of the cave opened up into one grand chamber after another; a million years of water droplets had hardened into petrified ballrooms with structures resembling massive organ pipes, chandeliers, and decorative columns. When the guide turned all the lights off, we got to see the complete blackness that greeted the cave's first (European) discoverer back in the 1700s.
Several more hours of bicycling and two roadside ostrich burgers later, we were back in Oudtshoorn. We rounded out out time in the town with a game of Scrabble, a load of laundry, and a few minutes of watching the World Cup opening concert on TV (was Desmond Tutu drunk?? His speech made about as much sense as Mariah Carey's famous ramble).
The next day, yesterday, we left for the town of Wilderness, chosen only because of its name. We're staying at a wacky farm that doubles as a hostel; our incredibly laid-back host, Theo, gave us a room for the price of a campsite and met us in town upon our arrival to usher us into a bar where we could all watch the opening World Cup match. Vuvuzelas (the incredibly loud long plastic horns) blared through the night as Bafana, the South African team, tied Mexico 1-1. Our host then drove us and a carload of his shnockered friends back to the farm in his truck while his brother followed in the farm's other vehicle, an open-topped bus spray-painted with orange and yellow soccer slogans. The dude in the front passenger seat of our truck was hilarious, pointing his vuvuzela out the car window and yelling to Theo to alert him whenever we were about to pass an expensive house. Theo obliged, even giving him a countdown: "Expensive house on the left in THREE...TWO...ONE!!" On cue, his friend would honk the vuvuzela out the window at top volume (just one of those instruments is about as loud as a full blast from a car horn), and then scream out an indecent phrase in semi-Spanish about what should happen to Mexico's mother. In this way, two carloads of horn-blowing, insult-hooting, rowdy South Africans, plus two American backpackers who couldn't stop laughing at the whole situation, disturbed an entire neighborhood before arriving back at the farm. Upon arrival, as Justin and I were settling into our chilly but comfortable room, our host and his guests turned on some loud techno music, a disco ball, and a strobe light (who wouldn't have such things at their farm?) and kept the party going for hours and hours more.
Today we took a long walk around the outskirts of Wilderness, ending up back in town to watch the USA/England game. The 1-1 tie, while not ideal, was a better outcome than most would have predicted, so we headed back to the farm contented.
Tomorrow we are probably heading out to some village about 20k from here...we got a very random invitation from one of the guys we met for about 5 minutes at the party last night to stay at his house while he's away in Joburg! He drew us a very incoherent map, gave no address, and said only that the key should be "under the pepper pot," whatever the crap a pepper pot is...so we'll see if we find it! Adventures galore!!
Justin and I spent most of Thursday on a fantastic bike ride. A guy who worked at our hostel in Oudtshoon drove us and two other Americans up to a frigid starting point called Swartberg Pass in the mountains outside of town. The drive was breathtaking but terrifying: our driver, like all others I've encountered in this country, drove way too fast, zipping around corners and flying past pedestrians, all in a 15-passenger cube van with a bicycle trailer on the back. This was bad enough on the regular streets outside of town, but when our road changed from cement to gravel and began switchbacking up the side of the mountain, I got downright nervous. The gravel changed to mud near the top, prompting our driver to weave back and forth across the narrow road in order to maintain traction. We passengers from the Nation of Civilized Driving sat in tense silence as the van's front wheels zigged toward the mountain and then zagged back toward the cliffside, so close that we could actually see over the edge before our driver aimed the van back the other way. When we finally rounded the last bend and came to a stop, the irony of the Afrikaans sign labeling the area as "Die Top" was not lost on us.
The driver set us loose on our bicycles, and the first few hours proved lovely but frigid as we descended the mountain and made it back to the relatively flat land of the desert area known as the Little Karoo. A few hours of riding brought us to the Cango Caves, an absolutely amazing network of underground caverns. Two tours were available - Standard and "Adventure" - with the latter involving crawls and squeezes through sections with such claustrophobia-inducing names as "the postal box". While the latter option sounded exciting, I've been known to feel mildly panicky in spaces as large as small cars, the window seat on airplanes, and in bed with the blanket over my head; in other words, though I was indeed tempted to try some super-spelunking just to see if I could do it, I also didn't want to hold up an entire caving group while having some sort of subterranean panic attack. We opted for the standard tour, therefore, and were not disappointed.
The roomy mouth of the cave opened up into one grand chamber after another; a million years of water droplets had hardened into petrified ballrooms with structures resembling massive organ pipes, chandeliers, and decorative columns. When the guide turned all the lights off, we got to see the complete blackness that greeted the cave's first (European) discoverer back in the 1700s.
Several more hours of bicycling and two roadside ostrich burgers later, we were back in Oudtshoorn. We rounded out out time in the town with a game of Scrabble, a load of laundry, and a few minutes of watching the World Cup opening concert on TV (was Desmond Tutu drunk?? His speech made about as much sense as Mariah Carey's famous ramble).
The next day, yesterday, we left for the town of Wilderness, chosen only because of its name. We're staying at a wacky farm that doubles as a hostel; our incredibly laid-back host, Theo, gave us a room for the price of a campsite and met us in town upon our arrival to usher us into a bar where we could all watch the opening World Cup match. Vuvuzelas (the incredibly loud long plastic horns) blared through the night as Bafana, the South African team, tied Mexico 1-1. Our host then drove us and a carload of his shnockered friends back to the farm in his truck while his brother followed in the farm's other vehicle, an open-topped bus spray-painted with orange and yellow soccer slogans. The dude in the front passenger seat of our truck was hilarious, pointing his vuvuzela out the car window and yelling to Theo to alert him whenever we were about to pass an expensive house. Theo obliged, even giving him a countdown: "Expensive house on the left in THREE...TWO...ONE!!" On cue, his friend would honk the vuvuzela out the window at top volume (just one of those instruments is about as loud as a full blast from a car horn), and then scream out an indecent phrase in semi-Spanish about what should happen to Mexico's mother. In this way, two carloads of horn-blowing, insult-hooting, rowdy South Africans, plus two American backpackers who couldn't stop laughing at the whole situation, disturbed an entire neighborhood before arriving back at the farm. Upon arrival, as Justin and I were settling into our chilly but comfortable room, our host and his guests turned on some loud techno music, a disco ball, and a strobe light (who wouldn't have such things at their farm?) and kept the party going for hours and hours more.
Today we took a long walk around the outskirts of Wilderness, ending up back in town to watch the USA/England game. The 1-1 tie, while not ideal, was a better outcome than most would have predicted, so we headed back to the farm contented.
Tomorrow we are probably heading out to some village about 20k from here...we got a very random invitation from one of the guys we met for about 5 minutes at the party last night to stay at his house while he's away in Joburg! He drew us a very incoherent map, gave no address, and said only that the key should be "under the pepper pot," whatever the crap a pepper pot is...so we'll see if we find it! Adventures galore!!
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Some Pictures!
I figured out how to upload pictures! Here are a few from our trip down to the Cape of Good Hope.
The first two are of me on the hike out to Cape Point. The third is of one of the bays that we passed on the way down the coast toward the Cape. Beautiful trip so far!!
To Mossel Bay and Beyond!
Hello from Oudtshoorn!
Mossel Bay came and went. Justin and I took an evening bus out of Cape Town on Monday after a rather drizzly, uneventful final day and a last Capetonian dinner at a fantastic Ethiopian restaurant with live music that we'd found a few days before. We said goodbye to Sifiso with honest hopes to see him again at some point in the future and left for Mossel Bay, a destination chosen pretty much at random.
We arrived in the town just after midnight, after a 5-hour bus ride that barely moved our location on the map of South Africa at all. It was disappointing to not be able to see anything out the bus windows - I have no idea what the landscape between the two cities looks like - but at least the lack of scenic distractions allowed us to focus our complete attention on the old Clint Eastwood movie that played twice in a row on the bus TVs (I missed the part that explained how he ended up in El Paso on the first viewing, so it's lucky I got to watch it again. Phew!)
We'd called ahead to arrange a lift from the bus station to our accommodations, and our bashful young hotelier arrived shortly after our bus let us off. We thought we'd booked a hostel - the price was pretty cheap - but when we arrived at the Little Brak Beach House (which was quite a ways outside Mossel Bay proper), it turned out to be more like a delightful bed and breakfast right on the water. It even had a resident cat! I was entirely pleased. It lacked only some sort of indoor heating system in order to make it perfectly complete.
We awoke on Tuesday to piercingly blue skies, sunshine, and our hotelier's mother calling us to breakfast in her almost-unintelligible Afrikaans-accented English. After bread and muffins, our ever-helpful host, Phillip, offered us a ride into town (I'm pretty sure we were the only two guests at the whole place). We loaded into his car, but had only gone about a block when he glanced over at the ocean, hooted, and pulled a U-turn at top speed. Justin and I were completely dumbfounded until Phillip pulled to a stop at the shoreline and pointed. Hundreds of seabirds were circling, floating, and diving in the water only a few dozen yards off the beach. "It's the baitball!!" Phillip exclaimed, grabbing his cell phone and excitedly dialing some friends. "We've been waiting all month!"
I was completely ignorant about this ocean phenomenon, but Phillip explained that, as the sardines make their annual mating pilgrimage towards Durban, they are followed by seabirds, dolphins, and sharks that slowly compress them into an ever-tighter ichthyological lump, and then just pick off their meals from the mass. Unfortunately, we didn't see any dolphins or sharks jump (how awesome would that have been??), nor did we see the ball itself - Phillip told us that, when the water is completely still, you can actually watch through the water as the teeming ball of fish travels past the beach. All we saw was the birds, but the fact that we happened to be in the right place at the right time for even that much is pretty incredible.
After the baitball excitement, we headed into Mossel Bay, and our host dropped us at a trailhead for a beautiful hike along the seacliffs. The waves below were astounding: they were giant, and the water was such a clear blue that I could see how the troughs were marbled with red and brown sand before they crested and exploded in a frothy frenzy. After hiking for a couple hours, we saw some fascinating-looking tidepools below and found a pretty easy trail that led to them by winding down the cliffs. The pools were beautiful: they were full of tiny starfish and red and green seaweed; with the blue and white ocean and the dusty brown rocks, it was a truly lovely spot.
The weather quickly turned gray, though, and sudden gusts of wind began blowing so hard that I actually started to worry about getting blown off the cliffs, so we hiked out apace, arriving back in town ahead of some menacing-looking clouds.
We spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the little town and waiting for the inevitable rain to arrive. Mossel Bay was interesting mainly for the different slice of South African culture that it displayed. Man, if I'd thought central Cape Town was gentrified, I hadn't seen anything yet...Mossel Bay was so manicured that it looked like a place you'd take your ailing great auntie for an afternoon of sunning. Sure, there were still a few kind of sketchy places, like the minibus depot, but even that seemed pretty sterile. The town was by far the most unapologetically Afrikaner place I've seen yet. The Afrikaners are the descendants of the first Dutch colonizers; though I can claim to know very little about South Africa and its people, I have heard from locals that the diehard Afrikaners comprise the conservative Caucasian faction. Much of the public written material in Cape Town (street signs, posters, etc.) was in both Afrikaans and English; I was surprised to find that in Mossel Bay, however, many signs were in Afrikaans only. When I asked Phillip if there are many people who speak Afrikaans who do not also speak English, he rolled his eyes and said that there are indeed many in Mossel Bay (or Mosselbaai, as they'd say). He described them as people who still resent the British takeover of the South African colony in the early 19th century and who wax nostalgic for the days of apartheid. While no generalizations are ever entirely true, of course, it was still really interesting to observe a town that seems to be holding onto its colonial past as tightly as modernity will allow.
This morning and afternoon were persistently rainy; we ate a leisurely breakfast and then spent a few hours in town at the Bartolomeu Dias museum (he was the first European to round the Cape of Good Hope, though neither he nor anyone else knew at the time that he'd done so; apparently Mossel Bay was the place where he first came ashore after rounding the bend and turning north again.) The museum itself was rather lackluster, with an odd collection of seashells, boat replicas, and posters about Nelson Mandela; the highlight was undoubtedly a GIANT, moss-covered prehistoric skull and spine that lay, with absolutely no explanation, in the middle of the garden. I have no idea what sort of creature it came from, and everyone else was just walking around it as if it were a completely normal piece of lawn furniture. Indeed...
We boarded a bus in the late afternoon for the town of Oudtshoorn, northeast of Mossel Bay in the (supposedly) drier grasslands (though it's freezing and rainy outside right now) known as the Little Karoo. We've already booked ourselves on a 56 kilometer bike ride (whee!) starting early tomorrow, so I'd better go get some sleep!
Mossel Bay came and went. Justin and I took an evening bus out of Cape Town on Monday after a rather drizzly, uneventful final day and a last Capetonian dinner at a fantastic Ethiopian restaurant with live music that we'd found a few days before. We said goodbye to Sifiso with honest hopes to see him again at some point in the future and left for Mossel Bay, a destination chosen pretty much at random.
We arrived in the town just after midnight, after a 5-hour bus ride that barely moved our location on the map of South Africa at all. It was disappointing to not be able to see anything out the bus windows - I have no idea what the landscape between the two cities looks like - but at least the lack of scenic distractions allowed us to focus our complete attention on the old Clint Eastwood movie that played twice in a row on the bus TVs (I missed the part that explained how he ended up in El Paso on the first viewing, so it's lucky I got to watch it again. Phew!)
We'd called ahead to arrange a lift from the bus station to our accommodations, and our bashful young hotelier arrived shortly after our bus let us off. We thought we'd booked a hostel - the price was pretty cheap - but when we arrived at the Little Brak Beach House (which was quite a ways outside Mossel Bay proper), it turned out to be more like a delightful bed and breakfast right on the water. It even had a resident cat! I was entirely pleased. It lacked only some sort of indoor heating system in order to make it perfectly complete.
We awoke on Tuesday to piercingly blue skies, sunshine, and our hotelier's mother calling us to breakfast in her almost-unintelligible Afrikaans-accented English. After bread and muffins, our ever-helpful host, Phillip, offered us a ride into town (I'm pretty sure we were the only two guests at the whole place). We loaded into his car, but had only gone about a block when he glanced over at the ocean, hooted, and pulled a U-turn at top speed. Justin and I were completely dumbfounded until Phillip pulled to a stop at the shoreline and pointed. Hundreds of seabirds were circling, floating, and diving in the water only a few dozen yards off the beach. "It's the baitball!!" Phillip exclaimed, grabbing his cell phone and excitedly dialing some friends. "We've been waiting all month!"
I was completely ignorant about this ocean phenomenon, but Phillip explained that, as the sardines make their annual mating pilgrimage towards Durban, they are followed by seabirds, dolphins, and sharks that slowly compress them into an ever-tighter ichthyological lump, and then just pick off their meals from the mass. Unfortunately, we didn't see any dolphins or sharks jump (how awesome would that have been??), nor did we see the ball itself - Phillip told us that, when the water is completely still, you can actually watch through the water as the teeming ball of fish travels past the beach. All we saw was the birds, but the fact that we happened to be in the right place at the right time for even that much is pretty incredible.
After the baitball excitement, we headed into Mossel Bay, and our host dropped us at a trailhead for a beautiful hike along the seacliffs. The waves below were astounding: they were giant, and the water was such a clear blue that I could see how the troughs were marbled with red and brown sand before they crested and exploded in a frothy frenzy. After hiking for a couple hours, we saw some fascinating-looking tidepools below and found a pretty easy trail that led to them by winding down the cliffs. The pools were beautiful: they were full of tiny starfish and red and green seaweed; with the blue and white ocean and the dusty brown rocks, it was a truly lovely spot.
The weather quickly turned gray, though, and sudden gusts of wind began blowing so hard that I actually started to worry about getting blown off the cliffs, so we hiked out apace, arriving back in town ahead of some menacing-looking clouds.
We spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the little town and waiting for the inevitable rain to arrive. Mossel Bay was interesting mainly for the different slice of South African culture that it displayed. Man, if I'd thought central Cape Town was gentrified, I hadn't seen anything yet...Mossel Bay was so manicured that it looked like a place you'd take your ailing great auntie for an afternoon of sunning. Sure, there were still a few kind of sketchy places, like the minibus depot, but even that seemed pretty sterile. The town was by far the most unapologetically Afrikaner place I've seen yet. The Afrikaners are the descendants of the first Dutch colonizers; though I can claim to know very little about South Africa and its people, I have heard from locals that the diehard Afrikaners comprise the conservative Caucasian faction. Much of the public written material in Cape Town (street signs, posters, etc.) was in both Afrikaans and English; I was surprised to find that in Mossel Bay, however, many signs were in Afrikaans only. When I asked Phillip if there are many people who speak Afrikaans who do not also speak English, he rolled his eyes and said that there are indeed many in Mossel Bay (or Mosselbaai, as they'd say). He described them as people who still resent the British takeover of the South African colony in the early 19th century and who wax nostalgic for the days of apartheid. While no generalizations are ever entirely true, of course, it was still really interesting to observe a town that seems to be holding onto its colonial past as tightly as modernity will allow.
This morning and afternoon were persistently rainy; we ate a leisurely breakfast and then spent a few hours in town at the Bartolomeu Dias museum (he was the first European to round the Cape of Good Hope, though neither he nor anyone else knew at the time that he'd done so; apparently Mossel Bay was the place where he first came ashore after rounding the bend and turning north again.) The museum itself was rather lackluster, with an odd collection of seashells, boat replicas, and posters about Nelson Mandela; the highlight was undoubtedly a GIANT, moss-covered prehistoric skull and spine that lay, with absolutely no explanation, in the middle of the garden. I have no idea what sort of creature it came from, and everyone else was just walking around it as if it were a completely normal piece of lawn furniture. Indeed...
We boarded a bus in the late afternoon for the town of Oudtshoorn, northeast of Mossel Bay in the (supposedly) drier grasslands (though it's freezing and rainy outside right now) known as the Little Karoo. We've already booked ourselves on a 56 kilometer bike ride (whee!) starting early tomorrow, so I'd better go get some sleep!
Monday, June 7, 2010
The Mother City
I've landed in the Mother City.
That's the name that residents give to Cape Town, South Africa with well-deserved affection and reverence. This place represents the most unusual intersection of cultures I've ever encountered: Zulu and Dutch, Xhosa and British, Indian and Zambian and Malaysian and German features are all stuffed together into one fractious confederation that is simultaneously genteel and angry, both polishing itself for the future while still fuming from the injustice of the past and present.
My travel partner, a friend and fellow UH linguist named Justin, and I arrived on Tuesday afternoon after the longest air travel period of my entire life. We had left Honolulu the previous Tuesday and flown through Tennessee for a 48-hour stopover. Afterward, we flew to New York for a few days with my college roommate Kim, and then left to catch our plane for Johannesburg just after dawn on Monday. It is truly amazing that one can fly directly from New York to South Africa - almost 8000 miles - so I certainly have nothing to complain about. I can say, however, that sitting on a plane for 15 consecutive hours (in the middle seat of the middle section, no less) will make parts of your anatomy ache that you never knew you had. Other than being long and crowded, however, the flight was remarkably uneventful; my only real regret is that South African Airways has apparently taken all its culinary cues from the British. (Rubber-based sausages and boiled potatoes for breakfast? Really?) Justin had apparently indicated some sort of special dietary constraint when booking his ticket, though he couldn't remember what; whatever it was, though (Halaal, perhaps?) he ended up with some special menu that was infinitely preferable to mine (spicy chickpea curry for breakfast? When the alternative is bangers and whatnot, then yes, please!!)
After a brief stopover in Johannesburg, we caught a final flight to the southwestern coastal city of Cape Town. I watched a tract of South Africa that spanned almost the whole width of the country pass by under the airplane, and found the majority of it remarkably unremarkable: flat, empty, a few scrub bushes, dirt varying among different hues of brown. The last part of the journey revealed some interesting mountains that looked in fact more like wrinkles in the earth, or ripples moving outward in a pool. Then a few trees, some buildings, and we touched down on ground closer to Antarctica than I'd ever been before.
Our South Africa guidebook, made only a few months ago, said that there would be no public transportation options from the airport into the city. We asked at the information desk, however, and were immediately directed to our (literally) brand-new city bus at a shiny new bus stop. Even though we were the only passengers, we were nevertheless accompanied by multiple designated "information assistants" in yellow jerseys who carried our bags, asked where we were going, dispensed advice about Cape Town, and showed us exactly where to get off the bus...and then didn't even want to be tipped afterward! This is truly a city that knows the world is watching.
We spent our first few hours in the city wandering around a lovely, immaculately manicured central garden, as our CouchSurfing host, Sifiso, was still at work. During that first afternoon, I was floored - absolutely stunned - by how incredibly differently this second Africa experience had begun than the first one had. If I hadn't known otherwise, I easily could have thought I'd landed in somewhere in western Europe. Central Cape Town, which is crisp and smells pleasantly like autumn this time of year, is full of museums, cafes, wide plazas with bronze statues of dead (mostly white) guys, cobblestone alleys and even a few nice stone churches for good measure. You can even drink the water right out of the tap (in fact, our host said that the first time he'd ever heard a warning against drinking tap water was during his trip to New York!!) Cape Town is an incredibly easy (re-)introduction to the continent. It feels like Munich with more-proximal penguins.
Unless you venture outside the city, that is. Cape Town feels like Europe because it was forcibly, brutally engineered that way. Under apartheid, which means up until 1994, blacks and "coloureds" (mixed racial people) who lived in areas that were proclaimed "white" were physically removed from these areas (literally, in trucks, while their houses were bulldozed) and left on the outskirts. This means that South African cities are ringed by miles and miles and miles of sprawling shantytowns called "townships," full of corrugated tin and plywood shacks, mud streets, mounds of trash, a raging meth problem...and former government-owned liquor stores, the proceeds from which were used to fund the removal of more blacks from other areas. Seriously.
Our host, himself a black guy originally from the Durban area, has been the most enlightening part of our stay. He's extremely intelligent and well-informed about both South African and world politics, and talking to him is like hearing the hope and anger of an entire nation. Last night he told us about the rampant corruption and ineffectiveness of South Africa's ruling party, the ANC. Mandela himself used to head this party, he told us, and many of its current leaders were prominent figures in the fight against apartheid. Now, though, these same former heroes of the people are government louts, misusing funds and enriching themselves while the living conditions for millions of South Africans haven't changed since the Dutch were in charge. His monologue grew more and more intense until he finally yelled to no one in particular, "Is this what we struggled for??" A moment later, in a quieter voice that was painfully sad, he added, "How the mighty have fallen."
I had no response. But I am infinitely grateful for the small bit of understanding these conversations have brought me.
In happier news, the highlight of the trip so far has been a bicycle trip to the Cape of Good Hope. We joined two other visitors with a guide for a day trip that began with a boat ride out to a large rock off the coast just south of the city. The rock is apparently a favorite hangout spot for seals, and we saw hundreds of them, as well as getting a magnificent view of the foggy, mountainous shoreline that actually reminded me of a drier Kaua'i with lower peaks. We then drove along a beautiful coastal cliff-road (again evoking connections with the scenery of the American Pacific coast and Hawai'i), stopping at a beach full of African penguins! We walked along a boardwalk and saw dozens of them, these little knee-high creatures toddling around, braying loudly at each other and flopping awkwardly on top of fuzzy gray chicks. It was utterly adorable.
We then drove on to the national park surrounding the Cape of Good Hope, where our guide set us off on bicycles and drove on ahead to the halfway point to prepare lunch. The bike ride was amazing: it was the only sunny day we've had yet, and it was absolutely beautiful, with the wide, flat plain lowering gently to rocky shorelines in some directions and rising to mountains and cliffs that dropped into the sea others. At the Cape of Good Hope itself, the dry grassland (complete with two wild OSTRICHES, passively munching not 20 feet from the road) gave way to boulders, then rocks, and then the smallest slice of ocean between any major landmass and Antarctica. We returned our bikes to the guide and then set off on a short hike up a cliff. The Cape is actually two north-south promontories, only maybe a mile apart and in a sort of horseshoe shape; the Cape of Good Hope stretches slightly farther south, but its sister strip of land, Cape Point, is just as stunning and contains a lighthouse. We hiked around the curve and up to the Point lighthouse, where we could marvel at the 360 degree view of water and mountains while being treated to shouted renditions of the soccer songs of South America, courtesy of a rowdy group of Argentines and Uruguayans hanging out at the top.
Another highlight was a trip with Sifiso last night to a braai (cookout) that occurs every Sunday in the township of Guguletu, just outside the city. Immediately upon entering Guguletu, we left Europe behind and entered the Africa that I had been expecting. The cobblestones and cafes and Caucasians were all gone, and we encountered a helter-skelter mass of cars and people and animals and buildings. The braai is held at a tiny butcher shop; hundreds and hundreds of people descend on the shop weekly and stand in line to buy a plastic washtub full of whatever raw meat they want (we chose lamb, beef, and sausage). Everyone then takes their tub to the back room, where there's a fire and a grill rack and a handful of guys running back and forth to cook and deliver a thousand pounds of meat. The crowd then congregates outside in the street to drink beer and dance during the interminable wait (ours was about three hours). House music was blasting from under a tarp, and the few grimy tables that were set up just got in the way of the crush of the cavorting carnivores. Dogs squeezed under people's legs to catch the scraps, cars with their horns blaring parted the crowd from time to time, and the sheer number of people, plus the grill inside the shop, almost helped me forget that night had fallen and it had gotten really, really cold. By the time we finally got our food, much of the crowd had dissipated; we sat at a table and tore up unidentifiable meat chunks with our hands, scooping along with it mounds of cornmeal paste (which I remember as ugali from Tanzania, but which is called "pap" here). By the end of our meal, our hands and faces were slick with an impermeable coat of grease that the cold water provided could do nothing to remove; we finally gave up and just rubbed it in. It turns out that unadulterated animal fat is a fantastic moisturizer; my hands and lips still feel softer than they have in years. The braai was definitely one of the most fun - and most real feeling - experiences we've had in South Africa so far...even for us two near-vegetarians!
We are leaving Cape Town this evening for a smaller town called Mossel Bay, which is east of here along the Indian Ocean coast. I don't know much of anything about the town, but am hoping to use it as a point from which to find transport to smaller towns. Figuring out how to get around by public transportation outside the major cities here is proving really challenging.
Much more has happened in the past week, but Justin has been waiting at a cafe for two hours now, so I should go...more later from Mossel Bay!
That's the name that residents give to Cape Town, South Africa with well-deserved affection and reverence. This place represents the most unusual intersection of cultures I've ever encountered: Zulu and Dutch, Xhosa and British, Indian and Zambian and Malaysian and German features are all stuffed together into one fractious confederation that is simultaneously genteel and angry, both polishing itself for the future while still fuming from the injustice of the past and present.
My travel partner, a friend and fellow UH linguist named Justin, and I arrived on Tuesday afternoon after the longest air travel period of my entire life. We had left Honolulu the previous Tuesday and flown through Tennessee for a 48-hour stopover. Afterward, we flew to New York for a few days with my college roommate Kim, and then left to catch our plane for Johannesburg just after dawn on Monday. It is truly amazing that one can fly directly from New York to South Africa - almost 8000 miles - so I certainly have nothing to complain about. I can say, however, that sitting on a plane for 15 consecutive hours (in the middle seat of the middle section, no less) will make parts of your anatomy ache that you never knew you had. Other than being long and crowded, however, the flight was remarkably uneventful; my only real regret is that South African Airways has apparently taken all its culinary cues from the British. (Rubber-based sausages and boiled potatoes for breakfast? Really?) Justin had apparently indicated some sort of special dietary constraint when booking his ticket, though he couldn't remember what; whatever it was, though (Halaal, perhaps?) he ended up with some special menu that was infinitely preferable to mine (spicy chickpea curry for breakfast? When the alternative is bangers and whatnot, then yes, please!!)
After a brief stopover in Johannesburg, we caught a final flight to the southwestern coastal city of Cape Town. I watched a tract of South Africa that spanned almost the whole width of the country pass by under the airplane, and found the majority of it remarkably unremarkable: flat, empty, a few scrub bushes, dirt varying among different hues of brown. The last part of the journey revealed some interesting mountains that looked in fact more like wrinkles in the earth, or ripples moving outward in a pool. Then a few trees, some buildings, and we touched down on ground closer to Antarctica than I'd ever been before.
Our South Africa guidebook, made only a few months ago, said that there would be no public transportation options from the airport into the city. We asked at the information desk, however, and were immediately directed to our (literally) brand-new city bus at a shiny new bus stop. Even though we were the only passengers, we were nevertheless accompanied by multiple designated "information assistants" in yellow jerseys who carried our bags, asked where we were going, dispensed advice about Cape Town, and showed us exactly where to get off the bus...and then didn't even want to be tipped afterward! This is truly a city that knows the world is watching.
We spent our first few hours in the city wandering around a lovely, immaculately manicured central garden, as our CouchSurfing host, Sifiso, was still at work. During that first afternoon, I was floored - absolutely stunned - by how incredibly differently this second Africa experience had begun than the first one had. If I hadn't known otherwise, I easily could have thought I'd landed in somewhere in western Europe. Central Cape Town, which is crisp and smells pleasantly like autumn this time of year, is full of museums, cafes, wide plazas with bronze statues of dead (mostly white) guys, cobblestone alleys and even a few nice stone churches for good measure. You can even drink the water right out of the tap (in fact, our host said that the first time he'd ever heard a warning against drinking tap water was during his trip to New York!!) Cape Town is an incredibly easy (re-)introduction to the continent. It feels like Munich with more-proximal penguins.
Unless you venture outside the city, that is. Cape Town feels like Europe because it was forcibly, brutally engineered that way. Under apartheid, which means up until 1994, blacks and "coloureds" (mixed racial people) who lived in areas that were proclaimed "white" were physically removed from these areas (literally, in trucks, while their houses were bulldozed) and left on the outskirts. This means that South African cities are ringed by miles and miles and miles of sprawling shantytowns called "townships," full of corrugated tin and plywood shacks, mud streets, mounds of trash, a raging meth problem...and former government-owned liquor stores, the proceeds from which were used to fund the removal of more blacks from other areas. Seriously.
Our host, himself a black guy originally from the Durban area, has been the most enlightening part of our stay. He's extremely intelligent and well-informed about both South African and world politics, and talking to him is like hearing the hope and anger of an entire nation. Last night he told us about the rampant corruption and ineffectiveness of South Africa's ruling party, the ANC. Mandela himself used to head this party, he told us, and many of its current leaders were prominent figures in the fight against apartheid. Now, though, these same former heroes of the people are government louts, misusing funds and enriching themselves while the living conditions for millions of South Africans haven't changed since the Dutch were in charge. His monologue grew more and more intense until he finally yelled to no one in particular, "Is this what we struggled for??" A moment later, in a quieter voice that was painfully sad, he added, "How the mighty have fallen."
I had no response. But I am infinitely grateful for the small bit of understanding these conversations have brought me.
In happier news, the highlight of the trip so far has been a bicycle trip to the Cape of Good Hope. We joined two other visitors with a guide for a day trip that began with a boat ride out to a large rock off the coast just south of the city. The rock is apparently a favorite hangout spot for seals, and we saw hundreds of them, as well as getting a magnificent view of the foggy, mountainous shoreline that actually reminded me of a drier Kaua'i with lower peaks. We then drove along a beautiful coastal cliff-road (again evoking connections with the scenery of the American Pacific coast and Hawai'i), stopping at a beach full of African penguins! We walked along a boardwalk and saw dozens of them, these little knee-high creatures toddling around, braying loudly at each other and flopping awkwardly on top of fuzzy gray chicks. It was utterly adorable.
We then drove on to the national park surrounding the Cape of Good Hope, where our guide set us off on bicycles and drove on ahead to the halfway point to prepare lunch. The bike ride was amazing: it was the only sunny day we've had yet, and it was absolutely beautiful, with the wide, flat plain lowering gently to rocky shorelines in some directions and rising to mountains and cliffs that dropped into the sea others. At the Cape of Good Hope itself, the dry grassland (complete with two wild OSTRICHES, passively munching not 20 feet from the road) gave way to boulders, then rocks, and then the smallest slice of ocean between any major landmass and Antarctica. We returned our bikes to the guide and then set off on a short hike up a cliff. The Cape is actually two north-south promontories, only maybe a mile apart and in a sort of horseshoe shape; the Cape of Good Hope stretches slightly farther south, but its sister strip of land, Cape Point, is just as stunning and contains a lighthouse. We hiked around the curve and up to the Point lighthouse, where we could marvel at the 360 degree view of water and mountains while being treated to shouted renditions of the soccer songs of South America, courtesy of a rowdy group of Argentines and Uruguayans hanging out at the top.
Another highlight was a trip with Sifiso last night to a braai (cookout) that occurs every Sunday in the township of Guguletu, just outside the city. Immediately upon entering Guguletu, we left Europe behind and entered the Africa that I had been expecting. The cobblestones and cafes and Caucasians were all gone, and we encountered a helter-skelter mass of cars and people and animals and buildings. The braai is held at a tiny butcher shop; hundreds and hundreds of people descend on the shop weekly and stand in line to buy a plastic washtub full of whatever raw meat they want (we chose lamb, beef, and sausage). Everyone then takes their tub to the back room, where there's a fire and a grill rack and a handful of guys running back and forth to cook and deliver a thousand pounds of meat. The crowd then congregates outside in the street to drink beer and dance during the interminable wait (ours was about three hours). House music was blasting from under a tarp, and the few grimy tables that were set up just got in the way of the crush of the cavorting carnivores. Dogs squeezed under people's legs to catch the scraps, cars with their horns blaring parted the crowd from time to time, and the sheer number of people, plus the grill inside the shop, almost helped me forget that night had fallen and it had gotten really, really cold. By the time we finally got our food, much of the crowd had dissipated; we sat at a table and tore up unidentifiable meat chunks with our hands, scooping along with it mounds of cornmeal paste (which I remember as ugali from Tanzania, but which is called "pap" here). By the end of our meal, our hands and faces were slick with an impermeable coat of grease that the cold water provided could do nothing to remove; we finally gave up and just rubbed it in. It turns out that unadulterated animal fat is a fantastic moisturizer; my hands and lips still feel softer than they have in years. The braai was definitely one of the most fun - and most real feeling - experiences we've had in South Africa so far...even for us two near-vegetarians!
We are leaving Cape Town this evening for a smaller town called Mossel Bay, which is east of here along the Indian Ocean coast. I don't know much of anything about the town, but am hoping to use it as a point from which to find transport to smaller towns. Figuring out how to get around by public transportation outside the major cities here is proving really challenging.
Much more has happened in the past week, but Justin has been waiting at a cafe for two hours now, so I should go...more later from Mossel Bay!
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