Adventures in South Africa

I wasn't going to continue to write since I have now left Lesotho, but since the internet acess has been quite good, I thought I would write down a few things that I have enjoyed while touring South Africa in the last ten days or so.

Belinda and I arrived in Johannesburg on a Friday and left at 5am the next day to go into Kruger National Park on a safari for a few days. It has been so nice travelling with Belinda. We have had a really excellent time. The safari was wonderful and much more luxurious than we had anticipated. Really, we had just signed up for something through an agency and didn't really know what we had gotten ourselves into... We were "camping" in the park, which was quite funny as we were actually in lovely tents with beds in them and pillows and everything. It was quite cold, and we were glad of our sleeping bags, which most people had not brought, and slept really well. We did some night time drives on a private concession where we saw a Cape buffalo, and the next day did an all day drive into the main park. We saw many antelope, giraffes, zebra, hippos, and lions a leopard and rhinos (gray dots in the distance. It was really amazing to see these beautiful animals in the natural surroundings. The hippos were very impressive- they apparently rival crocs for the highest number of human deaths that they cause and should be avoided at all costs. A highlight was the morning walk we did around the concession. Here we loked at tracks and dung and happened upon a white rhino grazing among the tall grass- a magical experience.

Our last night was spent at a game lodge where we had a very fancy room with a shower AND a bath (this rates very high in my books!). We had no idea this was part of the itinerary so it was a nice treat. It was a also the site of a chimpanze sanctuary for chimps taken mainly from Angola where they are often used to attract customers. It is a fairly new faciilty and they intend to rehabiliate the animals and release them back into the wild.

From Kruger we took went to Nelspruit for the night (a nearby town) and then on to Swaziland for a night, and then Durban, Port St. Johns and now Capetown, from where I write to you.

This country is also stunningly beautiful. The mountains, the sea, the beautiful veld and the friendly people have all resulted in a wonderful little trip. As two females travelling, I had been a bit nervous about our plans, unsure of how safe I would feel. That, and South Africa generally tends to get a bad rap when it comes to safety. As it turned out we met lovely people everywhere we went, travellers and residents alike. So if you have ever dismissed travelling in South Africa because of safety reasons, I encourage you to re-evalaute and to talk to people who has been there themselves. So long as you exercise common sense, South Africa is not a place to missed!

We had intended to take a bus called the "Baz Bus", a tourist bus that stops regularly in differnet places along the coast at backpacker hostels. As it turned out, we found it to be cramped and a bit disorganized, and since it was becoming tourist season, had trouble getting on the bus when we wanted to. In Durban we abandoned the Baz Bus in favour of the regular long distance bus lines and local taxis. This gave us more opportunites to chat with the local people and we enjoyed this much more. From Durban we arrived in Umtata, a town near to childhood home of Nelson Mandela. We took a mini-bus taxi from there to Port St. Johns, a little sea-side African town.

We spent two full days in Port St. Johns at a hostel near the sea. This has been our favorite spot as it is along the Wild Coast and have not been developed very much. Instead of the Malibu-like homes in Durban, the hills were dotted with tiny little concrete homes and the local people sold their crafts at the beach. The local people were quite poor, and the hostel we stayed at was engaged in local development projects and employed many local people as well (not only as maids). They also mixed with the local community and did daily excusions where we learned more about the Xhosa community and their customs. The friendly people extended right down to the local dogs and wherever we went we were escourted by at least 3 dogs, who jostled for position to be by your side. This was quite unusual because my prior experience with dogs in both Lesotho and South Africa had been quite different, most dogs being used as guard dogs and not to be approached at all!

From Port St Johns we did a marathon bus ride all the way to Cape Town, where we spent three lovely days. We toured the wine country and the Cape itself, taking in the breathtaking views of the sea from various places along the Cape Penisula. We also went out to Robben Island, the infamous prison island where Nelson Mandela and many other political prsoners were kept during the aparteid era. The island is 11 km of the shores of Cape Town and officially closed as prison in 1996 and has opened for tours since then. I had read Nelson Mandela's autobiography in Lesotho, and found many of his descriptions come to life as we toured the island. The tour in the prison itself was given by an ex-prisoner who had been sent to the island for ten years at the age of 18 after setting fire to a rental building that kept records of rent owed by residents of a tounship, all of whom had been evicted from their homes and re-established in this new place as part of the Group Areas Act- an Act established to separate South Africans along the lines of race alone. This man told us he had come home from school one day to find padlocks on the door of his home. He and his family were put in a truck and driven to their new "home". While he did a great job in giving a balanced perspective of the prison and the struggle against aparteid itself, it was obvious that he still carried the burden of his suffering. One lady asked him why, given his history, he would choose to work for the prison. He replied that since his release he had been unemployed (huge unemployment in SA also), and that he preferred having this job to being a burden on his family. This was a poignant moment for me: his survival guranteed only by a daily visit to his personal hell. Frankly, I couldn't understand why more people wern't crying.