After leaving Kruger at close, we had
dinner at a little family run place and a long snooze in the town of
Sabie. Waking up at 8-something is so nice after a week of 5 am
alarms.
We did a lot of deliberation about our
route through South Africa, but ultimately decided to truck on down
to the Drakensberg in one day. It was a long, but very pretty drive
through an agricultural region.
Mostly long stretches of very gently
rolling plains brown with the winter fallow. Some vistas seemed
straight out of a Hopper painting, especially when, for several
miles, the telephone poles were yet to be strung with wires!
The views were beautiful, but more
memorable were the townships.
Before I got to South Africa, I didn't
really know what these were, so maybe a little explanation is in
order. Townships are not just “towns by another name”. During
Apartheid it was illegal for a Black to be in a town or city without
express permission, and even then only during certain daytime hours.
Furthermore most jobs were restricted to Whites only. Since the
ethnic-majority Blacks, and the only slightly less persecuted
Coloreds were no longer able to live in the towns, the government
designated “townships” to which they were coercively or forcibly
relocated. The result is that basically every settlement in South
Africa has a town and a township. In many cases these end up divided
by the main road, so on the left you will have nice large houses,
clean streets etc. all surrounded by fences topped with razor wire,
and on the right the horribly overcrowded slums with virtually no
city services, frequently all of which is surrounded by outhouses.
Some progress has been made in the last decade and a half, but the de
facto economic and residential segregation remains.
Economic development remains a huge
challenge, and while there is an official unemployment rate in the
20s or 30s or somesuch, the reality is that, like in the US, if you
work one day within the sampling period you are technically not
regarded as unemployed. So, work one day a month and you are counted
as working. How many people are involuntarily left without jobs on
any given day is anyone's guess. But salaries are low here, and are
stretched across extended families. Of course, all this is far less
true for whites.
It's a really strange place. In Cape
Town (jumping ahead a bit here) we visited the District Six Museum.
This is a converted church which means to memorialize what was once a
bustling Black and Coloreds neighborhood. A combination of corrupt
government officials, ambitious developers, and plain old racism led
to the forced relocation and literal bulldozing of the entire
district. But my takeaway from this musuem was this: For most of
the world the history of the twentieth century is a story of
progress. There are setbacks and episodes of inhumanity, but taken
as a whole, life for most of the world moved forward. This is not so
in South Africa. Here, the story is one of accelerating
backwardness, and racist policies in the early decades became
oppression, became increasingly violent persecution.
We really enjoyed our stay in South
Africa, it is a beautiful country with much to offer the tourist.
But we never really got comfortable. The entire time I was at pains
to subtly indicate that I was an American (either through accent or
conversation) because I would much rather be stereotyped for an ugly
tourist and citizen of the clumsy behemoth that unleashed George Bush
on the world than be mistaken for a White South African (Not that
they are all bad people, just that I wanted to distance myself from
the still fresh memories).
So anyway, it was a long haul, but we
got to the “Amphitheater backpackers” in the Northern Drakensberg
a little after sunset. The “Northern Berg” is a spectacular
range of mountains, created by uplift and erosion, and our hostel was
in the middle of nowhere, with awesome views all around. They
coordinated trips as well, and we booked for Lesotho the next
morning. Full bellies, and residual sleep deprivation had us retire
to our beds in a converted grain silo early. There was a sign over
the sink not to drink the water or take long showers. Susan was
about to brush her teeth with the tap water, convinced this was just
an attempt to get people to buy marked-up bottled water. “You are
in rural Africa and there is a sign that says, 'Don't drink the
water', at what point do you think that, maybe, you shouldn't drink
the water?” I asked. She mumbled something about being me a wuss,
but used the bottled water.
The next morning we were crammed into
one of a pair of four-wheel drive microbuses for the 3 hour drive
into Lesotho. Lesotho is an independent Kingdom, having aligned
themselves with the English against the Boers.
Besides providing a
high redoubt in which to station artillery, it has no resources of
value, and hence the treaty was honored by the British. It's dirt
poor, which in this case is also a cruel pun as the soil is mediocre
at best and the entire economy is agrarian. We had to go through
immigration to check out of (and later back into) South Africa, but
we have no Lesotho stamp because there is no Lesotho border control.
Our destination was a little village
just down the terrifying road from the border crossing. A rocky dirt
track meant for horses now services one or two tourist vans a day.
We did our best not to look down, but at the bottom when we forded a
stream, we knew we were out of the water, as it were, until our
return trip. The hostel donates part of the tour fee to the village
for the completion of their school, so we were welcomed to the
village by a local.
It was about this time that we realized
this was a mistake. It was a weekend, so the kids weren't in school,
but the curious little ones wandered over from their chores or play
to check us out. They were greeted by a gang of paparazzi sticking
cameras in their faces.
I have seen more decorum from a safari van
that suddenly stumbled on lions. One Belgian girl gave the orange
from her lunch to a kid with a self-satisfied smile. The guide, to
her credit, jumped in and told everyone not to do this because (1) it
teaches the kids to beg and (2) the kindergarten lesson that the
Belgian evidently missed was “please don't give something to one
child unless we give it to all”. Duh. OK, for everyone out there
who doesn't already know this – if you want to give charity in a
situation like this you give it to an elder, who then can give it to
the children at the time and circumstance that is appropriate for
their culture. Better yet, ask your guide what is appropriate. This
hostel is the only one that runs trips into this village, but by the
time we were on our way out at the end of the day local teens were
asking for cigarettes from us.
The Belgians continued to ignore the
guide. Evidently, they were all in the area as volunteers building
an orphanage in South Africa, and came on this trip for a day.
Oranges ran out, and they were onto candy bars. Every child was
being photographed from three feet away by a dozen or more cameras
simultaneously. God save us from the riteous.
Here's the thing with
volunteer-tourism. It's a gimmick, just like swimming with Dolphins
or bungee jumping. Do it to make yourself feel better. Don't do it
to actually make a difference. If you want to make a difference, you
don't do it by spending $1000 on an airline ticket to come to a rural
area with an abundance of unemployed and do unskilled labor for free.
If you are coming all this way to paint a wall, or a cinderblock
one-room schoolhouse stay home, use the money to hire local labor,
buy books with the money you saved, and preserve the earth with the
carbon you didn't emit. On the otherhand if you actually have some
skill to offer, or can train people in something useful, you are on
the right track. Unfortunately, the more skills people acquire, the
older they get, the less they travel, and the more they vote
Republican. But that's life I guess, you have people with means to
do good and people with motive to do good, but rarely people with
both. Hey pot... you are black (sayeth the kettle)!
After a hike and lunch we stopped in to
try some local beer. Then we met the Shaman/healer-woman. This was
interesting, if a little toursity with the woman sitting at the
middle of a circle of twenty-four white people. She explained how
she was selected to be a medicine woman, the difference between good
and bad magic, and how she communicated with the ancestors to find
the way to heal the sick people. I got a little nervous when one of
the do-gooders stood up asking if she could fix back pain.
Thankfully some spirit of common sense possesed her and she sat down
without asking if she could be healed right then and there.
But annoying as the Belgian santimonius
troop was, far worse were the other two Americans. This one guy was
loud, and obnoxious, always the first to ask a question, always of
the type that is meant to show how much he already knows. “These
petroglyphs, they were made by the San people?” Dude, I read the
lonely planet 5-page history of Southern Africa too, shut the hell
up, you aren't impressing anybody. He kept challenging the guide,
givin her a hard time about details in her hsitory of Lesotho and
South Africa, literally saying “I don't believe you.” to some of
the more atrotrious and painful details. This to a woman who spoke a
half a dozen languages, could translate in real time between English,
Besotho, Africaans and her mother-tongue, shared with us her
postponed ambition to go to college and study anthropology and
clearly knew a LOT about the area. He was the very embodiment of the
ugly American. Sure enough, he went to Harvard.
Now it isn't just me, this guy must
have pissed off the fates, and I just can't help the shadenfreude on
this one. After our long day in the sun, and our 3-hour bump riddled
ride home Susan and I were happy to eat and crash out. But
apparently some folks from the hostel went to the birthday party of
some local girl. Genius boy rolled his (uninsured) rental car into a
ditch somewhere along the road back from the party. Drunk driving in
rural Africa! Brilliant! (no injuries)
Eager to put some mileage between us
and the retards inhabiting the backpackers we took off the next
morning. Now in fairness, we did meet some nice folks. There was a
married couple, he from Brazil, she from India, who were doing a sort
of on-again, off-again around the world travel after he gradauted
UCLA medical school. They were fun, smart, and interesting. There was also a crazy French guy who was riding his
bike everywhere. He left France something like two years ago,
figured he had a few years of travel left. Great guy with lots of
interesting stories and wonderful perspectives obtained by moving
through countries at a human and not motorized pace. Actually, not
at all crazy except for the whole bicycling thing.
West of the mountainous Lesotho, and
appraoching the Southern Coast is the “Karoo”, a huge inland
desert.
Plump in the middle of this is Graff-Reinet, a town better
known as “set of movies taking place in 1950's America” or “real
life Twilight Zone”.
OK, I don't think it has actually been
featured in any major media, but it could be. It is a really cute,
really eerie town which has proudly preserved it's history and
architecture since the era when the proud Africaner residents were
boldly fighting against the evil incursions of the British (nevermind
that the Africaners were the source of South Africa's oppressive
racial politics). The old residence of the parish priest's family
was converted into a museum, with all the artifacts of frontier
living through the hundred years or so 1850-1950. This was
fascinating, and gave a real sense of how much on their own these
early European settlers were. There was also a war museum telling
the story of the town's occupation by the British during the Boer
war, and of the now disbanded local regiment, it's fighting against
the British, and then against the Germans (twice). I am no Apartheid
apologist, but in a way it was nice to see this history. The museums
made no mention of the racial context of their histories, but instead
the curation focused exclusively on the subjects themselves; the
family and family life of the various pastors, and the doings of the
local military troop. This left the curators free to proudly display
these histories. As an exclusive history, it would be dangerous.
But as one curiousity in the greater context of a visit to South
Africa, it was interesting and illuminating.
For dinner I had Kudu snitzel. Yum!
Here is a photo of a Kudu:
We stayed in a homestay run by this
really nice old Africaner lady and her husband. She was really
sweet, and a hoot to talk to. Like everyone over the age of seventy
she had opinions about everything and everyone, but was happy to put
this to good use and call all the restaurants in town for us to
secure a good table. We would just sit over morning coffee and chat
about all the changes she had seen in her time. It was fascinating,
especially to see how she was trying to deal with her own bigotry.
She also answered a key question; if old people keep their houses
cold, and foreigners keep their houses cold, do old foreigners keep
their houses twice as cold? The answer, dear readers, is yes.
Before leaving Graff-Reinet also took
in the Karoo National Park, the next day the Addo Elephant Park –
taking maximum advantage of the Parks pass we bought when we got
here. In Addo I did a horseback game ride, Susan took the warnings
about “experienced riders only” to heart and drove around in the
car. I saw Red Haartebeest, Zebra, Ostrich, and a jackal that we
chased at a gallop for a while. Susan saw these plus Elephants.
Grrr.
But, I did have a lot of fun, and once we swapped horses
around a couple of times due to temperament, got pretty comfortable
galloping through the African bush. Susan saw a baby warthog.
This
was the most time we'd spent apart in more than a month. That night
we ended up in Jeffrey's Bay.
This was where I hit a wall. Even
after a long sleep, I was staring at this perfect wave saying to
Susan, “This is a perfect wave!” But I didn't paddle out. I
couldn't, I was just too damn tired. I'm still kicking myself, as
after this first day the swell backed way down and it wasn't worth it
anymore. So I still haven't surfed in Africa.
Instead, we drove over to a Lion
Sanctuary and breeding center. They help their rescue and breeding
efforts by letting tourists in to see and interact with some of the
cats.
We took lots of photos of the big guys in what amount to a
somewhat less ethically troubling zoo (they had tigers too, oddly
enough).
I justified it to myself by figuring that they do provide a
source of genetic material for the population of game reserves and
parks.
But the big appeal for me, was the lion cubs. For an extra
fee (of course) you can play with and cuddle the lion cubs. This
turned out to be way, WAY cooler than I had hoped.
We climbed into
the enclosure with five cubs, all about 4 months old. Lions, unlike
domestic cat are social creatures, so the cubs love the attention,
even of people. By four months they were about 30 kilos, so the
ranger didn't let us pick them up. We pet them, played, and then
they started to bite and pull on my clothes. My pant cuffs survived
rather aggressive play, but my shirt has a nice rip where the little
guy combined claw with teeth.
How cool is that? I literally have
shirt that was ripped by a lion! (I had a small scratch too, but
whatever) Susan was happy with the arms-length view, but I got her
in for at least a couple of photos.
They were so cute!
(Four of these guys are white, and only
one the normal tawny. They aren't albinos, just genetically
recessive color. I think they deliberately breed some white lions
for special purchasers, I don't think you could ever release these
into the wild because the impala would see them a mile away.)
