Tired?

Dusk at Hermanus

As we started our long drive from the Tsitsikamma National Park back to Cape Town, I became aware of a certain travel weariness that had crept up on me. For three weeks we had moved fast from place to place, following a loose but busy schedule, sleeping one day here, two days there, changing landscapes and hotel rooms often, like a couple of drifters living in their motor home. The land had become familiar to us; we knew the grocery stores, the banks, the fast foods, and the parking customs but we didn’t settle in any corner long enough to develop the comfortable illusion that we had a home of our own. Familiarity with a place you visit creates the yearning to stay, but in the usual vacationer it is closely associated with the thought – good or bad – of returning home. We didn’t have a home to get back to, and we weren’t going to stay either, so I felt that it was time to move on, not just to another town and another hotel room, but to the next stage of our trip. But it was too early for this restlessness: we had to get to Cape Town first, and it was going to take us a few more days. This feeling of inadequacy had struck me a bit too early.

I spent the following few days under the ominous shadow of this thought, which made them a little dull and unexciting. I had already decided we had to leave, and this diminished the beauty of the places that we saw during those last days, although these places were in no way inferior to the ones we had already visited. Or it may have been the weather, I don’t know . . .

Cape Penguin.
Click on pic to see slideshow
or here to access the set

We got to Hermanus, the self-crowned whale-watching capital of the world, but didn’t see many whales, because we were too lazy to wait for hours on the bluff, looking at the sea through our binoculars, waiting for something to happen. We saw them in the end, but they were just gray patches floating on water, blowing steam and showing their tails once in a while as they dived. Alas, there was none of that spectacular breaching stuff that you see on the Discovery Channel. So I guess it was the disappointment that the whales didn’t come to parade themselves in front of my camera that made us spend most of our time getting busy with the local delicious food and good wine.

Next, it was Simonstown on the cape peninsula, a little town of rich, beautiful terraced houses overlooking the sea, part of a gorgeous stretch of narrow coastland running around the nail-shaped peninsula that extends into the Atlantic, south of Cape Town. There was not much to see here besides the penguins at Boulder’s beach. The whole town fell asleep around seven, so we had our dinner extravaganza in an almost empty restaurant.

Evil baboon

On the day we drove back to Cape Town we took a ride through the Table Mountain national park and visited South Point – the southern tip of the peninsula, which also holds the Cape of Good Hope. In the visitor center parking, I was attacked by a baboon that came from nowhere and wanted to steal the granola bar that I had just started to eat. I caught the baboon by the throat, pinned him to the ground and yelled at him: “You want by granola bar, you filthy baboon? Then come and get it if you can! Take this! And this!” I said, as I punched him in his dog-ugly face . . . Ok, it wasn’t quite like that. It climbed on the roof of the car as I was standing by it, and made a dash for my hand, but I jumped back. It seemed to want to come after me, so I threw the bar over its head and the baboon went after it and later was chased away by the park rangers armed with long sticks.

The Khayelitsa township.
Click on pic to see slideshow
or here to access the set

Finally, back in Cape Town (after another short detour to the local wineries), we landed at the same noisy hotel on Long street where we had stayed two weeks before. The next day, we took an organized tour to visit one of the most visible legacies of apartheid: the townships – the suburban conglomerates of dilapidated houses, wooden shacks and tin-houses where the black population had been forced to settle when the country was ruled by a regime that considered skin color as the most important guiding principle. The tour was a very educative experience, but I could not shake off a lingering feeling of guilt for having paid money to see the misery and poverty of others.

On the last day, as I returned our rental car, I finally felt free. Something else was going to begin soon. Better or worse, I didn’t know, but I was eager for it.

Click here to read more...

Summary only...

Splendor at the Cape

The city, the harbor and the mountain.
Click on pic to see slideshow
or here to access the set

It’s not surprising that when the Dutch settlers arrived at the southern tip of Africa in the 17th century they decided to make this place their home. It’s also not surprising that when the British started foraying into this land, almost 150 years later, they too, decided they liked it so much, that it had to be theirs. I too, felt the irresistible attraction of this land, its superlative, fascinating beauty, and wondered how the life of the first winemakers who started shaping the vineyards around Stellenbosch and Franschhoek may have been, and how the first farmers who crossed the Swartberg pass into the immense and empty Karoo picked the right patch of land to settle on.

The Kirstenbosch botanical garden

The landscapes of the Cape Province will literally bring a smile onto your face. Before arriving here I had no idea that everything would be so abundantly green. Even the seemingly barren hilltops of the less humid Karoo region are covered with shrubs that glisten in all shades of green under the hard African sun. This may be the case just because it’s the end of winter now and it has been raining often recently; a summer landscape may be quite a different story – the beautiful coastlands of California come to mind, with their luscious foliage frenzy during the short spring and the scorched yellow tones which last the whole long summer.

The Neetlingshof winery.
Click on pic to see slideshow
or here to access the set

There are quite a lot of things to see in the Cape Province, the most visited in South Africa. Like everybody, we began with Cape Town, the big happy village, a very relaxed and relatively safe big city, with a pretty downtown that reminds of a mid-size American town with its not-too-tall skyline and the pedestrian shopping area, the older, more bohemian streets where the bars and clubs are now concentrated, and the pretty restored waterfront, bustling with locals and tourists on a stroll. Quite an American-looking town indeed, except that it has a diamond-shaped fort in the middle, with bells, cannons and guards wearing the proper historic attire and performing an outdated ceremony for the sole benefit of tourists and their cameras.

Perfect harmony between man and bird.
Click on pic to see slideshow
or here to access the set

From Cape Town we moved eastward to explore the many wineries that cover the gentle hills of the region. Estates with imposing white gates and names like Blaauwklippen, Neetlingshof, Spier, Steenberg, Chamonix, Haute Cabriere, and Fairview are now all a blurry mix of memories, but I surely won’t forget the good times we had with all the bottles of excellent wine we bought there. Although wine tasting, Angela’s favorite “hiking”, is an activity very alien to my personality, I must admit it is very instructive and makes a good opportunity for pretty pictures.

The church in Prince Albert

From these vine-heavy tiny hills separated by miniature mountain ridges the drier, flatter Karoo, is just a stone throw away. The vegetation changes, the nights are cooler and the towns are more spread out. This is the land of ostrich farms, game reserves, winding, never-ending highways, where baboon families can be seen looking for food by the side of the road and you can drive for a very long time without crossing another car. We spent a few days here visiting or just passing through small towns with fairytale-sounding names like Montagu, Oudtshoorn, Ladismith and Prince Albert.

Sails and the wind
Click on pic to see slideshow
or here to access the set

The journey continues south, along the Outeniqua mountain pass, to the ocean coast and then eastward again. This part of the seaside, so aptly named “The Garden Route” brings forth yet another type of gorgeous landscape, to keep the traveler happy: thick, green coniferous forests, pearly lakes and lagoons, steep hills cascading into furious waves, and picture-perfect little towns tucked between sea, rocks and sand dunes. We spent a couple of days at a beach backpacker hostel in the remote Buffalo Bay, where the doors didn’t have latches or locks and the whole lodge, owners, staff and guests seemed to be just another large family. As I write this, we are staying in an ocean-side cabin in the Tsitsikamma national park where we hiked a bit, cooked a bit and mostly did nothing all day long. Tomorrow we’ll be on the move again heading back westward slowly toward Cape Town, on a different route than the one we took to get here, through endless fields of yellow canola and wheat, green at this time of the year.

Click here to read more...

Summary only...

Africa, Africa!

Women singing on the Waterfront
in Cape Town

From the moment our 747 landed at the O.R. Tambo international airport in Johannesburg I knew that we were about to begin a new adventure. Colors, smells, landscapes, sounds, people and life in general, all was different from the manifestations of the continent we had left just a few hours earlier. Do you remember that feeling that comes over you when you arrive in a place you have never seen before, even if it’s just a few hours away from home? Do you recall that avalanche of sensations of all kinds whose only common feature is that they are all different and unfamiliar? One tries to absorb and process all that input, and in a few days it all becomes just normal and loses intensity, but the first day is always unforgettable.

I have already written about our days in Pretoria and our visa troubles. It turned out in the end, that the troubles weren’t as big as I had thought they could be – except for Zimbabwe - which we will not be visiting - getting all the other visas was just a breeze. Or course, we had to pay for them, sometimes up to $75; it surely doesn’t come out cheap to visit those wildlife reserves if you’re a gringo! How do they call gringos in Africa?

South Africa is a beautiful but uneasy place to travel to. You cannot avoid asking yourself the troubled and complex social questions that come naturally with this place, like a permanent and ominous cloud. What has changed since apartheid has fallen? Can whites and blacks reconcile and build up a future together? How can a white man live in this country without an overwhelming sense of guilt for the crimes of the past? How can a new national identity be built? How can prosperity be brought to the overwhelmingly poor black majority? Can something be done about the AIDS crisis and why is the government sticking their head in the sand? And my favorite: is Johannesburg really that dangerous?

As a traveler with an open eye I couldn’t help noticing the peculiar details. The streets we walked or driven on, whether they were in the suburbs in Pretoria or in downtown Johannesburg or anywhere in or around Cape Town, all looked spotless; there was not an ounce of garbage in sight. Although the situation in the townships may be different, street cleanliness in and around cities is an indication of strong civic sense, which in turn is a solid foundation for nation building.

Race issues are big in South Africa and it should be so, until all things about skin color have been discussed over and over, until everything was understood, and the words have been turned around so many times that they have become meaningless. While apartheid has ended and the majority has finally gained freedom, there hasn’t been a redistribution of wealth to accompany it. I think there shouldn’t be one at all – any form of reparation for immaterial injustices like the deprivation of freedom should consist in programs to create jobs and infrastructure, and to improve education and health systems. Anything remotely punitive would lead to a disaster - just look at neighboring Zimbabwe and what the redistribution of land owned by white farmers has brought them…

The economic differences still prevail and match the previous social differences. You cannot help notice that the majority of shop or restaurant owners and managers are white and that most of the occupants of the vehicles you see on the street are white as well. At all the mid-range restaurants we have dined, most of the clientele were white – they may have been mostly tourists, I don’t know. There is certainly an emerging black middle class but it will take a while until things change noticeably. If anything, there are big hopes for the future and the whole country seems to be going through a construction frenzy – new shopping malls, houses and apartment buildings are growing out of the dirt every day…

Why is crime so wide-spread in South Africa? Nothing happened to us (yet - knock on wood!) but everybody tells us that things are really bad. While we were in Cape Town the newspapers were full of articles about the resurgence of muggings against hikers on Table Mountain. The answer is obvious, crushing poverty and the lack of education are pushing destitute young men from the townships to crime. But is anything done to stop this? If you listened to South Africans' opinions about their government, you’d think there isn’t. Indeed, they have their troubles and creating jobs and schools is not easy and doesn’t happen overnight. But as a tourist, you can’t help noticing the almost complete lack of police on the streets. I have hardly seen a uniformed man or a patrol vehicle since I arrived here. Just drive for a few minutes in any town in the United States and count the police cruisers you cross… South America had police officers everywhere, some of them heavily armed; South Africa seems to lag far behind in the “Law & Order” chapter.

How long will it take until things will have visibly improved? Many years, I think; there have been only 15 since apartheid's end. To compare, Romania’s anti-communist revolution has been 18 years ago and the old mentalities are still alive and well. I have faith in human nature, but it takes an awfully long time to change…

I started to write a post about the beauty of Cape Town and the southern wine country and look what I came up with...

Click here to read more...

Summary only...

Time to change continents

Latin America was beginning to feel too much like home after three-and-a-half months of asking "donde esta el bano" and saying "gracias" a thousand times a day. When things that were once so different, so new, start looking so familiar and cozy it is clearly time to leave, time to move on. At least that's true when it comes to traveling...

We're in Cape Town now, after a few days spent in Pretoria and a quick drive to Johannesburg. Having a rental car makes getting around much easier. We'll spend some time in and around Cape Town and then we'll head east to the Garden Route - a beautiful stretch of coast in the Western Cape province - before heading back to Cape Town on a different road, to start our overland tour going northwards.

One main reason for spending time in Pretoria was to apply for visas for those other African countries we will be visiting. Tanzania and Kenya formalities went smooth as ice, with a turnaround of one day each. Since we had the car, we were able to pick up the Tanzania visas and apply for Kenya the same morning. While for those two countries both of us needed visas, for the rest of them it was only I that had to get in line and beg. Malawi went surprisingly smooth - on the phone they told us it would take three days to issue the document, but when I got there they told me to return and pick it up the next day. Malawi was the friendliest consulate so far and the most pleasant surprise - apart from the fact that we drove to the wrong address in downtown Johannesburg, where the consulate had been before moving to the suburbs (I had forgotten to check before leaving), and then had to get directions to the new location over the phone and argue among ourselves over how to get there...

However, I hit a wall with Zimbabwe - the Johannesburg consulate told us they were not expediting visa applications anymore, not even with the extra fee, and that the process will take a minimum of a week, whereby the passport will be sent to Zimbabwe and back. Hell! visa or not, my passport wasn't going to go to Harare without me, by rail, road, air or any other way. We decided therefore to forgo Zimbabwe altogether and cross directly into Zambia instead (no visas needed for all bona-fide tourists), where we will reunite with the tour three days later. The tour company agreed and will provide transportation from the border to Livingstone, by one of their preferred vendors. Only Botswana and Namibia are left now, and I will apply for the former tomorrow.

I don't have any pictures of Pretoria. When everybody - locals, tourists and travel guides alike - tells you that the crime rate in South Africa is appallingly high you start believing them. Although we never felt unsafe during our time there, I just didn't feel comfortable flashing a big and obviously expensive Canon SLR camera on the streets. Besides... there's really nothing to photograph in Pretoria. Now that I'm in Cape Town, the tourism capital of South Africa, I started to pull out the camera more often, but I still don't feel as much at ease as I was in South America.

Click here to read more...

Summary only...