Emakoshini Boutique Durban

I'm spending 2 more nights in Durban with a nice couple I found on couchsurfing.org. Margaret is an environmental consultant working on transportation issues for the city of Durban, and Gavin is a professional clown. They've given me a private guest room and various rides around town, which is great because public ...

Well here I am again in Hillcrest. Spent the week, sorting through clothes to take down in to the valley to distribute amongst the orphans. They were distributed on Wednesday, it has been a variety of weather as well...really hot to quite cold......not sure why I am here early, but I learning to take each day as it comes...

... we were lucky to get on really well with the other 2 people in the group, Herbie & Joe plus of course our courier & driver who were more than keen to join us for the drinking part.
We were back to the coast staying at St Lucia, a real holiday place, they had a Hells Angels meeting going on, basically over 50's still pretending to be young and of course noisy.
We did a cruise to see Hippos, Crocs and so many species of birds. The ...

... thrown in there. I apologized for our tight Peace Corps budget , we gave her some christmas cookies and apples and continued on to Durban. Finally at Durban, Anstey's is a nice backpackers on the beach in South Durban in an area that is packed with what looks like wealthy South Africans' beach houses/condos. Our first few days in the surfer town were a little disappointing since we were looking forward to a little relaxation/recharge time on the ...

... to one and beers have gone up to fifteen rand, making them a pound each. Sorry to throw all this maths at you (which isn't exactly right if you reread that) but basically every time I go back I am shocked at how much I have to fork out for a beer. Even though it's some of the cheapest in the world (bottle store prices are probably a third of that). Another thing that's the cheapest in the world is our electricity. That's a fact, if you read the papers. The ...

South Africa is really... white. Durban is dangerous at night and there
is a huge mall. They have blackouts every day for two hours at two in
the afternoon, and even the malls shut down.

... in while I was in the bathroom, and my return scared them. I laughed at first and desperately wished that I had my camera handy. I was glad Thembisa had warned me otherwise I might have screamed instead. I hadn't actually seen them around since my first weekend in the flat. I chased them out and closed my front door and kitchen window. I'm amazed they didn't come in through the front door as the bars on the front door ...

... prayers for the church members and two families in need. There was no liturgy at all. The offering was collected by men only. The staff member who took me said that until a couple years ago, the church was known as the young, white, middle-class church in Durban. Suddenly, they started getting a number of refugees from Zimbabwe and the Congo, and the racial and socioeconomic composition of the church started changing. She said that ...

... sa mycket morfin som manniskor av indiskt ursprung! Att indierna nastan i dubbelt sa stor utstrackning drabbas hjartinfarkt! Det ar liksom som att ... om jabbet hemma ar en promenad pa en aeng, sa ar det har som att spela "minroej" - pang! sa gar du pa en mina i form av ovantat komplicerad soevning om du inte passar dig. Har hunnit se en del av det beryktade skottskadorna, men de flesta i ett lugnt skede - en saarig arm som maste opereras ...

... branch-line train, I was invited to the engine by the white two-man crew. I must be one of a small and dwindling number of humans who have ever shoveled coal into the boiler (if that's what it's called) of a steam locomotive. By that time I knew enough to travel second-class, and unlike Gandhi I didn't openly rebel. But when we queued up at the Thaba Nchu immigration post ...