South Africa
Trip Start
Oct 10, 2008
1
30
31
Trip End
Mar 01, 2009
Cape Town,
Western Cape,
South Africa
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
We have arrived in Capetown and reached our goal in one piece, hallelujah!!!
Mind you, we had another timing belt failure just 35 km from here: have you ever heard a diesel back-firing? Well, it can when the timing belt slips and I predicted that when it happened: I was right and poor old Timo, after checking valves and injectors, spent another Sunday morning on the side of the road in front of the Stumble-In backpacker in posh Stellenbosch, covered in dirt and oil, replacing the timing belt on that particular vehicle for a third time!! It took him three and a half hours and he even managed to do it without removing the radiator. But it really pissed him off so close to the end of the tour and our fare-well party fizzled out with him looking completely bored and obviously glad to see the back of us.
However, we had another farewell dinner the next night with only the 8 participants and had a ball in the Mama Africa restaurant in the middle of Capetown with African music and some black girls dancing wildly!
Anyway, after two nights in a hotel as part of the tour Jenny and I moved into a backpacker for a third of the cost and have since visited Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was locked up for 18 years, and Table Mountain with marvelous views over the city and Atlantic ocean.
South Africa comes across as a modern and well run country with good infrastructure and beautiful landscapes, the most prominent of which are huge vineyards, hundreds of them. Not surprisingly, our last day of the tour was spent visiting three wineries, all at least a hundred years old, and drinking and eating more than is good for us. And while I stayed reasonably sober I had absolutely no luck in tracking down anybody to answer silly questions like why was there no netting or bird scares, why are the vines still trained on up to five wires without vertical pruning and how can they machine harvest rows that end with a lamp post (so that the happy punters can find their cars at night!). But nobody else was even slightly interested in such petty details, so these questions remained un-answered and I went instead to the kiddies animal kraal, where donkeys, pigs, geese and a pony where happily kept together in a large enclosure among the vines.
The only familiar sight was rose bushes at the ends of some rows as early indicators of fungal infections.
The wine tour also took in the above mentioned city of Stellenbosch, where we had spent an enjoyable day previously, visiting Museums and admiring patrician houses dating back to the late 1600's, when the Dutch first colonized the cape. This influence still manifests itself in street names and monuments and makes for a European feel. So do the numerous oak trees lining every street, some of them over 200 years old and originally planted to supply wood for wine barrels and corks. However, due to these oaks growing much faster than in Europe they proved to be unsuitable and are now all protected to the point where people have to build their houses around them because you are not even allowed to prune them! Any dead trees are replaced immediately. All the wine barrels we saw in the wineries came from France.
Another intriguing feature of this university town is the fact that female students outnumber males by five to one, so come on guys: this must be the place to study!
Capetown on the other hand is a not so busy port since the re-opening of the Suez canal after Israel handed the Sinai back to Egypt, but a vibrant and apparently rich city re-vitalized by the preparations for the 2010 soccer world cup and with a waterfront similar to Queens wharf in Auckland, but 10 times bigger!
We went for a sightseeing tour in an open-top bus with individual earphones in half a dozen languages synchronized with our progress on the ground by GPS, very sophisticated and enjoyable. We also find everybody, especially in the service industry, very friendly and obliging with no post-colonial stress symptoms whatsoever and all bronze statues depicting their colonial oppressors still standing!! Where is New Zealand's Nelson Mandela?
The bad news is there are still huge shanty towns of cardboard and corrugated iron everywhere on the outskirts of Capetown and black empowerment has not changed much for those in the poverty trap. We went to a concert in the Botanical Gardens (just like the Mission Concerts) and got talking to a local white couple: are those shanty towns a time-bomb? Can Zimbabwe happen here? No, there is an affluent black middle class that has too much to loose to let that happen, was the answer. I have my doubts!
All in all a great experience and a lot of priceless memories, especially of black people: tall slim women and friendly and helpful guys, I shall return!
Well folks, this is it, thanks for watching, we will see you in God's-Own, leaving here on 27 Feb and arriving in Napier on 1 March. We look forward to coming home after nearly 5 months of travel.
Until then, cheers from Hans and Jenny.
