South Africa

Trip Start Jun 19, 2007

Trip End Aug 18, 2007

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Flag of South Africa Cape Town, South Africa
Thursday, August 16, 2007

With Zimbabwe being such an undesirable place to be these days it was not
surprising to see hundreds of people lined up at immigration at 3AM to get
out of the country. We waited in line, outside in the cold, for four hours
before receiving the all important passport stamp that cleared the way to
South Africa. Nothing seems to come easy on this trip, but my long rocket
ship ride through Africa had finally landed me back on the first-world.

It was immediately obvious to me that things had changed when our bus stopped
at the first gas station in South Africa

. Not only did it have gas, but it
was also replete with a functioning ATM, clean toilets and a mini-mart
stocked with all manner of food and drink that could rival any you would find
in the States. What made this all the more amazing was that we were hundreds
of kilometers from the nearest major city; the gas station was in the middle
of nowhere. I felt like dropping to my knees and weeping with joy.

About six hours later we arrived in South Africa's administrative capital,
Pretoria. I got off the bus there rather than 50 km further south at the
commercial capital of Johannesburg because of safety issues. Jo'burg is a
much larger city but infamous for its crime and I didn't want anything to do
with it. Besides, Pretoria seemed like a lovely city to do a bit of walking
around in.

The next day I did just that by strolling to a couple of museums and, of all
places in Africa, a zoo. The first museum was an impressive structure known
as the Transvaal Museum. It was a taxidermist's dream -- virtually every
animal you can find in Africa was there in stuffed form

. It also included
life like interpretations of many of the extinct hominids that preceded homo
sapiens.

Next, I walked to Church Square in the center of the city and took a couple
of photos of the impressive Paul Kruger statue that dominates the square.
Kruger is a sort of George Washington in South Africa as he was the leader
for the Afrikaner resistance against British colonial rule and basically the
first president for the country. From there I walked down to Paul Kruger's
house which is now a museum. He lived mostly during the 19th century and his
home, with many of his possessions, has been carefully preserved. The most
interesting exhibit for me was in the backyard where the presidential rail car
was on display.

Having been through some of the most famous (and expensive) national parks in
Africa, I thought it might be interesting to go check out the nearby Pretoria
zoo as a way to compare the experiences between seeing animals in their
natural habitat and seeing them in captivity. The zoo turned out to be quite
nice. In the span of a couple of hours I saw every African animal you can
imagine from gorillas to rhinos, and then boarded a sky lift that had great
views of the city. However, nice as it was, it wasn't quite as good as seeing
hundreds of hoofed animals on the Serengeti, or a lioness 15 feet from your
car window. Of course the zoo only cost me about five bucks and, as far as
I'm concerned, safaris are a rip off. At the bare minimum you're paying a
hundred dollars a day to be driven around in a land rover, which you can't
get out of, down dirt roads that are crammed with other land rovers

. So when
you factor in the price I would say the zoo is the way to go unless you have
a chance to see some exceptional scenery like the Serengeti. In short, the
biggest difference between the zoo and a safari is that in the zoo, the
animals are in a cage; on a safari, you are in a cage.

With my exploration of Pretoria complete, I boarded the Karoo Express to
Cape Town the following day. Unfortunately, the train departed from Jo'burg so
I found myself on a 45 minute bus ride to the train station. No sooner had I
gotten off the bus near the station than a white guy approached me with some
scam about how he and his wife had been robbed and they needed money to get
someplace. It's an old scam and I told him I didn't have any money and
hurried off to my train platform

. If you had really been robbed wouldn't you
be at a police station trying to sort things out there rather than begging
for money at a train station?

The 26 hour train ride to Cape Town was awesome. There was a restaurant car
and my compartment had a heater in it. Feeling happy to be alive, I drank
beers, ate steak and strawberry cheesecake and slept warmly while South Africa
streamed by my window. Much of the scenery was fairly unremarkable, though. The
Karoo is a vast semi-desert region in central South Africa and the majority of
the trip was spent passing through it.

However, as we got closer to Capetown the scenery changed dramatically. At
one point, I looked out the window and saw snow-capped peaks in the distance
with smooth green plains stretching to them

. It was such a beautiful and odd
sight; not the sort of thing you would ever expect to see in Africa. As we
got closer and closer to Capetown the wine lands started to appear. Sadly, it
is not the correct season and the vineyards were all devoid of grapes. Still,
the scenery was so beautiful and out of place you could easily be forgiven
for thinking you were somewhere in Europe.

Shortly before arrival in Cape Town, the townships appeared. A township in
South Africa is the place where all the blacks were forced to live during
apartheid. They are sad, poverty ridden shanty towns where most blacks still
live today. But honestly, they're not nearly as bad as shantytowns I had seen
around large cities elsewhere in Africa.

Cape Town has a slightly misleading name because it's not a town at all, but a
city of 3.5 million people

. It's also one of the most beautiful modern cities
I have ever seen. For me, San Francisco and Sydney, Australia were two of the
most beautiful large cities I could ever remember seeing -- I can now add
Capetown to that list. The city is wrapped around an unusual mountain and
surrounded by water from the Atlantic. Table mountain, as the name implies,
is a flat-topped mountain that absolutely dominates Capetown. Many of the
wealthier Capetonians have houses that are stretching up the sides of it.

When I left the train station I walked to Long street, a place filled with
backpacker hostels. As everyone says, walking through the streets of Capetown
is just like walking through a city in Europe. On Long street you could
actually see more whites than blacks. After checking into my room I started
talking to the helpful staff at my hostel and my head was spinning from the
endless tourist options presented to me: Climb Table mountain; visit the wine
lands; do a Township tour; travel to the Cape of Good hope; go to Robben
Island; shock diving

. The list went on and on.

I only had a few days and ended up settling on two good options. The first
was heading down to the Cape of Good Hope and the most southwestern tip of
Africa. It was a great tour that involved such things as seeing seals and
African penguins. The highlight, though, was the dramatic scenery at the
bottom of the Cape of Good Hope where the Indian and Atlantic oceans meet. We
were standing on massive sheer cliffs with enormous waves crashing against
them that sent sea spray flying 30 or 40 feet in the air; the oceans
stretched out endlessly in all directions.

Another highlight of the tour was the steady stream of unique flora -- known
as 'Fynbos' -- we passed which can only be found in the Western Cape of South
Africa

. There are only six floral kingdoms on the entire planet and one of
them exists only in this region. Our tour guide informed us that there are
more species of plants on Table Mountain alone than in all of England. As you
can probably imagine, the whole region is beautiful.

On my last full day in Africa I took my second tour out to Robben Island --
the place where Nelson Mandela was held for 18 years as a political prisoner.
That was also a great tour. Not only were the views of Capetown from the
island spectacular, but the tour itself was very special. Amazingly, all the
tour guides on the island are ex-prisoners. It was quite powerful sitting in
one of the prison sections and listening to a former prisoner tell us how he
had been incarcerated and what life was like there.

And that was South Africa

. One of my colleagues at the college who had lived
in South Africa for a few years said to me once, 'It's the only country in
all of Africa that works.' I tend to agree with him. It certainly has its
problems but when you consider where the country was not long ago, and where
it is today. It's doing quite well. And if there's hope for South Africa,
then there's hope for the rest of Africa as well.

Tomorrow I fly back to Dubai where I'll type up some closing thoughts for
this blog.

Closing thoughts next...