Since when is Jo'burg 6500 km from Cape Town?

Forget half the length of Africa, the final tally of our spontaneous road trip from Johannesburg to Cape Town ended up at 6500 km -- that's about 80% the length of Africa.

Until I have the chance to sit down and properly reflect on the trip, here's the experience in visual form http://www.photobox.co.uk/album/7357675, and here's the experience in point form...

Highlights:
-Victoria Falls -- an absolutely mind-blowing site, impressing me the likes of Machu Picchu
-Fish River Canyon, Namibia -- despite the un-imposing name, it's a stunning canyon, apparently second only to the Grand Canyon in stature
-Highway wildlife in Botswana -- we saw more wildlife along the highway than we did in the National Parks, and it was so refreshing to know that elephants, giraffs, zebras, and lions exist not only in National Parks, but still roam Africa's vast landscapes
-Cape Town -- along with the entire Western Cape, will never fail to inspire me
-People of Zimbabwe -- the glimpses of Zimbabwe we saw through our trip and conversations with emigrants in Botswana have stirred in me an absolute fascination in the country and its people
-Quirky accommodation across the region -- we stayed at everything across the board, and half the fun is chatting with the characters who run the B&B's, camp grounds, backpackers, huts, resorts, and even a camp for orphans!
-Namib dunes -- of course...
-Widely varying landscapes and people -- we had such a variation of landscapes to cross, and colourful personalities from across the region's social spectrum
-Leanne & Guillaume's wedding -- at Kirstenbosch botanical gardens, an event that brought people together from literally every corner of the world
-Reuniting with old friends as if no time has passed...

Lowlights:
-Forgetting my phone at the hotel just 15 km away -- but still in another country!
-Witnessing the circle of life -- such as a rotting elephant on the side of the highway and dozens of vultures capitalising on donkeys' roadside misfortunes
-Driving 6100 km of a 6500 km roadtrip -- though teaching Sara how to drive standard on the left side of the road and the right side of the car was quite a highlight -- go girl!
-Botswana's landscape is really quite boring to drive across, but the coolness of the people makes up for it

We made some amendments to our list of acquired skills along the journey:
-Charming border guards out of paying heavy registration fees to enter their country
-Disinfecting our car and ourselves at dozens of Foot and Mouth disease checkpoints across Botswana
-Avoiding men in military gear carrying riffles, mysteriously exiting and entering the un-fenced National Parks in Zimbabwe
-Off-roading our little VW Polo like a Land Cruiser, and still being the only car in Namibia that didn't get a flat
-Recovering bank cards eaten up by ATMs across Botswana
-Exporting South Africa's extremely polite highway driving to Botswana
-Name that road kill -- we have identified an elephant, donkeys (although it was difficult to identify underneath a dozen vultures), eagles, something that looked like a baby gorilla, and then the usual dogs and cats
-Dodging livestock -and- elephants -- we also shared the road with a giraffe, zebras, dozens of baboons, and other exotic mammals
-BYO-Hotel -- sleeping in the car when we can't find reasonably priced accommodation, and drying our clothes in the car while on the road
-Capitalising on any opportunity for make-shift workouts
-Decorating Marco's windshield (our car) with colourful insects
-Having lively filling station conversations -- our most interesting conversations have mostly been with gas station attendees and chats with various Zimbabwean hawkers at filling stations
-Eating everything but Batswana food in Botswana, including Portugese, Chinese, South African, Lebanese...
-Entertaining eachother -- I think we must have covered every topic of conversation known to man before we reach Cape Town!

2300km down, 2300 km to go!

My first trip to Southern Africa, I spent a month living here. I had my hair cut, I bought underwear, I ate whole foods, went shopping, and lead a pretty domestic, sedentary life with our South African friends.

This trip is virtually the opposite -- we are combing across the surface of four countries, a road trip the distance of about half the length of Africa.

Driving is not the only skill we have mastered along the way though. We are also learning how to:
-Charm border guards out of paying heavy registration fees to enter their country
-Name that road kill -- we have identified an elephant, donkeys (although it was difficult to identify underneath a dozen vultures), eagles, something that looked like a baby gorilla, and then the usual dogs and cats.
-Dodge livestock -and- elephants -- we have also shared the road with a giraffe, dozens of baboons, and other exotic mammals.
-BYO-Hotel -- sleeping in the car when we can't find reasonably priced accomodation.
-Have lively filling station conversations -- our most interesting conversations have mostly been with gas station attendees and chats with various Zimbabwean hawkers at filling stations.
-Distinguish between reality and our dreams -- as usual, our anti-malarials are giving us unimaginably vivid dreams to enjoy.
-Entertain eachother -- I think we will have covered every topic of conversation known to man before we reach Cape Town!

Tomorrow we say farewell to Botswana after a week of traversing this vast, barely populated country of really chill people, and a short trip to Zimbabwe to see the absolutely monumental, majestic, and massive Victoria Falls. Tomorrow we head to Windhoek in Namibia, where we will begin our descent through the Namib dunes to the Western Cape of South Africa, exhausting our one CD of Batswana music along the way.

[De]Evolution of a Tan.

I associate excessive doses of sun and perpetual summer with having a tan. I have been in summer since I went to Peru in February 2006, after all. I think sun=tan is a reasonable association, and yet contrary to popular belief, I am not very tanned. Every time I see someone I know I seem to get the same reaction.

-Wow. You really aren’t very tanned. Haven't you been in Africa the last 7 months?

1. GHANA. I worked as a Community Development Planner for 6 months in Ghana. Half of my time at work was spent in my office, a quarter of my time was spent at workshops, in meetings, or at public sensitization events, and the last quarter of my time was spent in the field monitoring and evaluating projects. Ghana is extremely hot, and Koforidua is the capital of the most humid part of the country. And no swimming pools to quell the heat. I'd manage to get most of my desk work done in the mornings, when my office was cool enough to think. After lunch, it was too hot to sit at a desk, and I'd usually retire to one of the two air conditioned offices in my building and socialise for the rest of the day. In the late evenings, hours after the 6pm sunset, it’s hot enough that basic un-animated conversation provides enough activity to sweat profusely. Fanning oneself produces more exercise and heat than the cooling effects of the mild breeze your producing. When on site visits, I wore a hat, sunglasses, sunscreen, and covered my skin with something to protect it from the burning sun, and still never lasted more than a few minutes before having to head for the shade. It’s HOT. Not in a nice warm blanketing way, but in a painful, retina-burning, planning-what-to-wear-such-that-you-don’t-sweat-through-your-outfit, hammering down on you, kind of way. I always wore a hat outside and drank copious amounts of [yuk!] water, and still had heat stroke twice. In fact, the darkest my hair has ever been in my life as a blonde was at the tail end of my time in Ghana.

2. SOUTH AFRICA. My Ghanaian friends had told me that the reason there are so many whites in SA was because the climate was just like in Europe. I arrived in Jo’burg in late summer with very high expectations, and was very very excited to wear long trousers for the first time in 7 months. My friends in Ghana had never seen me wear trousers before. I spent a whole day at the poolside – not just 10 minutes of sun before having to retire to the shade – and then off to Cape Town. The Cape Peninsula had some of the most beautiful and inviting beaches I’d seen before, and the strong breezes made even the hottest of days feel very mild.

Inland in the wine country, the air was dry and the heat soothing, and it was finally possible to hit a terrasse in the sun. Finally I was going to get the tan I needed before my return to the temperate world. I didn’t have any freckles, but my cheeks were pink...then darker pink...then red. Was I burning? Should I put on my hat? No, it’s just the South African red wine we were enjoying -- enjoying enough that you could read it on our cheeks.

SA’s most famous beaches surround Durban, but floods in Mozambique and along SA’s east coast pre-empted any beach ambitions we may have had. Instead, we headed for the hills – the Drakensburg, to be exact, where we climbed up to 3200 metres. This was the closest I’d been to the sun in a long time – although I lived in the “mountainous” region of Ghana, none of those “mountains” even compared to Burnaby Mountain, which we Simon Fraser alumni always referred to as “the hill”. SA’s mountains, on the other hand, were very impressive, and we returned from our expedition up the Drakensburg with a respectable shade of skin for someone who claimed to have been living in Africa for 7 months. After spending 4 hours out to sea great white shark cage diving, parasailing on the Garden Route, climbing the Drakensburg, and going on a 5-day camping safari in Kruger National Park, I was finally exhibiting the 7 months I had spent in Africa.

3. ENGLAND. When I left Canada in August, I packed for 7 months in Africa. I knew I’d be in Europe too, but figured I’d cross that bridge when I got there. And besides, how cold could it be? It was April.

-If you need to borrow any of my coats, help yourself. Oh. And I have an extra pair of gloves for you too.

Gloves? I had bought no less than FOUR scarves/shawls in Ethiopia, anticipating the European cold. I had lost my hat somewhere in the Indian Ocean, a sacrifice to the Gods of shark cage diving, and all I had was a thin safari jacket and four scarves/shawls. I had entirely forgotten about gloves. And I suffered for my thoughtlessness.

4. ITALY. I used to have freckles when I was a kid, but hadn’t had freckles since 2003 when I lived in Turkey, a summer where I spent 16 weeks in persistent, unyielding sunshine. I assumed I had outgrown freckles and was old. It was just another reminder that life peaks at 27, wasn’t it?

-Actually, freckles represent damage from the sun, so it’s probably a good sign that you haven’t had any freckles since 2003.

The temperature in Italy was excellent – it was the perfect temperature to walk around all day without needing to bring an extra bag just to put all your excess clothes into. Montreal springs are always like that – you need to pack for everything between +28 and -15, sweating underneath your spring jacket while the sun is up, and then catching the flu in the evening as the temperature drops by 5 degrees per hour, every hour after sunset. The same day I remarked about my lack of freckles since 2003, I came back to the hotel after a long day of siteseeing and noticed the appearance of freckles on my nose and cheeks! It was a lose-lose battle – sun-damaged skin, or feeling past my prime?

Italy was perfect – cool enough to be comfortable wearing proper walking shoes, but warm enough to eat gelato every evening for dinner. The sun was soft and embracing, not stinging and hammering, and just the right temperature to enjoy my daily half litre of wine on a sunny terrasse in the late afternoons.

5. MOROCCO. I arrived in Morocco dawning blonde hair, freckles, and a respectable tan – or as respectable a tan my Northern European self can get. I couldn’t pass as a local, but I clearly wasn’t some fresh-off-the-boat European tourist, inexperienced in the ways of Africa. Or maybe it was my permanent aura of un-approachability I exude when travelling in pushy countries. I spent 3 days in the Sahara desert and in the Atlas mountains, under patchy clouds perfect for photography. I thought I was going to the big sand dunes, but was instead at Zagora where the dunes were barely high enough to act as toilet camouflage.

I arrived at Ando’s apartment in Casablanca exhausted and lethargic. In fact, I think Ando’s quite disgusted by just how little I can manage to do in a day, but still feel good about myself. In 4 days in Casa, I hadn’t left more than a 3 block radius from Ando’s pad, and my bronze was fading.

Finally, she managed to drag me out for a day on the town – we went to the medina, I bought two tapis, and we went to the market and bought camel meat from a meat store that had a freshly slaughtered camel head hanging from it [yes, of course we took shameless pictures of ourselves standing behind the camel head, which conveniently hung at my shoulder length]. We found someone to grill our kilo of camel meat for us on the side of the road, went to the beach, and then we finally went to the hammam.

At the hammam, you sit in the steam room for an hour painting yourself with a seed ingested and defecated by a goat, and then a woman comes and scrapes all your dead skin cells off. She actually stopped halfway and showed me just how much grime was peeling off me. All I could do was shrug, conveying the international sentiment of "what are you gonna do?" -- passive acceptance of one's own disgustingness.

I emerged from the hammam satisfied that I had finally managed to get myself clean since taking that 6 hour tro-tro to Bui National Park last January [see blog entry “Ando can officially sleep anywhere”], realizing that maybe I had had a tan underneath all the layers of dust afterall. If only I could get my clothes as clean! [I really just want a box of chemicals and a machine to wash my clothes at this point]

In any case, along with the layers of dust, she had certainly managed to scrape off whatever progress I had made in my plight to actually look like I had been in Africa for 8 months now. I didn’t see any women at the beach wearing swimsuits, and I’ve been pretty careful about not exposing myself too much while I’m in Morocco, so I don't know how much sun my skin will actually see while I'm here. I guess I’ll just have to wait until I get to Spain and Latvia before I can have my African tan!

[In Casablanca on 1 May, post-camel lunch, but pre-hammam]

Domestification.

People seem to imagine I lead this glamorous life of nomadic globe-trotting, never knowing what corner of the world I shall find myself in next. This statement is true in all but the term glamourous – there is a fine line between excitement and fear, and glamour generally refers to that which differs from the norm of one’s existence. Anything done consistently begins to feel like a chore, and current activities that excite me include things that are associated with longer stays in a place: buying spices, decorating apartments, hanging art, buying crafts that don’t fit into a suitcase, reading the globe & mail, and having enough plates and cutlery to throw a dinner party for more than one guest.

On Saturday night Leanne and Guillaume threw a house-warming party to celebrate their arrival in their new home. Leanne is a dear friend of mine who was my flatmate when I lived in Istanbul in 2003, and has been one of only a handful of people I know around the world who could really sympathise with the lifestyle of living out of a suitcase for the last six years. We came to Cape Town 5 days ago and have been staying with Leanne and Guillaume, buying things for the house, eating breakfast on the veranda, watching BBC on digital satelite television, cooking with appropriate utensils, reading books in the garden under a tree, and letting the experience of Cape Town slowly trickle into our lives rather than actively pursuing it. At the house-warming party, people kept asking us where we’d been in Cape Town, and mostly we could only name some restaurants, bars, a hairdresser, and some shops we’d been to, plus one spontaneous detour up Table Mountain to watch the sunset while we were dropping off some friends at their hotel.

Travel is hundreds of decisions being made hourly – are we hungry? Thirsty? When should we book a tour of Kruger National Park? Rodden Island? Which towns to stop along the Garden Route? What day should we leave Cape Town? Constantly sizing up the potential worthiness of a place and re-aligning our priorities based on this blind assessment. Pressure to see it all while still giving ourselves enough time to ourselves in order to make it enjoyable – balancing this equation is a full time job.

-So, what do you do?
-I’m a municipal planner. I’ve been in Ghana for the last six months working as a community development planner. Basically, I’ve been working in international development.
-And when do you go home?

Home. Where do I even start? Are strangers allowed to ask such deep and exposing questions? WHEN is difficult enough to answer, but HOME? Ouch. When living out of a suitcase, one clings to anything familiar. Leanne and Guillaume are familiar, and home seems to be more of an essence than a place. Being domestic in their beautiful new home in this beautiful city is more glamourous to me than the backpacking I’ll be doing next week.

-I figure around the end of April I’ll have some time to start looking for my next means of employment, and that will dictate where my home will be. Either that, or I’ll just go to Vancouver to see my family and let my health recover for a few months. Get my teeth cleaned, see some doctors, and the like.
-Ooh. What a glamourous life you lead!

Great White Sharks.

After barely a day in Cape Town, South Africa, Guillaume made the suggestion to join him and his friends Great White Shark cage diving.

-Apparently it’s a major tourist attraction for visitors to SA, and not to be missed.
-I don’t really do the not-to-be-missed-attractions thing when I travel.
-But it should be fun and the weather’s supposed to be great this weekend. Last time we scheduled, it was cancelled due to weather conditions. You should seize the opportunity.
-Sure. Let’s do it. As long as I don’t have to think about it or talk about it before hand.

Everyone has at least one irrational fear. I’ve seen people screech at the thought of a snake, despite never having met a poisonous one in their lives, and other common fears include bees, mice, and cockroaches – creatures infinitely more peaceful and evolved than people.

My one great irrational fear is of Great White Sharks. When I was in kindergarten, I accidentally stumbled upon a National geographic documentary on great white sharks that followed Sesame Street, and for more than two decades since, images of great white sharks swimming from every shadow in my bedroom, leaping from the taps in my bathtub and the drains in the swimming pool where I trained as a competitive swimmer for 12 years plagued me.

I would develop rules: as long as I’m not the last person out of the pool, the great white sharks won’t creep out of the drains and get me; as long as there is someone else on the same floor as me when I’m taking my bath, the great white sharks won’t pour out of the bathroom taps or jump out of the toilet; if I don’t swim in the lane next to the slide, then the great white sharks won’t come tumbling down the slide to get me.

When the time drew near, Jas and I packed the car and drove to Hansbaii to face our fears. But without Guillaume.

-I don’t feel like waking at 5am, and besides, I don’t know how I feel about the ethics of how the sharks are treated. Luring them in for tourists to photograph with under water cameras? Seems kind of inhumane.

Hypocrisy is something one has to deal with constantly while in South Africa, and my Great White Shark cage diving was just another example of my general approach in the country – just experience all that you can of your landscape, and ask questions later. It was a bit embarrassing actually – I’m quite the advocate for sustainable and responsible tourism, and had just spent 6 months in Ghana proposing Community-Based Ecotourism development planning, among other things. So we went with the most ethical of the shark cage diving companies, a company that has taken people the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt for cage diving experiences. True ethical laziness – using Leo and Brad to set your responsible tourism bar.

The experience was extraordinary and extremely exhilarating. But it was not what I had expected. Many tourists whom we met along the way asked us about the experience.

-It’s really worthwhile, and I’d do it again in a second, but mostly it’s 4 hours of misery interspersed with about 10 minutes of excitement. One of the blokes in our group said at one point ‘it’s not unlike watching paint dry’. Everyone’s sea sick, the deck of the boat is freezing from the wind, and the people in the cage are just lasting as long as they can before hypothermia sets in. And that’s in a full wetsuit, which, by the way, smells and is far too small for anyone over 150cm. It took about half an hour after docking the boat before I could feel my feet, and that was about 2 hours after I had gotten out of the water. But, when the sharks come, it’s awe-inspiring. They are truly fascinating creatures.

The cage is oval-shaped and open-topped, and is attached to the side of the boat. In order to last as long as I could in the water, I would sit on the top of the cage, and when the sharks would come, I’d wait till the last second and dive under the water to see them from bellow. This tactic allowed me to spend 45 minutes in the shark cage, though mostly sitting on top with as much of myself out of the water as I could manage.

The first shark, a small female of maybe 3 metres, circled around the cage several times, tugging at the bait as the shark experts pulled the bait towards the cage allowing us a closer view. As the bait was pulled up and over the open-topped cage, we were certainly given a close up of the fantastic creature. This was just the appetizer though.

The second shark was a massive male, 5.5 metres in length. He gave people above and below the water’s surface a show as he lunged out of the water for the bait. One of cage divers grew too cold, and I offered to take the corner cell of the cage so that the new diver could share a cell with his girlfriend, but he declined and took the corner cell instead. As the colossal male great white sped up for his attack on the unsuspecting line of bait, the shark expert pulled the bait towards the cage and we all dove under to witness the event from below.

I saw the enormous beast spring in our direction, and then towards the corner of the cage I had just offered to take. And then the great white did the unimaginable – he lunged over top of the open-topped cage and leapt at the bait, now dangling in the air over the boat, and then dove back under the boat. I stayed underwater as long as I could, seeing nothing but water and bubbles, anticipating the site of blood. When I could no longer hold my breath any longer, I surfaced, half expecting to see only half a diver in the corner of the cage. Instead, he excitedly pulled himself out of the cage, clenching his camera up high, and triumphantly announced

-I GOT IT ALL ON FILM!!!!

I laughed a sigh of relief, and realised that I hadn’t actually been afraid of the shark. It didn’t feel like he would attack us, even if we had still been sitting on the edge of the cage when the bait went over head, rather than under water. In fact, great white sharks don’t like eating humans – they usually only attack surfers, and that’s because they think they’re turtles. Over the next twenty minutes, the massive male circled around a few more times for us, splashing those of us below with bubbles, and those above with water as he stormed off after failed attempts at trapping the bait.

When I finally couldn’t handle the cold a moment longer, the three of us who had endured the cold since we first cast the anchor climbed out. I changed, ate, and tried to warm my feet up enough to walk, draped myself in towels and watched the great white sharks play with the bait from the deck. As I sat there shivering and trying to prevent myself from vomiting along with everyone else, I was quite satisfied that the only inhumanity occurring on this trip was towards the humans, not the sharks.

[pictures from this trip coming soon…]