| rising every time we fall |
[Jul. 9th, 2010|09:00 am] |
The Apartheid Museum is well worth your afternoon if you are within a hundred miles or so, but the most moving part of the day was our Zulu cab driver who took us there and broke down crying in the car telling me about the Sharpeville massacre which he was 8 years old for and had been sent to Botswana for safety. He said that the pool at the entrance to the museum represented all the children’s blood spilled when people protested being taught in Afrikaans and got shot. For the internal part you start by getting handed a card saying “white” “black” or “colored” and then you have to enter through your door to a separated tunnel where you learn about pass laws, segregation, and homelands. As you progress you learn about resistance and removals, the ANC, and some nice side stuff about Nelson Mandela and women dissidents.
  
The South African Bill of Rights is an exquisite legal document written by people with long memories and clear English so it cannot be misinterpreted, ever. It has normal rights as in the USA Constitution: assembly and association, fair trial, religion. It has rights that all Americans ostensibly get from the Clean Air Act and the ADA, and rights that only Californians and Vermonters get like freedom from discrimination based on sexual orientation. All children have the right to a name, freedom from hunger, education, health, and welfare. What it also has that I love is an explicit right to privacy, and a right to recreation and sporting activities--this is obviously written by people that hadn’t been allowed on the Whites Only beaches on the coast their whole lives and wanted a holiday.
 
In summary, my initial fears about South Africa were: bandits, lions, Argentinians, and the angry llama kazoo. At no point did I feel physically unsafe (although my belongings felt eternally vulnerable, guns fight lions, Argentinians are just annoying and not a real hazard, and next time there won’t be vuvuzelas. Going back, my fears will be: pickpockets, heat, and wanting to stay forever. I like the big headlines they post on the trees lining an avenue for people too poor to buy a newspaper, I like Yeoville because it is just like Manila, and I could eat KFC and peanut butter if I got homesick.
 
I packed my carryons, did my Travel Hair and waited at O.R. Tambo airport, flew to Franz Josef Strauss on a German plane after Germany destroyed Argentina in the semifinals, and paused in Munich for a happy Bavarian breakfast of muesli and beer. I read lots of books: The Dreaming Void, ...And Another Thing, Beautiful Maria of My Soul, and Disgrace. When I got home my cats were well cared for and Danny was waiting with Berkeley-brand safari as amazing inflatable closure to a great trip.
 
See you in Brazil in 2014. |
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| Yep, it’s wood. |
[Jul. 8th, 2010|10:07 am] |
Kate-tourism for the last few days! We saw a lot more of Johannesburg neighborhoods than just the malls and chain restaurants of soccer adventure time, specifically Rosebank, Braamfontein, and Newtown, but not Soweto (next time). Rosebank was for masks and souvenirs and a failed attempt at the post office, Braamfontein for the University of Witwatersrand campus, and the goal in Newtown was art museums and street markets. I spent a while looking for the Arts on Main complex, supposed to be a hip mixed-use industrial space type thing, with studios and living spaces and cafes, but nobody had heard of it so I gave up. Wits campus is a stony, desolate place except for the Phytotron, a big round building apparently and mysteriously dedicated to nutrient cycling research.
 
Crossing the Nelson Mandela Bridge between Braamfontein and Newtown is a little sketchy, going from one wrong side of the railroad tracks to what is evidently also the wrong side, passing dull-eyed hair braiders and telephone poles with flyers about “Quick same-day abortion: 100% guarantee” for less than $40 USD. The Anglican Cathedral in Newtown is barred shut from all sides, and one corner is inexplicably forested with little stacks of potatoes, three high and tended by a very loud man with a plastic plate.
  
 
Museum Africa had a whole thoughtful and educational floor dedicated to local LGBT (not so much L, lots of T) stories without once blaming them for teh AIDS. One of its lower floor collections was almost exclusively wheelbarrow people and beaded bones by Pitika Ntuli, and they had a lot to say about geology and contemporary South African art, even though it was a little sparsely curated overall. We also found the Standard Bank art gallery with its special Bafana Bafana exhibits, and went for long harried walks through the street sellers without being pickpocketed.
 
 
More or less the entire African continent was rooting for Ghana by the quarterfinals, but they nonetheless lost to Uruguay on a missed penalty after an unconscionable Suárez handball. Since the Serbians had already gone home, our hotel housed the Uruguayan team for their bid against the karmically successful Netherlands. I waited outside the lobby for an hour and a half to get five minutes of video of the team leaving for their game, but in the process I made friends with some exceedingly well-armed policemen on team guard duty and got to play with the ammo suitcases in their car trunk, so it wasn’t time wasted. The little superfan Citroën here has literally gone almost round the world following the team, with a world map and flag bumper stickers from a route originating in Montevideo, crossing Central America through to Canada, dashed lines showing the ferry to Portugal, across Europe and down Turkey, to Pakistan, Indonesia, and then a long dashed line to South Africa.
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| you boat like a maniac |
[Jul. 5th, 2010|10:07 am] |
 
To romanticize overmuch, we lived amongst the lions for the four days. First thing when you wake up you listen for roaring, because then you know the direction you will go first that morning. The first day, we saw just the boy lions napping. The second, we moved silently with the megapride as they sought water. The morning of the third, all the game cleared out ahead of prowling bachelor lions and we saw giraffes running for their lives, and in the afternoon we saw everybody from the matriarch on down napping, so I could get a lot of the juveniles being adorable on video.
 
In total in one day other than lions I saw a hippo, a crocodile, a breeding herd of elephants, and I missed some warthogs during my nap but no matter, not to even mention the dizzy herds of steinbok and wildebeest that you just ignore and the lodge dogs Pluto and Sheba. I went hunting for Mozambican cobras because our guide used to keep them, but it was winter, so no luck on them or lizards. We did see a dwarf mongoose, actually several, which are cute and glossy brown. Another day we saw half a dozen white rhinos (so called because of their square lips and nothing to do with their color, thanks, Brits) and an embarassment of Zazus, actually yellow-beaked hornbills but for the benefit of our Portugese lodgemate all animals were identified with their Lion King equivalent.
 
South African languages I knew existed: !Xhosa, Zulu, Afrikaans, miscellaneous Sothos and Tswanas. South African languages apparently critical to know on the Eastern Cape and into Mozambique that I have never heard of: Tsonga (Shangaan). Well all righty then. But since a lion is a ngala and a baby lion is shingalana, I reasoned that since a hippo is imvubu then a baby hippo was a shimvubana and I was right! Eavesdropping on your tracker pays off and everyone looked all surprised. The exercise to the reader is that if a leopard is ingwe, what is a baby leopard?
 
Things I haven’t said yet: I intended to sketch this trip but didn’t in favor of hours of HD video, but I did get recommendations for horseback safaris in the Okavango delta and a houseboat in Botswana with my name on it. I need a new camera if I am ever going to do this again, and Sundowners is the ultimate in civilized traditions: amarula cocktails as the sun sets over the national park and you are snug in the jeep with a hot water bottle. Horns, unlike antlers, are not shed yearly. Afrikaans has stupid words like “Uidvlugt” and nice words like “Olifants” for Elephants. Naledi means Stars in Shangaan and the night sky over Kruger explains the reference in a heart’s breath.
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| mega-lightning froody |
[Jul. 3rd, 2010|08:36 am] |
 
Safari! Hugo, Semi, and I had four days of aMAYzing lions and hippos and dinners and naps in a private game reserve adjoining Kruger National Park, about four hours from Jo’burg. The guy who drove us the last leg kept ignoring my protests and driving right past roadside giraffes (REAL ones, and not roadkill) and impala, but in the end he was right to do so because Naledi Lodge is this amazing luxury heaven in the bush* where we were treated like victorious colonialists and sent to explore our hot tub while they prepared our first of many wonderful gourmet lunches and teleported our bags to the suite.
*and not heaven in the bushes, which sounds like a seventh-grade party game
 
The basic structure of a safari day is wake up at 5:30, be in the Jeep by 6, drive or walk around (armed) for 4 hours and see as many of the Big 5 and Friends as you can see, at 10 roll back in to camp to freshly cleaned rooms and a mountainous hot breakfast, read three pages of a novel then sleep the unwakable sleep in the treehouse till 1:30, rouse self and make it upstairs to an award-winning lunch by 2, chat, possibly swim, be back in the Jeep by 4 for the evening drive/walk, back at camp again by 9 for gourmet dinner and wine, pass out by 10:30 to repeat again. The malaria medicine I took dreamed me a new idea for a novel, although it turns out that for winter you actually only need to worry about anthrax from carcasses, but not even really that, because the vultures have special digestive systems to process the anthrax for you (!).
  
Balule Reserve is 30,000 hectares on its own, unfenced to Kruger’s two million, and there are restrictions on how many people a lodge can have so you and half a dozen friends share that whole expanse of track and watering holes to find your daily animals. The Big 5 is officially the 5 most dangerous animals to hunt on foot: lion, buffalo, elephant, rhino, leopard, but my Big 5 is the 5 I am most excited to see, so those but also 5a. diverse dogs (jackal, hyena) 5b. diverse antelope (impala, gnu) 5c. zebra 5d. giraffe 5e. hippopotamice! 5f. (bonus) birds!
 
Luckily for bundu-bashing (bushwhacking), an elephant is approximately the width of a Land Cruiser so often there are already sort of trails you can follow, as long as you don’t mind the possibility of there being an elephant at the end: it wouldnt be personal if an elephant tusked you, but you would be no less dead. Also, you have to announce over the radio when you are going walking, because they shoot to kill poachers here.
 
In the same way that the American South is kind of rural but defensive about it (and they would shoot to kill trespassers), Transvaal Afrikaners were totally pro-apartheid and yet speak the languages of the labor and are familiar with the culture. Equivalently, reform-minded city kids from Cape Town may have been anti-apartheid but were probably monolingual, etc. You see the same kind of cultural transfer through familiarity in American Southern food, which is largely “black”, even though it belongs to everyone now. I don’t know how far that comparison goes, but at minimum it extends to white Afrikaners referring to fully grown black men as “boys” in the same way that Confederates might.
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| Beeblebrox. Just be glad he’s out there. |
[Jul. 2nd, 2010|08:34 am] |
 
Our first Round of 16 game was Mexico-Argentina, which Argentina won handily after cheating for two goals (offsides, mate, it’s still not allowed). It was also our last night for now in the good old FIFA-approved Sunnyside Park Hotel, home of the Serbian team for our first week and the Uruguayans for the next. We had dropped the car off even before the game and gotten a ride to Soccer City with the Afrikaner car rental guy who reminded us that if in future we rented a car in southern Africa we should get ZA plates, not SZ or ZW because we would get robbed as country bumpkins. He also warned us about the bad blacks who come out at night and why white South Africans don’t travel much in Africa because they “know what they’re getting in to,” even though it was less than 24 hours before we had that impression corrected or at least qualified by the safari driver.
  
 
We had Category 2 tickets but with a hefty southern hemisphere wind they were effectively Cat 3s, and were in the less-fanatical upper section next to some Germans and a Korean instead of the entire vuvu-assailing population of Mendoza. Semi and Hugo made their media presence for NuestraTele with an on-screen jersey exchange and some platitudes about losing like real men to a better team. Germany beat England in the other game, which is complicated, because it is very important that they win their next game but lose to Brazil should it come to that.
 
 
This helpful graphic should illustrate why I felt at home basically the whole time despite being about as far geographically away from my regular daily life as possible.
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| I BELIEVE. DON’T EAT ME. |
[Jun. 29th, 2010|02:49 pm] |
   
Next morning we had bananas from a street seller and pink Fanta from the gas station before hopping over to the louage station for a ride to Lobamba Royal Valley and the Ezulwini area. Lobamba is where the royal mausoleum, national church, and cultural museum are, with Seventh Day Adventists worshipping happily across the street from the armed guard of the sacred corpse of HM King Sobhuza II. There is a little photo gallery of all the nice things that nice Sobhuza II did during his lifetime, such as meeting with Prince Charles of Great Britain and attending the opening of a Holiday Inn at Ezulwini in 1970 (honest!). Is he not a likeable little squeezyface?
 
Rural Swazination smelled like campfire as we walked over basically an eighth of the country to Mantenga, a nature reserve airlifted from Arizona (not really) and home to the Taiwanese and Finnish embassies (really). We had what I called in my head “Cultural Experience B-14” in the combination of getting there and being there, because getting there we had to deal with the fantasmagorical African inability to give complete directions anywhere and their equivalent inability to admit it, so they get you started going the right direction and then make the rest up.
   
The Mantenga beehive village was more or less authentic, and we had a tour by a village teenager who showed us the huts belonging to the different familial roles: mother, grandmother, younger sons, etc, all defined relative to one guy who was the headman of the whole shebang. We ate boiled peanuts and a spinachy greens thing and had chicken on toothpicks while we watched a performance of longcalling and drumming and feats of strength.
 
Our early hints of manufactured authenticity included the singing group trying to sell us their DVD and the handful of twenty-something guys in regular clothes hanging out behind the mother-in-law hut and making faces at the unmarried longcallers in between juggling a soccer ball. Then we were sure because the minibus we caught back in the direction of Manzini had a dozen of the performers in regular tracksuits talking on cell phones in the back, and I had a lovely conversation with the guy who danced the part of the witch doctor and who told us some nice restaurants to visit. It gets dark winter-early despite the summer temperatures and we had been slightly delayed by cow rush hour so it was night by the time we got back to the hotel, but we had time to make a pen pal of a preschool teacher in the capital who used to host Peace Corps volunteers.
 
The last day I did my two absolute favorite new-country things, visited the grocery store and had a long breakfast with a halal curry and a local newspaper. Headlines included “Fewer going to church during World Cup” and “Miss Swaziland Roundup!” and a ssSwati/English bilingual crossword where the clues didn’t say what language the answer would be in, yikes. Highlights of the grocery store were the pet section (dogs are just unIslamic, not unChristian) and the instant oxtail soup packets. We walked the last few miles to the airport and entertained a little kid with a sharkbanana as our last Swazi hurrah.
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| There are no black people in Switzerland stop lying. |
[Jun. 28th, 2010|12:16 am] |
 
Friday morning (is there such a thing as a Friday in Africa? Let’s call it “the day after Italy-Slovakia”), Hugo boarded a plane to Durban for the Brazil-Portugal game for which he could have sold his tickets for $5,000 but didn’t because he is a superfan, while Semi and I boarded a marginally shorter flight to Matsapha, Swaziland. One slight note to Lonely Planet, otherwise a remarkable and complete resource, you really should mention that Swaziland works on a different currency than South Africa (expected!) but that there are no ATMs or bureaux de change at the INTERNATIONAL airport (unexpected!), although they do sell unexpired Tab soda.
  
The Mountain Inn is charming, on a beautiful hill overlooking Mbabane, so there are twinkling lights at night and great vistas in the day. We walked downtown to the louage station and took a shared minibus with Beyonce on the radio to Oshoek, the border crossing. A friendly, opportunistic minibus driver at the banana seller’s volunteered enthusiastically to take us to Hawane Dam and waterfalls, but was less enthusiastic when we got there and wanted to walk around, not just look at them and go. He was even less enthusiastic when I found a snake by stepping on it, but soldiered bravely on for his day’s financial windfall.
  
I also established through questioning that he had been exposed to physics and chemistry in highschool, but probably not biology (Two balls hitting, flying off at angles? Nod, yes. Two liquids, pour, whoosh? Nod, yes. Frogs, cut up, microscope? Emphatic head shaking, no.)
 
We found a mostly authentic beehive village acting as a family resort and caught a louage from Hawane back to Mbabane during rush hour, which was fantastic because I sat next to a guy who told me all about local music and we went immediately to the CD seller after disembarking to look for Parlotones, Just Jinger, Loch in Ville, and Prime Circle, all of which turn out to be poppy and happy and could do well over here if they had the right management, hint, hint.
 
Back at the hotel there was a conference dinner in progress and one of the local princesses of the Dlamini dynasty was hostessing wearing what I think of as a prom dress. |
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| get up you poof he only kicked you in the lung |
[Jun. 26th, 2010|06:18 pm] |
 
Another brilliant day of food-soccer-food-drink-sleep but with a twist. Italy played Slovakia overconfidently and lost embarassingly, with a soundtrack of Semi’s beginner random outcries of “¡Vamos!” and “¡Crúcelo!” basically arbitrarily, vs. Hugo’s more advanced cheering tactics, and it didn’t help either way because the Italians kept falling over and forgetting to score, until the end, when they panicked, and it didn’t work.
 
Since we (“we”) had been cheering for Italy, we were depressed, so we caught a cab from the outside of Ellis Park and asked the Zimbabwean driver to take us somewhere local for dinner. He took us to an Islamic restaurant in a terrifying ghetto, so we politely asked to go somewhere nicer, and ended up at Mandela Square again, but this time we went to the Taste of Africa buffet instead of the NewsCafe. It was great! Great, great, great. They painted our faces like Zulus (mine means unavailable, married), grilled bananas over ground springbok and called it batotie, and played drums and danced with bangles. South African food is Indian food in cognito with an African protein and porridge instead of rice as the starch, viz, ostrich samosa with pap.
 
This is the wildlife we have encountered to date.
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| acrobatic and mean-spirited |
[Jun. 25th, 2010|12:22 pm] |
 
The Blue Citroën of Glory had popped a link on the two hour drive back to Jo’burg from Rustenberg and we made the last dozen miles in third gear with the back seat just holding on tight as we careened straight through traffic circles and prayed for green at robots, but the mechanic came by the next morning and twist-tied it back together so we were in business at the crack of noon, which was lucky, because we had scalped tickets for the USA-Algeria game in Tshwane (Pretoria) for $20 and our same-day Ghana-Germany seats.
 
Pretoria (to use the oppressive name out of habit) is an hour or so away, but by now we were experts at highway etiquette (pull over to the left when someone wants to overtake and they will flash their blinkers as a thank you) and unfazed by the massive burning, which we determined after surveying the natives to be either intentional highway beautification or uncontrolled trash burning. Hiring a car is an absolute necessity because Jo’burg is a sprawling disaster, but I do recommend having more than one CD to choose from, especially if the one CD is the Spanish version of the official World Cup soundtrack and you are going to be there more than a week or so.
 
We painted our faces roadside using my leftover German Carnival paint and were apparently so attractive (or weird) that a photographer from the Pretoria Star hung out with us for the entire pregame as we became Captain America and friends. Hugo scalped a Category 4 ticket reserved for South Africans but we all snuck down to the US Soccer Federation section where they knew real chants and how and when to cheer.
 
Plucky as the Americans were, they held out for a heart-infarction 92’ minute goal to beat Algeria 1-0, drenching me and 85,000 of my closest friends in beer and making even the hardiest Mexican learn the vuvuzela. The madness moved to Hatfield Square, which we eventually found, and smoked Cuban cigars in an Australian bar surrounded by enthusiastic Kenyans cheering on Ghana with dying-baby mini-vuvuzelas. Algerians and Americans had a total love-in somehow, teary eyed and sincere, pounding each other on the back and explaining what a good game it had been on both sides, which I guess is the point of international competition in the end.
   
Back to Mandela Square in Joburg for a nice homey News Cafe visit and traditional breakfast with sunup.
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| “Ladies. Dude.” |
[Jun. 24th, 2010|10:57 pm] |
Semi was standing at JNB customs as instructed and we took the new Gautrain (first and I think only public transportation of the trip) to our hotel where we relaxed for about four minutes before Hugo forced Mexico jerseys on us and whisked us to Rustenberg for the Group A Uruguay game. The rental car was a blue Citroën that could hold five, so gave two New Yorkers named Kate and Alexa a ride from Melrose Square.
 
Rustenberg is a stupid place for a stadium, even a small 35,000 seater, where even trying to get to the Park N Ride was a series of blind guesses and wrong turns based on where the cars full of luchadors were heading but NOT, importantly, based on directions from locals, after a gas station attendant asked “What stadium?” when we wondered where it might be. The golf stadium, genius. Anyway the scenery looks like San Diego, except that most of the highways are on fire, most of the time (on which more later).
 
 
First thing to notice about my first World Cup game with scalped tickets was that thankfully, Latin Americans don’t understand the vuvuzela, or I would be deaf. We sat in the Mexican section with men from the San Francisco Mission (really) blowing conch shells and shouting, and nobody had lost their voice yet, and Budweiser was still $5, so it was a nice gentle introduction to this scary foreign country. Even though Mexico lost, the mariachis put on a good show back at Melrose Square where we returned to dance and sing and juggle footballs before going for the first of many nights in a row to the NewsCafe in Sandton.
  
Three week old travel notes indicate that even though my upgrade hadn’t gone through, my SFO-FRA seatmate was an agreeable Fijian Googler on his way to a security conference in Sweden and that FRA differentiates itself as my favorite airport because it has adequate electrical outlets. I used my German GSM phone to try and text Danny’s rented Peruvian phone located at the time in Colombia, or something. An auspicious start to a trip. |
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