RestlessNatives.net NativeGuide to
SOUTH AFRICA
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We travelled to South Africa in October 1995 for a friend's wedding. We spent about 2 and a half weeks there, visiting Johannesburg, the Drachensberg range, and Cape Town and the nearby coastal area. We also had a few hours to see Amsterdam on the way to the RSA, and those photos are included here too. Some of this may be out of date by now.
George's college roommate got married in October 1995, which was the first big warning for us that we might be in danger of becoming Adults. The wedding and all the surrounding goings-on make for a pretty amusing story (as most weddings do), but we'll leave it for another time. The important thing is that the wedding was in Johannesburg, South Africa, and we jumped on the chance to spend a couple of weeks down there.
We flew from Chicago to South Africa by way of New York and Amsterdam. This made for a lot of time in the air, maybe 20 hours or so, and was also for some reason just really tiring. By the time we arrived at JFK, George was already groggy enough to make the mistake of asking a NYC cop to tell him where to go. The cop just grinned and reminded us that maybe that isn't the best question to ask in NYC.
Amsterdam
Sorry, we're unable to find our Amsterdam photos at present. We'll put them up here when we can.
We landed in Amsterdam in the morning, local time, but for those of us still on Chicago time it was late at night. George had never been to Europe, so we sucked it up and went into the city for a full day (night) of sightseeing (we had about a 10-12 hour layover).
We took the train into town and then essentially followed the walking tour(s) in the local guidebook, at least as well as we could manage at 4 a.m. internal time, with frequent detours for caffeine. Deb was seen snoring away in the middle of a cafe more than once. So we got a glimpse of the local monuments, canals, churches, markets, shopping malls, etc. It seems like a nice enough city, pretty, with reasonably friendly locals. We can't really say that it seemed extraordinary in any way, but we were sleepwalking through it for only a very short time, so that may be our own fault.
We visited the Anne Frank house, which is preserved as it was when she was there. We haven't read the diary since high school, but it was still interesting to see the context for what we remember of it. There are a number of displays in the house about the book (e.g., a display of the various translations of the diary that have been published), the house and its owners, Anne Frank's life and death, and the German occupation and the Holocaust. A worthwhile place to visit.
On a lighter note, we also noticed the multitude of drug-related shops and products for which Amsterdam is famous. As an American, it's definitely odd to walk into a shop that openly and legally offers a connoisseur's range of marijuana. In fact, half of the merchandise in those stores seems to be trading on this oddness factor (t-shirts, etc.). In any case, we aren't qualified to make any comments on this stuff, except to say that it looks like someone who is qualified could have a pretty good time in Amsterdam.
At the end of the day, we stumbled through the flower market, back to the train, and ended up grabbing an hour or two of shuteye on benches at the airport before our flight to Johannesburg.
Johannesburg
We were happy to see our soon-to-be-married friends in Johannesburg, of course. Unless you're there to see someone, though, we would tell any visitor to South Africa to skip this city. Anything you can find in Johannesburg, you can find somewhere else more pleasant. It's not that we didn't find anything good about the city, just that we found places like Cape Town to be much more worthwhile. (The lack of photos in this section pretty much says it all).
Among the other problems in this city is the fact that Johannesburg has a high crime rate, and a real good dose of social/racial tension as well (unless things have changed since we were there, of course). The main problem, from an American point of view, isn't really the crime rate but the fact that the crime is extremely unpredictable. People get mugged at knifepoint in broad daylight in front of major international hotels in the center of the city, for instance. The white suburbanites in particular seemed to be very concerned about safety (read "frightened"), though we did get the impression that the perception of danger was more severe than the reality. Take all this with a grain of salt; we obviously don't know what we're talking about here, since we have spent a grand total of a couple weeks in this country - but the point is that we felt that the tension level was noticeably different between Johannesburg and Cape Town for whatever reason.
As far as the city itself goes, there are shopping malls, restaurants, etc., like you'd find in any city. There are a lot of good places to buy arts and crafts, including some seriously upscale galleries, but we ended up buying our souvenirs from a couple of artisans at little roadside stands. We're really happy with them - little malachite sculptures of animals, and great little wooden tables. And it's nice to know that the guys who actually made them got the whole purchase price.
We also visited a restaurant called Carnivore (George could never have passed up a place with that name). The meal lived up to the name. A neverending stream of waiters circulated with huge skewers of meat from various animals, slicing great slabs off them and onto our plates (sort of a Brazilian style). The animals apparently vary from night to night, but we remember having wildebeest, nyala, kudu, and a couple of other African deer and cow equivalents (in addition to the usual beef etc). The wildebeest got rave reviews from us, the kudu wasn't good, the rest was in between. The veggie accompaniment to all of this? One lonely little baked potato. They give each table a little white flag to tip over when the diners surrender and want the food to stop arriving, and eventually even George was fed into submission. And when he's moaning later that night about having eaten too much meat and too few veggies, you know it was a seriously carnivorous meal. We thought Deb, who was generally a herbivore prior to starting to date George a mere three months before this trip, might never recover.
Our schedule didn't allow us time to do a safari in one of South Africa's major game parks (which are supposed to be excellent, and probably the main tourism draw in the country), so we did the best we could by heading out to the game preserve near Johannesburg. It's not on the same scale as the national parks, of course, and is closer to something like Lion Country Safari in South Florida (that's a drive-through zoo/preserve where the animals roam within fenced boundaries and the cars stay on the road, for those who don't know), but it is still a chance to see the animals in a largely natural habitat.
The lions, the only predators that we saw, are kept separated from the various potential prey species. The lion pride is fed daily with a cow carcass. This is a photo op for the tourists, so the carcass is tied to a tree (to keep the lions from dragging it off into the bushes before eating it). It may be a cow rather than a wildebeest, but it's still a treat to see a lion pride feeding up close. The other treat at the wildlife park was the fact that most of the animals had babies with them, including the lions, the rhinos and the giraffes. Awfully cute critters.
The Drachensberg
We think the name means something like Dragon Mountains, but we really don't know. The only Afrikaans we learned in the RSA was hou links, gaan regs verby (stay left, pass on the right), though a lot of it is so close to English that you get the gist (like the advice column letter we read where someone was complaining that her breasts were plat soos pancoekies -- the spelling might not be right but you get the idea). A fair amount of Afrikaans (and Dutch, for that matter) could be easily confused with English written by someone who was Hookt on Fonix.
To get to the Drachensberg, we drove across farm country for a couple of hours, then up into the hills a bit. Stopping at a service station along the way definitely broadened our understanding of what's possible in the snack food realm, by the way (although living in Asia has broadened our horizons even further). The Drachensberg is a mountain range which seems to have more than its fair share of luxury resort and country club sort of establishments with tennis, golf, etc. We stayed in one of these resorts (not usually our kind of thing, but we hadn't arranged this part of the trip). It was nice, but we couldn't help but feel a little uncomfortable about the somewhat apartheid-y feel of the resort (black staff, white guests, that kind of thing).
In our 3 days or so in this area, we spent most of our time hiking the trails around the nearby hills. At first glance, the bush in this area isn't what we think of as African-looking (that would be whatever part of Kenya they show incessantly on National Geographic specials), but the hills really do just seem old. We had some nice walks, and managed not to be bitten by any disease-carrying mosquitoes or anything. We didn't see anything special in terms of animals (aside from the gigantic iridescent insect that tried its best to push George off a cliff and/or give him a heart attack), but it was a good feeling to spend the day walking around in Africa. It was also a pretty good feeling to come back to air conditioning at the end of the hike.
This part of our trip is where we saw our favorite Afrikaans sign, by the way. It was on one of those roadside maps that shows your location in relation to the local roads, and pointing to the little red car was an arrow with the words U is hier.
Cape Town
The tourism aspect of our trip improved tenfold as soon as we hopped a plane to Cape Town. The southern coast is simply far more attractive than Jo'burg, with a somewhat calmer attitude and many more interesting things to see and do. Certain parts of it are distinctly reminiscent of certain parts of California - the wine country, the winding coastal road, and the seaside developments in particular. But if you look, there's always a little reminder that you're in Africa - like the zebras moseying around the local park.
Getting to Cape Town from Johannesburg requires only a short flight (2 hrs?). Our flight was fine, though the takeoff was a bit hairy. It took forever to get off the ground after we started down the runway. We started to wonder seriously if the pilots were going to drive the plane to Cape Town. George also noticed from his window seat that the little yellow stripe at the side of the runway moved in and out, in and out, as the plane swerved its way down the runway at 200 mph for what seemed like 20 minutes. It's at times like this that you're relieved the airport is in the middle of a big empty flat space and not beside a river or atop a hill. The plane finally pulled weakly up into the sky with a fair amount of shuddering and creaking, and we were on our way to Cape Town. (Our guess about the long takeoff, by the way, is that the heat and the altitude in Jo'burg combine to make for thin air.)
We stayed with some friends of Deb's who happened to be working for the Taiwanese consulate in Cape Town. They were nice enough to not only cook for us (best sweet-and-sour chicken we've ever had) and let us stay in their house, but to let us use their car. The car had diplomatic plates, which we figure probably saved us a ticket or two.
South Africa wines apparently were quite well-respected, but the industry got pretty well hammered by the anti-apartheid embargoes and such. When we were there, it was just starting to make a comeback and very good wine was selling at very low prices. We spent a day driving around the wine-growing areas near Cape Town, which are in some very attractive country that reminded us of the nicest parts of Northern California (with more mountains). We came across a couple of winery employees who were too snooty to give us the time of day, but for the most part it was fun and the wine tasted great. We didn't buy any, though, mostly because the USA has truly asinine rules about mailing wine.
We had first been really impressed by the local wine when we ate lunch in the small town of Hermanus, where we had gone to see the whales which come into the bay and can be spotted from the shore. We ate in the local cafe, and when we asked about the fish of the day, the owner scooted off into the kitchen, saying "There's one left, it's perfect for the two of you!" When she reappeared, we asked her for a wine that would go with the fish, and she brought out a really nice one. After tasting it, we were pretty sure that we were going to get killed on the price. It turned out that not only was the fish great, but the excellent wine was about US$8. That's when we decided that a wine tour was in order. (We did spot a whale in Hermanus, incidentally, but it was veeery far out in the bay.)
The trip to Hermanus and back follows a winding coastal road that is reminiscent of parts of the PCH, with some spectacular views of the bays and mountains along the way. We also came across a pack (or pod, or gaggle, or whatever the proper word is; we'd pick platoon) of baboons sitting by the roadside munching on whatever it is that baboons munch on. We stopped for a photo but couldn't really hang around due to the fact that we were in the middle of the road. We don't know about you, but we're always especially happy if we come across a cool animal by chance in the wild (as opposed to a zoo, or even a trip specially to see them in the wild). And we'd have to say that coming across a bunch of baboons rates right up there with accidentally spotting that bald eagle in Washington.
The other place that we saw near Cape Town was the Cape itself. It's not that special looking, but it is a strange feeling to stand at the tip of it and think about where you are on the globe, and the fact that there's basically no more land between you and Antarctica. There is a sizable chunk of nature preserve around the Cape, though it seemed fairly barren when we visited. There were nice - if bleak - landscapes by the ocean though.
A looping drive around the peninsula, from Cape Town to the Cape and back, let us see a full range of lifestyles - from the pretty awful conditions of the Cape Flats where untold numbers of poor squatters live, to the luxury condominiums and homes on the cliffs overlooking the ocean, to the simple houses in between.
Also along that route, you can find unique spots like the tiny beach where we sat and watched dozens of little penquins waddling around. The photos that we took here are strange -- if we didn't know better, we'd swear the background looked fake, like those backgrounds in SeaWorld exhibits - but it actually looked that way in real life. The penguins are very cute. George was trying (as unobtrusively as possible) to take a picture of one that was apparently camera shy. It ran and hid in a little nook in the rock, cutting a hilarious figure as it leaned backward to see if we were gone yet.
In Cape Town itself, we found our way to an assortment of restaurants and stores. We happened to be eating in a bar & grill type restaurant when the OJ Simpson verdict was announced live on CNN. The manager changed all of the TVs over to CNN and turned the sound up, and everyone in the place stopped what they were doing and watched. It was mind-boggling. It was also embarrassing that this joke of a trial was all that most of these people had ever seen of the American judicial process. Don't get us started.
Also in Cape Town, we visited the botantical gardens of which the local guidebooks seem so proud. They're nice and quite extensive gardens (though we have to admit that our interest in looking at flowers is fairly limited).
And finally, just outside of Cape Town, we stopped for sunset at a beach that offers a great view of Cape Town and the mesa-like Table Mountain, which sits above the city. Table Mountain always seems to have a flattened cloud hovering just above it; this is referred to as the Tablecloth. (Useless information, in case you're interested: what appears to be a stationary cloud is in fact the moisture in the air briefly becoming visible as the air cools when it passes over the mountain, and disappearing as it reaches the other side).
Though we might never have visited South Africa if not for the wedding, we ended up being very glad that we had a chance to see this country. Our friends are still married, by the way, and we hope to get them to tell the story of that wedding sometime, because it certainly had its moments. We'll also work on getting them to tell you more about South Africa, which they know much better than we do.
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