It's a hobo's life for me...

My home for the night is Linda’s 24-Hour Coffee House, in the Bloemfontein Bus Station, which is actually much more comfortable and pleasant than any Greyhound depot I’ve seen in Canada. Even if there were a room in town available for less than $100 (there isn’t, this being the holidays and my arrival here being quite unplanned) I’d have no way of ensuring I catch my 6:00 AM bus to Joburg. So I’m here for another 9 hours, my luggage checked and my scribbly blog journal in hand.

Bloemfontein (or just “Bloom”) is apparently a nice enough town of half a million, mostly populated by Afrikaans, and legendary among other South Africans for its dullness. Meh. I’m going to sit here and drink rejuvenating beverages until dawn and fill in the plentiful gaps in the notebook entries I’ve been keeping for future transcription online. So if you find this or the prior dozen entries to be bloody loquacious, please be forgiving – I’ve got a lot of time to kill.

Hitting the road...

The sun is coming up, and by unanimous consent we’re getting moving early in an attempt to beat the heat, pausing long enough to pet the baby goat who was sleeping in our doorway when we emerged to greet the day. The night passed in stops and starts, the stone floor being less than luxurious, but it wasn’t too bad. The hot lunch and shower awaiting me at the lodge, six or so hours from now, sound very appealing.

Far away...

A pot-bellied pig is plaintively asking me for food. Two immense chickens just mated at my feet. The sun is going down, and the cool, welcome wind is too intense to keep a candle lit. This is the most remote place I’ve ever been.

I’m sitting on the doorstep of the erstwhile tourist rondavel, in a clutch of similar huts 50 or 60 kilometres from Malealea, itself a world away from electricity, let alone the Web, so as usual I’m scribbling in my notebook. A circle of metre-high stone wall, about 8 metres across encloses the local cows for the night (though one just made a daring escape). The many chickens wandering about in the dust are starting to clamber up onto the head-high frame of sticks and twine that serves as their evening roost, lest the local dogs get any hungry ideas while the birds sleep. A few Basotho (local) women, spanning at least three generations, are brewing some variety of beer in a huge steaming pot over a semi-open fire.

The horse ride out here was a six- or seven-hour odyssey of amazing vistas and strained muscles that took me far, far away from the world I’m accustomed to. It’s very different here, and fascinating despite the emotion it evokes. Lesotho is poor, like no place I’ve ever seen before. I’m many, many kilometres away from the nearest power line, water main or paved road (or even a real dirt road, for that matter). Basotho are almost all subsistence farmers, and though there’s no famine here the country is dependent on food aid and economic opportunities are beyond scarce.

But at the moment, the scenery is intact and beautiful. The trek led us through innumerable villages and down, across, and up the deep gullies I saw yesterday. The landscapes are cast and varied – the plant life over our trek ranged from tenuous to almost lush (impressive given the dry climate) – all of it very different from what I’m used to. At the moment, the most obvious and striking are the aloe grey-green aloe plants. I’m told they’re like aloe back home, but these are huge - taller than my head and wider than my horse. Each of them is flowering, displaying orange blossoms on stalks that shoot as much as ten metres into the air for a few days before collapsing under their own weight.

The intensity of the ride was a new experience for me. My previous horse rides have been mostly of the 2-minute Washington State Fair variety, so hours of riding over really rough terrain was a bit of a change. Right from the beginning I decided to simply trust that my horse had no more desire to die than I, and I assumed that she would lead me wisely and surely down the steep, narrow trails of rural Lesotho. Unfortunately, my horse had, as Michael put it, “a bit of a suicidal bent”, manifested in her obsession with cliffsides. I named her Winnie (short for Winston) in honour of her sheer bloody-mindedness. No matter how broad and comfortable the path, no matter how stridently I tugged her towards the trail’s center, she was only happy tiptoeing right along the edge of dizzying plummets. Lesotho is an alpine country, with a palpable roof-of-the-world feeling. There are a lot of cliffsides for a deranged horse to flirt with.

But even my insane steed couldn’t dampen the fun. The six of us (two guides, myself, and the three friendly South Africans from yesterday, Michael, Lee and Donna) circled mountain after mountain, following village paths, dry clay streambeds and tiny, rocky paths. Our pace varied from deliberate to galloping (and butt-numbing), depending on the mood of the horses and the patience of our guide. We passed amused, candy-demanding children, and other villagers whose responses were by turns wary and quite friendly.

Our trek took us past dozen of tiny farms smaller than the average Canadian backyard, plowed by weathered human hands and occasionally oxen (never by machines). Corn and a handful of other dry-ground crops dominate the landscape, and the valleys reverberate with the constant ring of cowbells. Boys as young as three, wrapped in brightly patterned woven blankets and wearing conical Basotho straw hats, herd modest clusters of cattle and goats through the sparse grazing lands of the hills. Lesotho is one of the few developing countries where female literacy is much higher than male – apparently because boys are drafted into tending family herds in the absence of their fathers, many of whom work the mines in South Africa to supplement farm income. Tribal and family loyalties seem to dominate - one of our guides paused to hurl rocks and angry words at unwelcome herders urging their cattle across the wrong river to his tribe’s shore.

As far as I can tell, whatever indigenous ecosystem might once have existed here has long since been replaced by livestock. Paradoxically, people who have sought to lessen their poverty by expanding their herds are discovering that overgrazing and the attendant soil erosion threaten to completely destroy their livelihoods. It’s been estimated that by 2040 Lesotho will have no remaining land suitable for any kind of agriculture, precipitating a crisis for which the national government is, of course, completely unprepared. Anybody (I’m looking at some of you SFU folk) who pipes up about the romantic purity and simplicity of this sort of pre-industrial life can expect a thorough verbal beat-down – some of the human consequences of the subsistence lifestyle are too horrifying to comprehend.

But I do feel welcome here in this village. No doubt the revenue from renting out rondavel we lekowa (non-insulting local term for white folk) is a welcome boon, but there’s some genuine hospitality. A local woman asked with genuine interest (and excellent English) about what I was scribbling in this book, and was pleased to know that I was taking notes about the area. The locals laughed with us (rather than at us) for our clumsy attempts to visit with the village animals.

It’s growing very dark now, and in the absence of electricity the stars are growing remarkably bright. We’re setting out early tomorrow, so I’m calling it a night. I think this has been one of those days that will keep coming back to me for years, at unusual times and in unexpected ways. I’m glad I’m here.

Crawlies...

Something very heavy (as such things go) scrambled in through my window and thudded to the floor in the darkness of the lodge rondavel last night. It scurried around the floor, squeaking too high and loud to be a mouse. It vanished when I lit a match to see it.

I still have no idea what it was.

In constant motion...

I’m writing by candlelight. Actually, the generator in my home for the night is still on for another hour, so I could turn on the light bulb over my head, but this place looks much cooler in the dim light. I’m in a Sotho rondavel, and circular hut built of red stone and plaster, roofed with a cone of tightly woven grass. The floor is perhaps 9 feet across and though it holds 2 beds I appear to have the entire place to myself (more privacy than I’ve had in weeks).

Tonight’s home is part of the Malealea lodge, a lovely complex deep in the wilds of southwestern Lesotho. Though we’re many miles from the nearest electrical lines (hence the evening generator), this place is calm, clean, spirited and ultimately very relaxing. The journey to get here, however…

Getting to Malealea is surely the most intense bit of traveling I’ve ever done.

After posting this morning from Maseru, Lesotho’s small but incredibly frenzied capital, I set out for the bus station. Some friendly ladies at the cavernous, almost totally unused Lesotho Tourist Centre pointed my in the right direction, after about 30 minutes of staggering like a mule under my new backpack and the weight of locals’ stares, I was there.

The Maseru bus station mirrors the city around it – bustling, intimidating as hell to any foreigner, and chaotic in a way that must be witnessed to be understood. There are no bus timetables in Lesotho – the buses arrive when they’re bloody well ready and leave when they’re full. Dozens of truly decrepit buses and passenger vans floated about without any visible order, some with no destination markings, while thousands of people milled about in the otherworldly heat with far more purpose and direction than I.

Steeling myself, I headed to the nearby supermarket to claim water to prepare my parched body for a ride sure to be sweltering. Sadly, a polite employee, wary of shoplifters, informed me at the door that I’d have to leave my bag, laden with passport and other indispensables, outside the front door in the throng. Though he insisted on deferentially calling me “Boss”, the shiny pump-action shotgun he was brandishing did not leave me feeling in charge. Since neither of the two options which led to water (losing my worldly belongings or dodging 12-gauge pellets) seemed appealing, I continued my journey, thirst unslaked.

Feeling very white, I wandered into the maelstrom seeking a bus or minibus labeled Malealea, a village 80 kilometres from Maseru, for which the lodge is named. Sensing my goal from my skin colour, a succession of people (speaking mostly South Sotho) pointed me in many different directions, none of which reveal buses labeled Malealea. After a short while, two gentlemen who spoke a bit of English argued with each other for a moment and then decisively suggested a bus with an unfamiliar name. Buoyed by their confidence, I boarded the crowded conveyance, which was as luxurious as a schoolbus from hell and already twice as packed. Feeling hideously out of place but seeing no alternative, I clambered towards and emptyish seat in the back, trying and failing to avoid bopping people with my immense backpack, which I refused to store up on the roof rack with all the other baggage. I squeezed tightly against the window, amid thundering Sotho tunes coming from two ancient but powerful speakers mounted on the ceiling. Then I watched with equal fascination and horror as a long procession of grandmothers, businessmen, farmers, and mothers with infants secured to their stomachs with only ingeniously tied blankets, filed onto the bus. Most of them wanted to share my seat. The eventual victor was a somewhat businesslike man, who spoke a handful of English words and said he was going to Malealea himself. Though he never shared his name, this boosted my confidence in the endeavour.

After perhaps an hour of merciless heat and zero ventilation the bus, finally full in a way I’d never imagined possible, departed along a dust road. Lesotho paved its first road for the King of England’s visit in 1947, and has done little to expand the network since then, at least outside Maseru. The road, one of the main arteries, was not so much potholed as simply broken, which ensured an exciting ride for the hundred or so passengers. Drawing through farming settlements too small and scattered to call villages, the bus careened at speeds for which neither it nor the road were designed. Thunder and lightning roiled in thick clouds that retreated with the horizon, and the vicious sunlight was only occasionally punctuated by welcome bursts of light rain through the open window. In the four hours it took me to travel 80 km, the bus stopped at every tiny community on the way. At each stop a small army of people emerged from nearby homes to sell fruit juice and water (neither of which I trusted to drink) through the bus windows to the passengers.

After hours of interminable stops and white-knuckle sprints, my (by now) suspiciously helpful travel companion pointed out the minute hamlet of Malealea (virtually every place name in Lesotho starts with “M” – very disorienting). We both disembarked with difficulty, and a hand-painted sign said “Malealea Lodge – 7 km” along a narrow but very scenic dirt road up a dry hill. By then, I’d been crammed into very public transit for nearly 24 hours, and I was not inclined to wait for the Lodge bus the Nameless One insisted was coming. I thanked him for his help and set off up the road, in spite of his entreaties to stay put (in very hot, unfamiliar, and for all I knew, dangerous territory). He waited at the crossroads. Instincts are funny things, and mine told me to get walking.

About 2 kilometres up the road, past clutches of tiny huts and gauntlets of children smilingly demanding “Sweets! Sweets!”, an engraved metal sign marked the entrance to a short mountain pass. It read “Wayfarer - pause and look upon a gateway of Paradise.” Just beyond was a valley so vast I couldn’t guess at its size or shape. Dozens of arid mountain peaks, ringed with rock strata visible from many tens of kilometers away, encircled the scattered rondavels, tiny cornfields, and dry grazing patches below. A handful of impressive rivers and modest streams cut jagged gullies hundreds of metres deep into the yellow-white sand of the valley floor, sectioning the land into tribal holdings.

I clambered up the nearest hill to get a worthy picture. While I perched on my rock, the Nameless One ran (nobody willingly runs in 40-degree heat) through the pass and down the road I had been following. Presumably in pursuit of me, he scanned the hillsides until he saw me and called me down to the road. Though I was grotesquely aware that I’d be truly hoped in the event of a mugging, I found consolation in my greater size and the abundance of good bashin’ rocks at the roadside. A kilometer further on, I drew little comfort from his continued anonymity, to say nothing of his unsettling habit of climbing small hills to yell things he wouldn’t translate to people I couldn’t see, all the while pointing insistently at me.

When he paused to step into a roadside house, insisting without explanation that I stay put, I took my leave, walking briskly down the winding road. After maybe 2 kilometres of pleasant breezes and bemused locals unused to pedestrian white folks, I saw no sign of the shifty dude, and breathed easy. Moments later, a bright SUV pulled up alongside. The passengers, Donna, Lee and Michael, South Africans on vacation, graciously offered me a lift. No longer fearing ambush, but quite content with my 5 klick hike, I clambered in.

I arrived at Malealea Lodge intact, unmugged, and not at all dead, a full day after leaving Cape Town, a thousand flying-crow kilometers away. I ate a straightforward but delicious (and bloody expensive) meal and retired exhausted to my darkening room to write. I’m going quite blind scribbling by candlelight, so I’m calling it a night. Tomorrow: crazed horses and unforgiving Lesotho terrain – a winning combination!

One more thing: the helpful lady at the lodge’s South African booking office told me it would cost 400 rand – just short of a hundred dollars – to get from the Lesotho-South African border to the lodge.

I did it for three bucks.

Country-hopping

After about 15 hours in transit, peppered with last-minute course corrections, I'm in Maseru, capital city of Lesotho. I arrived by walking over a road/rail bridge from South Africa, and climbed into a crowded VW van converted into a minibus. It roared with unintelligible but joyous South Sotho music. In order to fund my upcoming horseback trek into the deep mountains of this alpine country, I've just converted more money than most Basotho make in a year, which I suppose should make me feel guilty. Now I'm taking a few minutes at a Chinese-run broadband internet cafe (globalism rocks my world) and will have a tasty breakfast at Nando's in a few minutes.

This is one of the poorest countries in the world, but at this very instant I'm relatively comfortable, owing (I think) to my growing ease with the (on the surface) chaotic rhythyms of African life. I'm about to go in search of a bus to take me to Malealea, about 80km away, where I'll be staying in a thatched forest hut and befriending a real live pony. After that, I'll spend a night or two in a Basotho village in the far south of the country while touring the mountains.

This is, methinks, a very successful vacation.

P.S. I've not forgotten to write about my Cape Town adventures, but I don't have that much time at the moment. It'll have to wait until I get back to Gabs on the 31st or 1st. If I don't get on before then, Happy New Years!

In chronological order...

It's been a while since I last offered an update, considering all that's transpired. Seriously, the days are just packed.

I honestly started to write about Robben Island, Table Mountain, the Christmas goings-on and my occasional brushes with the Reaper, but found that my words were rote and passionless and totally unfitting the niftiness of the last few days.

I'm think I'm mostly preoccupied with not knowing what my Lesotho plan is... the hostel I was planning on visiting is adamantly not answering the phone, though I had hoped to arrive sometime midday tomorrow after an odyssey of taxis and hiking. I have a buncha camping gear to pick up, and further details to arrange. I'll try to write snazzyish posts about the goodness of days past on the 12-hour bus ride to Bloemfontein, on the Lesotho border. But I can't promise I'll be able to find net access in that tiny country. We'll see...

Weirdness...

Merry Christmas, all!!!

Very weird to be marking the day this far from home. I hope you're all having a fine, preferably snowy Christmas. I'll share the details of my own Christmas chaos shortly...

Santa even visited!

Long Street Backpackers, mindful that Christmas can be tough for travelers, organizes a spiffy extravaganza of food’n’fun for all its guests on that most familial of holidays. After yesterday’s fun, frazzling, knee-knackering epic journey up, a little relaxation was supremely in order.

My old nemesis Irony sought me out again… dammit. I kicked off Christmas by climbing halfway up Table Mountain again… with a bathtub-sized bowl of salad in my arms this time.

‘Twas worth it. The hostel managers staked out an excellent spot for a Yule feast, less a proper cave than a low-ceilinged overhang embedded into the mountain, albeit one with floor space to rival most houses. Table Mountain was wearing its trademark tablecloth of cloud, a thick mist that shrouded the cave and offered wondrous relief from the heat and sun of the day before.

The next best thing to a white Christmas at home is hanging out with a slew of backpackers, each clinging affectionately to a champagne bottle and devouring plate after plate of turkey and tiramisu. Though a cool wind blew, I and my fellow Yule travelers found warmth in the beverages on offer and enjoyed the fine food, good company, and impressively loud music (considering that the speakers and batteries had to be lugged up the trail along with everything else). There was even a Secret Santa gift exchange – I gave a bottle of booze and received a nifty gourd rattle. The party wound down from its raucous heights by about 6 o’clock, lest the trail down become dangerously dark, and the crowd waddled back the hostel fat and happy and more than slightly impaired.

The hostel in the evenings is normally a deafening place that serves as the intermittent base for the guests’ nights out in the neighborhood. Last night it was tomb-quiet by 8PM, and I much doubt that any of the party guests headed out for further celebration. The next morning was likewise quiet, punctuated only by the pained moans of hostellers suffering the wrath of grapes.

I had a great time, and I hope that you good folks back in Vancouver also enjoyed the company of good friends and a bit of overindulgence… but I bet I’m the only person reading this who’s ever done Christmas in a cave.

The Reaper says Hi!

What’s a vacation without a little flirting with death?

Table Mountain is a lovely, kilometre-high plateau that wraps around much of Central Cape Town. Its impressive beauty and walking-distance-from-downtown convenience make it extraordinarily popular with residents and visitors, which led me to greatly underestimate the damn thing.

Steph, Andrew, Nathan and I set out early for the half-hour walk to the mountain’s base. The cloudless sky and violent heat (a break from Cape Town’s normally temperate climate) made us awfully whiny by the time we reached the trailheads at the cable car station, 300 metres up., but we weren’t seriously dissuaded. After all, thousands of people climb Table Mountain on a busy day, enjoying a leisurely ninety minute stroll from the famed Kirstenbosch Gardens on the south side of the mountain. That we were on the north side of the mountain didn’t discourage in the least. Indeed, we reveled in our own smug superiority as we trudged past the station to the start of the trail. Hundreds of lazy (and, I now know, wise) tourists lingered in hours-long queues for an effortless ride to the summit.

Long inured to the hyperbole of Canadian warning signs, I shrugged off their South African counterparts that said such things as “Warning: the trail ahead is very difficult. This is not the recommended route.” It could have said something more specific, like “Jackass Canadians with nearly no rock climbing experience have a palpable chance of messy doom on this path.”

Steep but straightforward for its first third, the path known as the India Window abruptly changed character when the trail metamorphosed into a series of 20-foot rock faces. Reasonably simple for an experienced climber, this was a new hurdle for me. Fortunately, Nate and Andrew are veteran rock climbers, and they talked me through the process of scrambling madly up terrain no human was meant to traverse. Though I made it through intact, I had the honour of clinging precariously to thin handholds over truly precarious drops, terrified out of all proportion to the situation (maybe). Easily the most hair-raising experience of my trip so far.

But I was rewarded with some of the most impressive views I’ve seen. Table Mountain is far larger than its modest height suggests, and some incredibly sheer rock faces cap amazing panoramas of Cape Town, stretching away from the foot of the mountain and over the horizon. Clambering among the rocks and peering down at the city, I heard the shrill cries of rock hyraxes, tiny rodent beasties related to elephants, but they hid from view. The mountain was beset with lizards of remarkable colour and variety (and no small number of birds waiting to eat them).

About three hours into what should have been a ninety minute hike, we began referring to the climb as our Epic Journey. The further we climbed, the scarcer the shade and more merciless the sun, but our sense of accomplishment grew. Until around hour five, that is, when our water ran out and we (mostly me) started to whine. Eventually, impossibly, the summit of the mountain appeared, up a gentle slope adorned with handrails and chains that had been painfully absent earlier in the ascent. It was well trafficked by tourists complaining about the five minute walk from the cable car station, while the four of us limped and moaned over the last few steps.

After talking cheerfully about our upcoming tour of the kilometers-wide summit while climbing, we arrived at the top to find incredible views that we had no energy to enjoy. Instead we snapped a few photos and staggered to the (insanely priced) restaurant for refreshment, then staggered onto a cable car downhill.

By the time we finished the walk back to the hostel, we’d regained the energy to boast of our day’s accomplishments. The four of us took some time to partake in the culinary delights of Cape Town (a long way from the boiled corn mush of Botswana), and enjoyed some world-class burgers and history’s finest milkshakes before retiring to our rooms and collapsing around sunset.

The Japanese have a saying about Mount Fuji that applies well to Table Mountain, methinks: “You’re wise to climb it, and a fool to do it twice”. Brushes with death, blistering heat and all, I’m glad to have climbed Table Mountain, and I can’t think of any reason to ever do it again.

Fences...

One of the most striking things about Robben Island is its mundanity. South Africa’s most notorious political prison, a rallying point for the anti-apartheid movement, could have been indistinguishable from any jail. The first post-apartheid generation of leaders thankfully decided more was in order.

10 kilometres and a 20 minute ferry ride from the ridiculously gaudy tourist complex known as the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, Robben Island is a fascinating experience. I visited this afternoon with three friends from the hostel, Nathan (Kiwi), Andrew (American, self-described honorary Canuck) and Stephanie (Brit).

In addition to a leper colony and a small village for prison staff and their families, Robben Island held opponents of various South African regimes for nearly 400 years. Signs of long habitation are omnipresent in the ruins of old docks, crumbling stone houses and surprisingly large cemeteries given the size of the settlement. Now the island is dedicated to teaching South Africans and visitors of the injustices of apartheid and the way this place incubated the movement to end racially segregated rule.

The maximum security wing of Robben Island was reserved for black male political prisoners (whites and women were held elsewhere in South African), and the regime unleashed its greatest brutality on them. Our guide, Sparks, shared the island’s secrets with an authority well earned during his seven years as a prisoner here. Arrested, if I recall correctly, in 1983 for being a member of the anti-apartheid Pan-Africanist Congress, he explained the horrific living conditions and the punishment leveled at intransigent passengers. To hear a man describe his days of solitary confinement and starvation has rather more impact than reading any textbook on apartheid.

Nelson Mandela’s prison cell was like all the others in the solitary wing of the prison. It was perhaps six feet by five, with three paper-thin coarse blankets, a metal plate and cup for food and drink, and a single bucket for predictable purposes. He spent twenty years in that space, twenty-three or more hours a day, enduring sporadic torture and constant humiliation as did all the other opponents of apartheid held there.

The most remarkable thing that every visitor to Robben Island sees (aside from the penguins, of whom I saw only two) is the attitude of the former prisoners. Sparks explained to us that he, along with the other prisoners, made a decision to view their time in Robben Island not as an injustice, nor even as a sacrifice per se, but as a critical precondition for toppling apartheid. Robben Island strengthened and bound together the anti-apartheid movement by bringing together its most forceful leaders and their disparate groups. It was on Robben Island that the most courageous men in South Africa first set out common goals and methods for freeing their country. It was there that Nelson Mandela wrote The Long Walk to Freedom and smuggled his manuscript to the waiting world. It was there that the world first truly saw the face of apartheid and began to undo the system from abroad. It’s hard to overstate the significance of the place, or the power of Sparks’ (and others) conviction that apartheid could not have been overthrown without their suffering.

Lest the talk of forgiveness and reconciliation sounds like mere words, consider that Sparks, like many of the other former inmates now guiding visitors around the prison, chose to live in the island’s village after he was released. Some of the men who imprisoned him are now his neighbours, coworkers and even his friends.

Wandering!

I've discovered that my favorite pastime in a foreign city is to simply pick a direction and walk until I return to where I started or my feet cease to function. Yesterday morning I set out from a delicious breakfast at a local artsy-fartsy cafe (think Subeez) and turned right. Inasmuch as Cape Town has its share of desperate poverty, I resolved to correct my course should I wander into any injurious neighborhoods... yet no such thing happened. Instead I found yet another thing I hadn't expected to see in Africa...

California. Each block further up a grinding hill took me deeper into ridiculous luxury, glorious and ostentatious homes ensconced happily in palm trees and sculpted terraces. The weather was merely warm rather than infernal, perhaps 25 degrees, and a merciful wind reminded me that Cape Town is not the blast furnace I've grown accustomed to in Gabs. In climate, landscape, and conspicuous consumption, it's outright eerie... standing in the posh suburb of Tamberskloef, it was easy to believe I'd wandered into upscale San Francisco.

My camera, however, had not forgotten that I'd attempted to nourish it with no-name batteries bought Botswanan suburbs, and quit in protest after fewer than five minutes of function. The glorious Table Mountain that was drawing closer was abruptly off limits, as the gentle breeze accelerated to the 60km/hr brutality of the beloved "Cape Doctor". So I wandered back down the hill, replenished my camera at an upscale little shopping mall called The Garden, and found myself at the hostel without delay.

The air of relaxation overwhelmed me. I sat on the hostel balcony, overlooking snazzy Long St, and enjoyed the fruits of my early wanderings through the neighborhood's dozen used bookstores, in this case Richard Morgan's Broken Angels. After napping/reading for an hour or so, I noted that another, less windswept hill was but a short walk from the hostel. Heading towards it in the slowly setting sun, I failed to realize that there were marked paths and roads, and simply climbed up the immediately available steep side, through african thorn brush and swarms of leaping lizards. Arriving at the top after a sweaty, grimy, half-hour, I discovered full-fledged tourist infrastructure, including snack stands, paved roads, and people who were far better rested and less covered in burrs.

No matter... the view was extraordinary. My photos will have to wait until I return to Gabs, but though Signal hill is but a third the height of nearby Table mountain, it afforded an extraordinary panorama of the endless Atlantic, dotted with landmarks like Robben Island and Cape Town's sparkling waterfront. Table Mountain itself has an endless waterfall of cloud flowing over its summit and vanishing before striking ground, an extraordinary effect. A ludicrously tempting path led from Signal Hill up to impressive Lion's Head mountain, but darkness was encroaching and I retreated after an hour lounging and exploring the hill...

Whoops, gotta run. I'm heading to Nelson Mandela's prison cell in twenty minutes, followed by a tour of the Waterfront. After that, I'll take another shot at Lion's Head... you'll hear more soon.

Noise...

Cape Town is resonating with the thuds and whirrs of construction as I type this, from a cheap and convenient Net cafe (broadband!) down the street from my hostel. It's a busy, fascinating, confusing city, a bit larger than Vancouver and with South Africa's trademark extremes of affluence and poverty.

I'm staying at Long St. Backpackers, a hostel on the buzzing and coincidentally named Long Street, one of the main avenues for nightlife and restaurants, within walking distance of the crowded malls and shiny towers of downtown Cape Town. The hostel is crowded and friendly, with no shortage of varied activities - yesterday I helped wrestle a 10-metre ill-gotten Christmas Tree into place on their patio and on Christmas Day they apparently host a party in a nearby cave.

My plans for the day centre on exploring Cape Town on foot, camera surreptitiously in hand (though safer than Joburg, it's still South Africa). I'll climb the beautiful Table Mountain that someone dropped right in the middle of downtown (somebody google it, I'm running out of net time), and maybe visit Nelson Mandela's prison cell. There are, sadly, no elephants here, but there is a bewildering array of shops and craft stalls (all at extortionate prices), and the best variety of restaurants I've seen in two months. I had Lebanese food for yesterday's dinner, and the sudden rush of actual spices, so long absent from my life, was a moment of epiphany.

The web place will evict me in a few seconds, so I'm signing off. You'll hear more of the furthest corner of Africa as soon as I have more to post...

Call meee!

My cell phone number for the duration of my rampage around South Africa, from Canada, is either:

011-27-076-103-0072

OR

011-27-76-103-0072

Your contact is muchly welcome. And yes, muchly is a word.

More to come...

I smell truly awful right now... I've traveled over 1500 kilometres in the last 30 hours, over two legs of an interminable bus trip. I haven't slept in well over two days, nor eaten anything worth eating in that time.

But life is still pretty damn good... I'm at an internet cafe in Cape Town, and access is vastly faster than in Gabs. Though I haven't checked a map, I suspect Cape Town may be the furthest bit of land from Vanvouver, anywhere in the world, without going to Antarctica... pretty cool. There are even penguins here, whom I plan to visit/eat within the next few days. I'll scribe about all this in great detail, but for the moment I'm simply absorbing the joyous fact that even my casual vacation from my vacation is among the most exotic trips I've ever taken. Life is treating me well... the fact that I just ate a Big Mac notwithstanding...

Plans

The bitterness of my last post notwithstanding, I'm muchly looking forward to my Christmas plans. Work finished for the holidays as of yesterday, and now I have two and a half weeks to wander around Southern Africa. Joy! Alas, I have but four minutes of web time left, so I'll have to be brief and will hopefully post more details at the beginning of next week.

Mozambique just wasn't panning out in any non-suicidal way. Being a relatively inexperienced traveller, I decided against wandering solo (my schedule being incompatible with the other Maputo-bound groups of expats). On Monday morning at sunrise, I catch a bus from Gabs to Johannesburg, about six hours away. Then I mill about in Joburg for about 5 hours (hopefully finding a broadband web cafe from which to tell more) and then catch the 18-hour overnight Greyhound to Cape Town. Cape Town is supposedly almost Vancouverian in its beauty and cosmopolitan nature, so I'll spend a week or so seeing the highlights (including Nelson Mandela's prison cell!!!) and eating SEAFOOD! Then I'll catch a bus to Bloemfontein, South Africa, where I'll detour into the tiny alpine kingdom of Lesotho (pronounced Less-oo-too, apparently) and spend a few days in some truly remote and rugged terrain, hiking, mountain horseback-riding, and seeing some dinosaur digs.

Crud, outta time. Merry Christmas, all, but I'm sure I'll be online with more information and a message of cheer before the 25th! Hotmail's been out, but I think that'll be fixed soon too.

Anger

It’s hard to know where to begin. If you’re hoping to hear only about the wonders of Africa and the joys of traveling, skip this post. I mean it.

I’ve moved into a new home, and was planning to blog about the place when my new roommates Natalie and Aziz suggested dinner at our nearby kebab joint. Happily and hungrily I agreed, and within minutes we were relaxing on an unassuming patio in the concrete parking lot of a tiny and mostly defunct shopping plaza.

While we sipped our beers and awaited our food a woman quietly crept into a chair in the corner two metres from us and sat, rocking the toddler in her arms as if to comfort herself as much as the child. We didn’t notice her until she half-shrieked at a man who tried to offer her a cup of water, and we turned and saw one of the true faces of Botswana. The woman had been beaten so brutally that her swollen eyes completely blinded her, and blood dripped from a dozen rends in her face. The young boy was physically unhurt, but his mother was the most viciously abused person I’ve ever seen. Her head was bowed, and I could see little of her expression, but the fear she radiated was palpable.

The woman was rightfully inconsolable, and spoke no English that I could tell. None at our table approached her, as she was too terrified, and the restaurant staff’s initial response was simply to offer us a new table inside where her suffering would be out of sight and mind. They seemed not to hear Natalie’s requests for ice and a damp cloth to ease the woman’s swelling. The man with the cup of water spent many minutes attempting to pad her wounds with a towel, which she angrily flung to the concrete. Eventually the restaurant staff called the police and a few people crowded at a distance sharing our helplessness, while others tried talking to the women a little in Setswana, and to the too-helpful man we were beginning to realize was her brutal husband, who was six inches shorter than me and scrawny beyond words.

In ten minutes the police arrived. They casually patted down the man, cuffed him and led him gently into the back of the truck while they coaxed the blinded woman into the front seat. I couldn’t see what happened to the little boy. Procedural issues aside (sending male officers to transport an abused woman!?), the entire official response had such a practiced, nonchalant quality that I am certain of Aziz’s and Natalie’s assertions that the man will be free by morning and the woman, socially and economically dependent, will be back in that home after leaving the hospital.

I know that violence against women happens everywhere in the world, but here it’s so pervasive that even this most vicious of beatings was a non-event to most. In so many ways the modernity of this country seems increasingly a cruel façade. The HIV epidemic that is literally killing this country, about which I’ll write again separately, is another face of the brutality which is simply accepted as a fact of life here, a cultural practice ordained by God and tradition. The foreign-educated and fairly affluent Batswana women with whom I’ve spent some time have nearly boundless contempt for most of the men of their nation, and it’s hard to doubt their reasoning after tonight. From the nearly omnipresent culture of male infidelity that callously accelerates the HIV epidemic, to the (somewhat controversial) laws that automatically transfer a woman’s possessions to her husband at the moment of marriage, there is a tumour of outright barbarism beneath Botswana’s skin of modern industry and democracy. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen.

Apologies...

I've been moving to yet another new place, and have been reformatting all the computers at work, between which tasks I've had no opportunity to gtransfer posts from my own computer to the web-equipped ones. You'll hear more soon, but it probably won't be until Friday. A thousand apologies...

Everyone hopes...

The most intense thunderstorm I’ve ever seen has been raging outside my window for the last half hour, and everyone I’ve talked to is ecstatic. The lightning isn’t the once- or twice-a-minute punctuation that I’m accustomed to in Vancouver, but an endless strobe frenzy, a half-dozen explosive glares and searing forks every second, often coming thick and fast enough to starkly light the neighborhood like early morning daylight. The thunder is a constant tremor rather than a sharp assault, except for the occasional bursts so close they thy knock my windows about. The rain would be a respectable downpour even in Vancouver.

We’re all hoping that this means the rains have finally come. A storm of this intensity will have little lasting effect on the brutal drought Gabs is suffering, since the parched ground here can’t absorb the water so quickly and the rivers will swell briefly and then recede. But this is powerful enough that it just might signal the rainy season has finally arrived. If it’s so, the heat will be more merciful and the patch of unbroken dirt we call our garden might even sprout some form of life.

Here’s hoping… Gabs has seven months of drinkable water left in its reservoirs, and if this doesn’t herald the rainy season, the city will dessicate itself before next summer arrives.

For a bit of perspective on recent weather and a free(!) bonus lesson in the dangers of blog laziness, enjoy this now completely-irrelevant post below, written a week ago about the numbing drought that was gripping us at the time, which I feebly failed to post after I wrote it:


“It’s hot in Africa.”

The above wisdom was shared by my coworker Stone. It’s a lot more insightful if you hear it as I did, spoken with a deep African accent and a tone of utter exhaustion. Stone was born and raised here, his family has lived here since time immemorial, and he, like other locals, can handle the heat scarcely better than I can.

We’re all wondering when the rains will come. Since the brief shower I wrote about a few weeks ago, we’ve had a single mediocre rainstorm and a half-dozen mini-showers lasting perhaps a minute or two apiece. This is Botswana’s rainy season, but according to the papers we’re suffering through the worst drought in the country’s forty-year history. The genuine deluge that should have begun two months ago never came at all, and the southern half of Bots is running bone dry.

Everyone keeps saying “When it rains late, it rains hard”, but the consistent unease behind the reassuring words suggests that the unimaginable is on everyone’s mind and no one’s lips: there may be no rain this year at all.

Minutiae, Part 1 : Eats

I’ve been told that, in the temporary absence of excitement (like, for example, spending Christmas scuba diving with dolphins in Mozambique), folks would like to know about the tinyish details of African life. While I’m as yet severely ignorant of the real Africa, I can share what I know of life in Gabs which, at times and in more than a few ways, seems an enclave of Europe in the heart of the poorest part of the world.

First up: Food

Natalie, my American roommate, observed last week “You know, years from now, I’m never going to tell anyone ‘Back in Botswana, I ate the best X’”.

I was hard pressed to disagree with her. The supermarkets here are well-stocked, nearly what we’re used to back home, and when bought with care the food is wholesome and healthy. But, I swear to Vishnu, it’s dull.

No doubt I’ve been spoiled by the multi-hued culinary paradise of Vancouver, but by any standards things are pretty bland in Botswana, as even the guidebooks warned me to expect. The best thing about eating here is that since Botswana is a substantial cattle producer, very good beef and other meats are dirt cheap. I eat steaks pretty regularly because they’re actually about the most inexpensive meal I can get, and tasty too – a nicely marinated T-bone costs a dollar or less. But, as I’m reluctantly discovering, man cannot live on steak alone.

The staple food is pap, a truly flavourless boiled corn meal that serves simply to add starch and substance to diets dependent on gigantic portions of beef. Spicing is nearly absent from any of the food except the chicken (more on that later), and buying snazzier stuff like curry sauce is prohibitively pricey. Here I can buy almost anything I’m used to back in the world, but since I’m on a tight budget and would rather spend my money on traveling (dang semi-paid internships), I’m restricted to straightforward meats and fresh veggies. Of course, this is pretty healthy stuff, so my taste buds and my Vancouver gut are vanishing in tandem.

The restaurant scene is a bit better, but still takes some adjusting. The most common fast food joints are KFC and innumerable South African burger chains (no McD’s, not that you’d miss it). The prices, converted to dollars, are about precisely what you’d pay back home. The taste is likewise about what you’d expect in North America, so I find it better to skip these places and head to the omnipresent Nando’s and its tastier cousin, Barcelo’s. These places lay on the peri-peri, the omnipresent East African chili, in lavish doses, an unsubtle but very welcome relief from the timidity of the rest of the food.

The sit-down joints are a step up in quality and price, of course. Most of the usual pillars of my diet, from Thai food to Chinese, are nearly mythical around here, though a small handful of very upmarket hotel restaurants specializes in these cuisines. Sushi is entirely absent, this being a landlocked country, and simple fish is in very short and costly supply at even the best supermarkets. There are several decent Indian and Italian joints, and a number of pubs making excellent pizza and bar food. These places are expensive even by Western standards, though, so my visits there are few and highly cherished.

So food-wise, it’ll be another four months of relative good health and staggering boredom. I’m looking forward to my hoped-for visit to Mozambique, where if rumour holds true the seafood is fresh, the menu varied and the spicing bold. It won’t come a minute too soon. It’ll surprise no one, I’m sure, to know that I think daily about a dozen different restaurants I’ll visit within days of my return to Vancouver. There are countless things I’ll miss when I’m no longer here – the novelty, the music, the animals… great mounds of boiled corn are not among them.

I'm still alive!

My recovery is nearly complete, and not a moment too soon. For a few days I was sick enough that my coworkers and I were genuinely concerned that it just might be malaria, the localized extinction of the Anopheles notwithstanding. Pleasantly, ‘twas not so… merely one of the more mundane yet still super-charged local bugs. Thanks to all who sent get-well-soon emails – you’ll get the best presents on my return. Everyone else will have to content themselves with a baby elephant. In the meantime, I’ll bring you up to date on my surprisingly ordinary life over here.

First of all, Christmas is in the air. The carols are booming through the shops, and the nearby Riverwalk Mall is adorned by the creepiest electronic Santa I’ve ever seen outside Japan. “X Shopping Days Til…” signs are everywhere, and the proud consumerist frenzy is fully underway.

Only it’s thirty-five degrees outside. That ain’t right.

The expat’s life in Gaborone is one of near-constant migration, it seems. I’ve been fortunate enough to arrange places to live throughout my stay, an uncommon occurrence for which I’m supremely thankful.
At the moment, I’m sharing a 3-bedroom apartment near the University of Botswana in central Gaborone with two other expats, Natasha and Natalie. Natasha is a Torontonian interning with the local YWCA, and Natalie is a Fulbright Scholar from Irvine, California researching HIV/AIDS. Both are fine people who know the neighborhood well and have helped show me around.
Two weeks from now I’ll move to my (hopefully) permanent digs, a house with 2 Americans (Steve and Aziz) and a Canuck (another Natalie). That place has a swimming pool. And a DVD player. And a satellite dish. All of which are welcome, since I’m rapidly running out of things to do in the terminal quietude of Gaborone. Most importantly, they have air conditioning!!! Joy! Joy of joys!!!

I’m gradually adjusting to the peculiarities of Botswanan business culture, by which I mean I’m tearing my hair out with slowly decreasing frequency. The Botswanan attitude towards time and work is by turns more relaxed and yet more bureaucratic, a maddening exercise in contradiction. I’ll go into this in more detail in a separate post, but the upshot is that on alternating days I feel tolerably productive and helpful at Somarelang Tikologo, and on others I’m certain that sanity is being torn from my grasp by the infuriating formalities of innumerable committees. This organization literally has fewer staff members than it has committees telling the staffers what to do. AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRGGGGHHH!!!

Rather more exhilaratingly, I’m attempting to plan my Christmas vacation. My friend Rafael from South Africa will be in Peru over Christmas, so I may instead bus over to Mozambique with the Canadian Natalie and Taylor (another American). Mozambique, I’m told, is a captivatingly beautiful place dotted with glorious beaches (meh), sites of startling historical interest (a step in the right direction), and animals galore (now we’re talking!). If Mozambique doesn’t pan out, I may hitch a ride with some friends down to lovely Cape Town, bypassing the crime-saturated abscess that is Johannesburg and instead enjoying what is supposedly the most beautiful city in Africa. If even that doesn’t happen, I get the supreme consolation prize of catching a bus deep into the Kalahari desert and enjoying Botswana’s own natural glories solo, camera in hand. While I’d prefer to do that in April, when the weather is apparently more conducive to huge clusterings of animals, I’m sure that somehow I’ll make do.

So many choices, so little time to blog about it all…

With a thousand thanks to Briana...

Bree has helped me find bandwidth for the first of what will hopefully be many pics: Up first... Elephants!!! It's a thumbnail, so click for the biggie...