July 30-31

Nothing remarkable has happened in Harare so far. I was very fortunate in finding that the 2011 Harare Book Festival was taking place while I'm here. I spent a couple enjoyable hours talking with folks at the fair about how teachers are trained in Zimbabwe; how black farmers are faring now that they've been given land seized from white farmers; the state of literature in Zimbabwe (I bought three books for my classroom library by Zimbabwean authors); and the state of libraries in Zimbabwe (I agreed to try to send some books to help the cause).
Most of my time has been spent wandering around Harare, learning the layout of the city. I've ridden some more omnibus commuter buses into the suburbs, always an interesting thing to do. I've been searching for the best way to get to Botswana from here. It turns out the cheap buses leave from a crowded suburb called Mbare and that I'd need to get there at around one a.m. to secure a seat on the 6am bus. It sounds dangerous. So I'm going to research whether I can take a luxury bus from the city center to Bulawayo (remember Bulawayo, my favorite city of this trip), then transfer to a bus going further south to Botswana. We shall see.
I've been pondering several questions about Harare and Zimbabwe:
1. Why are there no Chinese restaurants in this country? I can't remember the last nation I've been in where there were none. And I know, from reading the local press, that there are many Chinese in Zimbabwe either mining minerals or searching for new deposits. In fact that is a controversial topic hereabouts. The MDC people (the major party opposed to Mugabe) resent the Chinese, saying they are raping the country of its mineral wealth. (Most of the refining apparently happens in China). Yet somehow all those Chinese workers are keeping a low profile. I saw my first two Chinese folks on the streets this morning. So why no restaurants.
Zimbabwean cuisine is the worst in the world, I'll wager. Every restaurant serves the same fare: chicken and rice; beef and rice; some other meat and rice; chicken, beef, or other with chips (french fries). And I am not exaggerating. No one sells anything else. If you are very lucky someone will serve a salad with the aforementioned. There is one chain of 'restaurants'. They have four incarnations, Baker's Inn (baked goods); Chicken Inn; Steer Inn (hamburgers); and Creamy Inn (Ice cream).
1a. Related to this is the question of indigenisation. This is a new law requiring that all foreign mining operations sell 51% of their assets to Black Zimbabweans (most of whom would presumably belong to Zapu PF, Mugabe's party). One assumes that many of these firms belong to the Chinese, yet I've read nothing in the press indicating that the Chinese embassy or any representative of Chinese business firms is upset.
2. Why are there no motorcyles or motor scooters in Zimbabwe? I've seen two motorcyles (one a nice offroad bike near Masvingo) and not one motor scooter. There are automobiles. Thousands of them in Harare. The omnibuses amount to thousands of vehicles all by themselves. So why no scooters?
3. The trash pickup system is odd. There are no streetside trash receptacle. Everyone simply throws their trash on the ground wherever they happen to be. Then a city employee comes and sweeps the trash into piles at intersections for sometimes mid-block. Generally these piles are set alite, where they smolder for hours. Occasionally a city garbage truck will come along and scoop up piles of trash from these piles into the trucks.
4. Why is it that in this terribly poor country (according to the press annual per capita income is $640; unemployment is 80%) everyone is scrupulously honest and friendly towards me? From my limited experience this is the most honest, friendly country I have ever visited, I almost didn't come here because I was afraid of robbery (or worse). What a mistake it would have been to give in to those fears.

July 29

Too tired to write much tonight. After studying my Lonely Planet I decided to head north to Harare. I found a nice hostel in an area with a lot of college students. No dorm available but I got a room for $25/night, a bit more than I anticipated but reasonable. I expect to stay here three or four days.
The bus ride from Masvingo was tight; we were crammed in like chickens one of those assembly lines that animals rights folks are always citing. I have the sore back to prove it. Luckily an old man decided to be my guide, without my asking, and he even helped me find the right neighborhood in Harare once we got here. What little I've seen of the city does not endear itself to me, but we shall see.

July 27

Today I spent several very enjoyable hours traveling to--and exploring--The Great Zimbabwe, largest archeological ruins in Sub-Saharan Africa. The ruins themselves are very reminiscent of Pergamum, Greek ruins in Western Turkey. And within the entire 'city' is a fortress-like structure that could easily be mistaken for Troy. The story of the place is that a group of people from east of here, in present day Tanzania, migrated to this valley sometime in the 12th or 13th century (I can't remember which right now). They used granite blocks, which they shaped by first heating the rocks, then dousing them with water to fracture the granite structures. Like the Greeks they splayed the stones so that the lower wall was wider than the top. No mortar was used. Like Pergamum they perched a castle-like fortification on a nearby hill, and put the King's residence there. For six bucks I hired a guide who answered all my silly questions without complaint.
Getting to the ruins was half the fun. My hostel host told me if I hoofed it to a nearby college I could catch a minibus to the ruins. I followed her instructions but one part didn't work out as seemlessly as I expected. The van dropped me off near a dirt track. The driver pointed down the road and said, "Go that way." My first thought was about the warthog that had just crossed in front of our van a mile or two back. My second thought was, "is this guy taking the tourist for a (literal) ride, dumping him in some backwater from which I will never emerge?" But so far everyone in Zimbabwe had been straight with me so I set off through the underbrush to find The Great Zimbabwe. The 'road' was a dirt pathway that had been obviously created by many horsedrawn wagons traversing the ground. Two ruts were separated by some tufts of grass. I walked for a few minutes till I came to a fork in the path. Ahead was a farm house with a lady hanging wash. So I motioned to her. "Left?" I signified. She nodded. So I trod onward, avoiding the feces on the path (cow or baboon?). After a few minutes I came to another paved road. Which way, right or left? I guessed right and, shortly, I noticed bright colors in the distance. Those turned out to be a streetside crafts market. The market ladies shouted instructions to me ("Turn here. Go through the hotel, you'll find the park behind the hotel.")
The ride home to my hostel was even better as I got a ride in the back of a covered pickup truck with an old man and a young girl going my way. The ride to the ruins was $2, the ride back was $1. Can't beat that.
Masvingo, where I 'm staying now, is a small city with an air of commerce about it--unlike Bulawayo. It's not prosperous (the electricity is turned off each night at 4:30) but the stores are very clean, and dozens of young men are engaged in building a sewer system of sorts. Their jackhammers woke me at 5:30 this morning. Most of them are digging with picks and shovels. The sad part is that the sewer is intended to direct all the untreated waste into the city's river. The river is barely a quarter mile from town. And there is a nice crafts market just beyond the river. I can't imagine the stink that this will all bring to the neighborhood, not to mention the trash that will fill the river.
I'm really in a quandary about tomorrow. I could head north to Hararre, the Zimbabwean capital. There's a train from Hararre to my next destination, Gaborone in Botswana. But really there is nothing attracting me to the capital except that Zimbabwe has been such a pleasant surprise. I admit to getting a little tired of all the deprivations of this, very poor, nation. Botswana is likely to be more modern and comfortable. I will probably head south, instead, hoping to catch that same train in Bulawayo tomorrow afternoon. That would get me to Gaborone in two days. But that is really too early. I'd rather get there on about August 2nd. I could head east to Mozambique, but transportation is so bad in Mozambique that I might never make it to Gaborone. Time to study my Lonely Planet.

July 25

I wanted to visit the esteemed natural history museum in Bulawayo today. On my way there I chanced upon 'Centenary Park', Bulawayo's central park. It epitomizes this country and this city. The park has been here for over one hundred years I think. Certainly the trees are magnificent specimens, some over 100 feet in the air. You can see that once upon a time this was a stunning tribute to the city. But time and neglect have rendered it a relic. An old abandoned miniature golf course is at the park's center. There is the shell of a once impressive zoo including an aviary. An old locomotive was once used to take kids around a narrow gauge track within the park. The track is still here and the locomotive sits nearby. There are slides and beautiful walking paths. I saw one elderly man in a uniform gamely watering plants from a lone spigot. Very sad. This park needs a benefactor, someone to spend a couple hundred thousand bucks to revive a once great piece of this community.
After the museum I went in search of something from my Lonely Planet guide. The book showed an Arts & Crafts building on the outskirts of town where locals made and sold art work. I figured that would be a great place to buy a gift. I began walking out Sixth Avenue as my guide book instructed. Within about fifteen minutes I was outside the city proper in a residential district that looked very much like public housing projects all over the world. Block upon block of identical single and double story brick buildings lined my way. The homes were small with about 200 square feet of front 'lawn'. Most had trees out front, citrus and other fruit crops in the majority. A few had paved the front area with decorative stones or cement. Most merely had sand or a few small flowers. Most residents did their gardening on the side or out back where I saw many local veggies being grown.
I got lost, as usual, but was able to quick people on the street often enough that I didn't go far astray. As I neared my objective I was greeted by a flood of school children from a local primary school who were going home for the day apparently. I suspect that the school day here is short owing to the extreme heat that covers most of the school year. I tried to ask for directions from the kids but no one understood my English. Language is an interesting issue in Zimbabwe. There are three languages, Shona, Ndebele, and English. The latter is the official tongue and all store fronts are in English. Yet most people seem to speak the native languages. Last week there was a hullabaloo because some of Mugabe's backers wanted new constitutional changes printed in Shona as well as English. My sense is that this is a side issue that crosses party lines. Anyway, I am most surprised that no store owner has opted to put up Shona or Ndebele signs. Seems like a smart marketing move to me.
I found the Arts & Crafts place. There were two buildings, one for pottery (no good for me; too fragile) and one for other crafts. But, like most things in Zimbabwe in 2011, the crafts people have fallen on hard times. I found a small store with some basic basketry and weaving from which I was able to procure one gift. But I suspect if I'd been there twenty years ago I would have found a more robust facility.
Bulawayo is so reminiscent of Malatya, Turkey, a place I found two years ago. Each has a terrific museum. The Bulawayo Natural History Museum must be one of the finest in Africa. It has hundreds of rare specimens including one stuffed elephant reputed to be the second largest ever taxidermed. Each city also has an interesting archaeological site nearby: Malatya had Arsenteppe, a 6,000 year old dig dating to the Hittites. Bulawayo has the Great Zimbabwe, which I hope to visit tomorrow.

July 24

Sunday here in a very Christian nation so not much is open. I used the day to wander the streets and read the local press. Surprisingly Zimbabwe has one of the most vibrant presses in the world if my eyes don't deceive me. I'm especially impressed with the Zimbabwe Independent, a mouthpiece of the opposition but also one of the best newspapers I've ever encountered. Zimbabwean politics is fascinating. Mugabe has been president since 1980, another guy who stayed too long. (Insert praise for the redoubtable Nelson Mandela, who just passed his 93rd birthday). In 2000 Mugabe, for understandable reasons, decided to seize all the major farms from their white owners (who got the land under the apartheid-like regimes of the previous century). He abandoned a previous system of buying the land that was funded by Great Britain. The pace was, apparently, glacial. The result of the seizures, however, was chaotic, and self-aggrandizing for those close to Mugabe. They got rich, the country went down the tubes, now listed as the second poorest on the planet. Civil war ensued. It was mostly black against black with tribal loyalties involved. In 2008 a sort of truce was put in place that gave some power to the opposition. That compromise is still in place though this week's newspapers say that Mugabe has rigged up an alternate financing system using money from mining to skirt the regular government finance system.
Bulawayo is a hotbed of opposition and the local press is full of anti-Mugabe rhetoric. All you see on the streets is the end result, an impoverished population hanging on by a thread. Hyper inflation killed most people's savings in the 2000's. The country abandoned their devalued currency and replaced it with US dollars and South African rand. A big issue locally is the scarcity of US coins. This forces businesses to substitute barter for small amounts. Groceries routinely give candy as 'change', which gives opponents a ready source of outrage. About every third business in Bulawayo sells 'air time' for cell phones. Another big chunk sells cell phones and accessories. There are few restaurants in town and nothing that could be called an upscale hotel. Trash pickups are rare, I gather, and residents simply push it into alleys or available out of the way spots. The telltale smell of raw sewage hit me randomly as I walked the streets.
But what really stands out for me is the friendliness of everyone I've met. Waiters, minivan drivers, newspaper vendors, they all give me a big smile and go out of their way to help me. The guy who drove our bus from Vic Falls chased me down the street for two blocks to try to steer me to a good place to stay.
One of the places where European influence really shows itself here is in sports. The papers are full of news from the Premier League in England, and local athletes excel at rugby and cricket.

Yesterday, through the fog of fatigue, I forgot to relate the excitement of our drive from Vic Falls. The land from Vic Falls to Bulawayo is virtually uninhabited. All I ever saw were a few gatherings of thatched roof huts, mostly fewer than five in a cluster. And the roads were almost devoid of personal automobiles. Traffic was mostly buses and semi's hauling freight. It was not a stretch of highway to liven the heart of a hitchhiker.
So when, about 100k. out of Vic Falls, I heard the telltale noise of a muffler dragging under our minibus (a large one, holding about 30 passengers) my heart stopped. The van came to a slow stop in the middle of nowhere. When the driver turned off the engine I began calculating my chances of survival. Thirty people abandoned on the highway. Who would get the few rides available? Certainly not me. The next settlement was probably forty or fifty miles ahead, and even those places probably didn't have hotels or places for me to sleep. And what of the growling teams of baboons I'd seen crossing the road ten minutes ago? Sleeping beside the road was not an option.
There's no drama, here, of course, because I made it to Bulawayo. The driver snarled, then pulled out a rope. In a few minutes he was thrusting his coat on the ground under the chassis. Somehow he managed to tie up the muffler well enough to get us 300k. further down the road.

I plan to stay here a day or two more before heading out to the Great Zimbabwe.

July 23, I think

I spent the day motoring from Livingstone, Zambia to Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. I learned never to invest in a used copy of Lonely Planet. It cost me today. I got to the Zimbabwe border this morning confident that there was no visa cost, but that was old info. I needed $30. So I had to backtrack to Livingstone, Zambia to get the cash. Luckily a kindly cab driver went out of his way to help me, even to the extent of finding friendly money changers, so it all worked out just fine. Once across the border I found a minivan headed to Bulawayo. It was an eight hour journey on a hard seat but I enjoyed it. I feel better being back on the regular bus lines and off the tours for a while.
I'm dead tired and haven't the energy for a long post. I had some trouble when I got here finding a bank that would take my ATM card (strange fact: the national currency of Zimbabwe is the US dollar) but eventually settled that. I also struggled to locate a good, cheap place to stay but that, too, is now old news. So I'm optimistic. I plan to stay here at least one full day before heading for a historical site called 'The Great Zimbabwe".

July 16 to July 22

I've been camping and out of touch for a week but it looks like I can post today:

July 17

Call this three degrees of separation from home. The first degree is any foreign land. The second degree is the small towns and villages of the world away from some or all of the comforts of home. The third degree is to travel away from the villages into the hinterland, on a 4x4 truck, for instance, deep into the jungle or the desert. In this case it is something of both. Call this a dry swamp. Officially it is named the Okavango Delta, a confluence of rivers in northwest Botswana.

We got here by trucking for two days from Windhoek, east into Botswana. Most of this nation encompasses the Kalahari Desert, a vast land of acacia trees and thorn trees and low shrubs. Unfortunately, like many areas of Southern Africa, the ‘wildlife’ is more likely to be beef cattle than leopards or wildebeest. The habitations are traditional round huts of the Bush People. Every once in a while if you peer into the bush beside the highway you see a small collection of these huts. Their means of survival are few as far as I can see: goats, donkeys, and cattle. There isn’t enough water to sustain farming I don’t think. At least I saw no evidence of agriculture.

If you hang a left somewhere inside Botswana and head north you come to the only non-arid territory hereabouts. But even here the vivid blue water is surrounded by white, white sand. It’s as if someone quickly superimposed a swamp onto a desert. To get to our campground we had to off load from our truck and board a ponderous 4x4 ‘bus’. We plowed through swampland for 40 minutes till we came to a beautiful resort on a wide expanse of the river.

My group this time consists of five tourists and two guides. Manni is the black Namibian leader of our expedition. Solidly built with a deep, authoritative voice, he is a perfect choice to guide us. His sidekick is Joseph, a younger, smaller version of Manni. They sit up front.

In back are the six of us. Marcus and Laura are Germans from Munich. He is a biologist working on vaccines. Irene is a middle-aged manager for Ska Travel headquartered in Melbourne, Australia. She is on a kind of busman’s holiday, checking out our tour company at the same time as getting some vacation time away from her family. Omer and Tom are from Jerusalem, at least now that is where they live. Tom grew up in Farmingdale, Long Island about ten miles from my hometown. They are in their early 50’s I’d guess with adult children back home.

Just as we were leaving Namibia I grabbed a newspaper. Inside was a revealing story about a group of lions formerly resident in northwest Namibia near the Angola border. In fact these lions were observed trekking across the border a few years ago and quickly fitted with collars for environmental study and in a vain attempt to keep the lions—and their human neighbors—safe.

It started with one male, one female, and a cub. Before long there were two males and several cubs, a total of ten lions in the group. Then someone got a license to hunt one of the males. It turns out that wildlife hunting is so lucrative that the Namibian government is willing to risk losing some of their tourist attractions to reap this bounty. For tens of thousands of dollars you can go on a sanctioned hunt, which someone did---though apparently there was some dispute about who provided the sanction and whether they had the right to do so. But the lion was killed. The theory is that if only males are killed you still retain females to bear the litters.

You can guess the rest of the story. In the wet season the four-legged delicacies that form the lion’s diet migrated elsewhere. So the lions began eating cattle and donkeys of the local folk. So some of the lions were shot. Then, last week, the last three lions were found poisoned. The need to protect livestock trumped the more abstract need to protect the tourist industry. How this will end I don’t know. Tourism is a very big business in Namibia. There is a high school in Windhoek that is set up to train young people for the various tourist vocations. But one hunt for an elephant reportedly yielded over $100,000 for a farmer last year.

My eleven-day tour so far has been dull. Out of five days so far elapsed I’ve spent four days being driven around in a large van. But it looks like the next six days will be more active. We shall see.

July 18

The sense that is most useful in the Okavango is hearing. People talk about how you can see so many stars when you are away from the glare of modern life but no one mentions that out here you can hear things that generally are obscured by the noise of crowded life. Last night the woman in the tent next to me coughed in the middle of the night and I started, certain she had mysteriously invaded my tent.

So when we took off on little two-person canoes to explore the delta the things I noticed were sounds: the buzzing of insects; the mournful honks of geese; the soft splash of the pole rhythmically pushing us through fields of papyrus and reeds; the one, lone propeller-driven airplane overhead; the guttural bleats of the hippo we could hear but not see. And, later, the grunts of an elephant that was so far away he was only visible through the lens of the ubiquitous telescopic photo lens of my tour mates.

The day was vivid without being interesting. We were told over and over again that we might not see any wildlife; they migrate so fast that no one can predict where the rare elephant or hippo might be observed. But, nonetheless, we were all disappointed at one distant pachyderm and a guileless young croc who didn’t have enough sense to run away. The baobab trees were polite enough to awe. I didn’t know they were deciduous. So here were these odd looking things that seemed from another planet, leafless with branches like robot arms in a sci-fi thriller. I half expected them to lift up one foot and shuffle across the island.

Despite being in such an isolated location I can’t escape the calculations of freighted life; can I rationalize this expense? Most of my time has been moving from place to place in a van or a boat or hoofing it overland. The experience is ephemeral, in passing, summative. Every place is strange, and yet familiar. Is the Okavango fundamentally different from a trip south of New Orleans or on some Australian river? Is the Kalahari so startlingly unique that my senses are sharpened? No. So how can I justify such an expense? And yet, without the tourist infrastructure I would never have seen any of this and my trip would have been hopscotching from one hostel to the next, never really seeing African life. All this might not be worth the money; yet the alternative would have been to simply mark time in an existence I might have had as readily in Taos as Botswana.

My travelling companions are all veterans of this sort of thing and, so, sensitive to the obeisance’s and courtesies that allow six adults to share confined spaces without making anyone feel put upon. And yet, as often happens to me, my odd status as a single person of advanced age makes it hard for me to fit in. Spouses talk to spouses, young people talk to young people, and travelers talk with people they can relate to. I don’t fit any category. And I lack the vivacity to attract people to me.

Nights around the campfire are fun. We call the fire Namibian television. But the conversation is light, no confidences are exchanged, and I feel cheated of the chance to tell my life story, or to thrash out the world’s politics as I’ve done in Tbilisi and Suvanaket and…Now that I think of it I realize that those kinds of exchanges are the exceptions that stand out in my memory. Most of my stops around the world are of a kind with this place, solitary or with superficial chit chat.

We have five days left on this jaunt. If my theory is correct we’ll have one day or night that will be memorable that might make the whole expense of time and treasure worthwhile.

July 19

“Danger Crocodiles”. The sign next to our campground for the night says it all. We motored most of the day northward, back across the border to Namibia. We are actually only a few miles from Angola to the north and Botswana to the east. We came here mostly to drive through a game park along the Okavango. For my tour mates this is what they’d come for; a chance to view hippos and elephants and zebras up close from our van/truck. I wasn’t blasé about the whole thing but I also wasn’t captivated. My broken down little used camera is out of place in this group as much as I feel I am, myself, most of the time.

But last night, sitting before the campfire, I must say that I felt much better. We began solving the world’s problems, as I hope we would. The chitchat of previous evenings gave way to more substantive discussions; and I felt much more a member of the cadre than I had the past few evenings.

We stopped for the night here at “Rainbow Campground” a secluded little spot on the river—hence the warning sign. Tomorrow we head off northeastward through a little Namibian panhandle (consult your Google maps of Namibia) that will take us close to Zambia, our ultimate destination three days hence.

Our group has settled into a daily routine. We wake at either 6am or 7am and begin to pack up our meager belongings. Then we disassemble each of our four tents. Meanwhile our two guides begin breakfast (cereal and/or bread and butter or jam). We place our backpacks, sleeping pads, sleeping bags, blankets (it gets down to around five degrees Celsius most nights), and other necessities on a tarp for loading onto the van. Only then do we get to sit down before the campfire and eat. When we arrive at the next day’s camp we reverse the process, unloading, then tent construction, Joseph cooks us supper.

July 20, 2011

A trip through Chobe National Park begins an hour before dawn. About a dozen of us boarded an open-topped van for the short ride from our campsite to the park. Our guide was Michael: “You can call me Mike.”

Mike’s English was British enough to sound distinguished but African enough to sound quaint. Multisyllabic words he rendered staccato. CAM EH RAH. AN EE MAHL. But, like many people who come to English late, Mike hasn’t felt the need for all those linking words. “The road, i’tis rocky. You have camera, it might fall, break. Better keep in pocket for now.”

The park was stark—he said rhymingly. I expected grass but all we saw was white, endless sand. There were trees, most of them deciduous so few leaves to look at this time of the year. There were shrubs. Where else would the lions hide? We never saw any lions, a great disappointment to all concerned. We did get a fleeting look at a leopard. You should understand that Botswana tourism is based upon wholesaling lots of visitors in lodges, then trucking them retail in vans to drive through the park. I don’t know how many vans were in the park today but enough so that when the word went out via shortwave radio that someone had seen a leopard we found ourselves blocked from the animal by six or eight other, almost identical, vehicles. All we actually saw was the rear end of her body dashing between a couple vans ahead of us.

We saw lots of animals: dozens of giraffes, a few elephants, buffalo, jackals, vultures, endless varieties of antelope, birds by the score, a squirrel, hippos on the river below us, and, most importantly, a hyena. I can now testify that a hyena is a uniquely ugly, intimidating, unsociable, malevolent, unsanitary beast. I know this because the animals of Chobe are so inured to human presence (at least if you stay in your van—people on feet are another story) that they go about their business without paying much attention to the gawkers. (One giraffe kept munching away at the leaves of a roadside tree even after we motored up within ten yards of him.) Our hyena crossed the road in front of us carrying the carcass of some kind of antelope. His massive jaw tugged his prize to a convenient spot beside the road. Then he slowly backed up from the thing till he found a good vantage point to check out the competition. There were two jackals—little guys compared to the behemoth hyena—circling, hoping for just a taste. And a flock of vultures landed on the sand across the road, obviously waiting to see how things played out.

Mike says the hyena was nervous that the original owner of the carcass, perhaps a lion, would return to reclaim his or her breakfast. This fearsome looking thing with massive front legs and a sloping body that ended with shorter hind legs looked like the devil himself to me. But he apparently lacked confidence about his ability to retain this meat if someone bigger and badder came along. So we sat in our van staring at this guy while he surveyed the odds that he could eat without being disturbed. Finally, after about ten minutes, and, especially, after the jackals began sniffing too close for comfort, Mr. Hyena returned to his prize and began dragging it into the underbrush. That was the last we saw of him.

Even after five days of this chasing after big game I don’t have any great insights into how this all fits into the lives of the people of Southern Africa. What I see is a kind of monoculture of tourism. Every country has its legions of tour companies selling visits to the various national parks, everyone doing the same thing, showing the same animals, using the same tents and vans and propane tanks. It seems akin to that other bulwark of the African economy, mining. Admittedly elephants are a renewable resource but my impression is that, in fact, these living things are not going to be renewed, that gradually they will be killed off leaving the continent impoverished in the same way that the diamond mines are doing. The lions of Northern Namibia are gone through a combination of hunting and poisoning. Rhino poaching is one of the most lucrative occupations in South Africa. Desertification and urbanization is swallowing up habitat.

There needs to be a Steve Jobs of African tourism, someone to dream up the next big thing; something that preserves the animals and plants for posterity but that requires more human intellectual input, making for a more diversified industry. Africans need to create their own high value products rather than selling this basic tourism thing.

We’re due for part deux of our park project in about two hours. This time we will sail down the Chobe River, which borders the park to the north. We’ll be looking for crocodiles and elephants and hippos.

In the 18^th century in France the courtiers at Versailles used to go to the King’s bedchamber to watch him eat and perform his ablutions. That was the image I had today on the river. In a semicircle were about a dozen flat-bottomed watercraft of various descriptions. There was one two-story aluminum catamaran-style boat; several boats that looked like a London double-decker bus without the wheels; a few small aluminum boats that held no more than a dozen tourists. All had Mercury outboard motors. And all were arrayed so that the passengers could watch one or more elephants stuff eelgrass into their gaping mouths—or in one case simply watch a regal bull make his way across the river back to the Botswana side. The Chobe forms the border between Namibia and Botswana. The Namibia side is flat and fecund with grasses because it is submerged during the recently-departed rainy season. The Botswana side in a gradually sloping hillside of red soil spotted with tall trees.

We didn’t spend all our time watching elephants. The hippos were present and accounted for. They had the easiest role. They sat sleeping in the mud along the river bank, except when one member of the ‘raft’ (which the guide informed us was the name for a group of hippos) yawned.

And we saw crocodiles, again sleeping. They ran our boat up within ten yards of this dozing monster and he (or she) never moved a muscle. What predates a crocodile, afterall?

July 22, 2011

You know, immediately, when you enter Zambia that you are in a different world. The climate north of the Zambezi is clearly more tropical, warmer, more ‘Central’ Africa. But you also know, when you cross the border, that you ain’t in Botswana (or Namibia or South Africa) anymore.

You cross into Zambia on a boat, a ferry to be exact. Before you get to the ferry landing you pass a quarter mile of parked semi-trailers hauling beer and lumber and all manner of goods. The ferry is a remnant of a former time. High up top is a lone captain surveying the narrow crossing. The distance is about twice what Ichiro could manage on a throw from the outfield. And the ferry is equally modest in size. It can hold, at best, five automobiles—or one semi-trailer and a couple compact cars. Foot passengers fit themselves along the sides as best they can. Local passengers are likely to be carrying something, something for sale on the Zambia side. Cases of hard cider seemed to be the most popular item. Young men spent most of the time that the ferry docked on the Botswana side toting cases and cases of the stuff. Riding beside the ferry were about a dozen two-person canoes being poled across the river. These were, we were told, the smugglers. There seemed to be no need to be surreptitious about this ‘crime’. The ferry was not an orderly place.

And immigration is similarly chaotic. Once you get to the Zambia side you join the queue of people bearing blankets and TV’s and the aforementioned cider. If you are lucky (we were) there are only a few folks ahead of you. But our driver wasn’t so lucky. He languished in an office signing paperwork and paying fees for over an hour while we waited in the van. But, eventually, we were on our way to Livingstone, Zambia, named for the bible-toting paterfamilias of this place—at least as far as the white inhabitants are concerned. The principal reason for coming here is to view Victoria Falls, an impressive deluge of water.

We saw the Falls. We took pictures. We did the usual tourist things. I was suitably awed but hungered for some contact with local folks or something that didn’t involve elephants or canoes. We got our contact with Zambian folk, but it wasn’t the kind I was looking for.

We decided to eat out for a change instead of the campfire fare. We chose an upscale place on the main drag in Livingstone. We arrived at 7:45 and ordered. Eight o’clock came; then 8:30; 9:00, 9:30. No food. Waiters disappeared into the kitchen. They returned bearing beverages, but little food was evident.

Then a meal was delivered, spare ribs. The menu mentioned 500 grams of meat. Three small pieces of beef testified to about 50 grams on my tourmate’s plate. He sent it back. More waiting. Then a few meals were brought. But the spare ribs people (there were three such orders) were mealless. Finally one brave woman in our party marched into the kitchen herself. Much shouting was heard. She returned with some rice for the spare ribs folks. More waiting. Another trip to the kitchen. More shouting. This time her visit was prolonged, but, voila, finally she returned with the spare rib meals for herself and her fellow sufferers.

But our suffering was not over. We waited for the spare ribs folks to finish their meals. Then we tried to get a bill. Much adding was done by the waitress on a nearby calculator. Totals were added and re-added. Mistakes were made. Finally, at 10:45 the last of us escaped the Zambian version of service. The lesson is, don't be in a hurry in Zambia.

I have one more night in the tent here in Livingstone. I then hope to travel into Zimbabwe tomorrow.

Thursday, July 14

The Namibian Desert is not a desert. When I saw it I thought of descriptions I’d read of the San Joaquin Valley before modern agriculture brought water. The valley bottoms are dry most of the year but there is enough rain in the winter to support low growing shrubs and one species of Acacia tree.

But there is something here in Southern Namibia that looks desertlike:

Sand. Red sand. Huge piles of red sand. The world’s largest sand dunes. But the sand got here in a strange way. To the east is the Kalahari Desert, in Botswana. The winds blow west. The sand moved with the wind to Namibia. Then the prevailing winds from the Antarctic carried it northward to its present location.

What you see to the right are tourists climbing Dune #45 (they're numbered). There are hundreds of these dunes in the Nambian 'desert'.

The Namibians have cast their lot with tourism. Instead of trying to convert the valleys to agriculture with their own version of the Central Valley Water Project they have sealed off thousand of hectares of land for wildlife and nature. There isn’t a town of any size within 200 kilometers of here. But tourists are trucked in by the hundreds to climb the dunes (see picture above), trek through the dry valleys and wonder at rocks and oryx and springboks. The strange part of this is the herdlike way that the humans behave. This morning at 6am there was a traffic jam worthy of the Long Island Expressway at the gate of our campground. The gates open each morning at 6. The sun rises at about 6:45. And every tour group has its charges safely tucked into the African travel vans that they all use. Once the gate opens the idea is the race down the two-lane road to Dune #45 (yes, they are numbered). Once at #45 the tourists are released to race up the dune to photograph the sunrise.

I did get a photo of the sunrise:

This is the first three days of my eleven-day tour. We started out in the middle of the country at Windhoek, and drove about 225 miles south to the campground. Tomorrow we return to Windhoek just in time for me to embark on the eight-day, northern trip to Botswana and Zambia.

The sad part of all this is that I haven’t been able to find a friend among the twelve fellow travellers on this trip. Most of them are agriculture teachers at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Two young women are middle school teachers from Manhattan. Thrown in a woman from Germany and a woman from Holland and you have my group. But only two of these folks are in my age range and my natural shyness undermines my ability to feel comfortable with strangers. So I definitely feel like an outsider.

On the positive side I quickly realized that this is a part of the world that I never would have seen except for one of these tours. There just isn’t anything or anyone near here. You just can’t hop a minivan or stick out your hitchhiking finger and get here. It is a beautiful region. This photography thing is not my usual schtick but since I took pictures I might as well use them:

Of all the countries I've visited in the past six or seven years Namibia seems to one to earn "Most Likely To Succeed". It has problems (40% official unemployment although many of these are working illicitly); the residue of apartheid (though race relations here seem light years ahead of South Africa); lack of industry (but they just discovered oil of the coast). You just don't feel the tension here that you feel in South Africa. Downtown Windhoek gives the appearance of a multi-racial democracy.

Tomorrow I leave on a five day trip northward, ending at Victoria Falls in Zambia. After that I don't know where I'm going, maybe to

Zimbabwe, maybe Mozambique, maybe Angola or Tanzania. I've spent too much money already but still have enough to wander if I choose. Or I may simply find a hotel in Zambia or Botswana and relax for a few days to conserve funds. I was lonely on the southern Namibia trip and I'm mostly hoping I can make some friends on the northern tour.

Tuesday, July 12

After my 22 hour bus ride (the bus, believe it or not, ran out of gas about 50k. outside Windhoek) I'm not certain what day it is. I'm in a state of the art hostel in Windhoek wondering if I've made an error. $7/hr for WiFi access...an outrageous price. Everything in this place is overpriced but I decided to buy one of their expensive tours nonetheless. $2,000 for eleven days. Too much money for a cheapskate like me but the tour seems irresistable: wildlife, desert dunes, Victoria Falls in Namibia, four countries all together with several days camping and a couple days at a fancy lodge. You only live once (and I haven't that much living left to do), that's my rationalization for spending too much money. We leave tomorrow. My one hour voucher for internet access is ready to expire so I can't write much. I hope I can find access somewhere on my tour.

Sunday, July 10

I did almost nothing yesterday. I took a catamaran (sp?) sail on the bay for about ninety minutes and bought some gifts but little else. I did get a new roommate, a fellow from Shanghai on a round the world trip. He's a grad student in math at the University of Chicago so his brain is probably about twice the size of mine. I'm off to a 19 hour bus ride to Namibia in two hours. When I get there I hope to sign on for a seven day tour which might involve camping out and might remove me from the internet. Can't say for sure yet.

Friday, July 8

I began the day determined to get to the botanical gardens without paying the $20 bus ride that the tour companies charge. If you have ever been to the gardens above UC Berkeley you know exactly what the Capetown gardens look like. Just as in N.California when you sit among the plants looking out towards the bay you see that this place was selected. You feel as if you are there to welcome visitors through the entrance to the bay.

I devised a strategy for cheap transportation. I took the minivan along the base of the mountain northward toward where I would be directly beneath the gardens. That was ninety cents. After exiting the van I turned right and headed up the hill towards the gardens. It took me about ninety minutes with a few minor false turns but eventually I came upon the place.
My walk took me through a wealthy white suburb. I thought I'd show you the way that South Africa whites protect themselves from blacks. They even have devised a way to dispense with black police officers. At the entrance to the suburb is a small white shack housing the office of the private security cops who roam the neighborhood on bikes and cars. A complete society segregated from South African society at large. Hop in your Mercedes (by far the most common vehicle), drive to work, then return home in the same sealed vehicle. No need to interact with blacks except as servants and employees of your company.
Admission was 37 Rand, about five bucks. I spent a few hours touring the place with one nap on a park bench way up at the top. It is not the most exciting botanical place I've ever been--too neat and tidy for that. An army of black gardeners tends the place for the (90%) white visitors.














I've only found two botanic gardens in my travels that really knocked me out, one outside Havana, the other on the Black Sea in Batumi, Georgia. The most 'interesting' of all was probably the Soviet Era gardens in Yerevan, Armenia, which have apparently been neglected for twenty years. I want some wealthy member of the Armenian diaspora to take on the task of renovating that place, which has a wonderful location in the middle of Yerevan. Someone will surely buy up the land and build apartment buildings if someone doesn't act soon.

After the gardens I headed back to my hostel to get dressed for the play, Purgatorio, that I was to attend at the University of Capetown. Again the minivans got me there (and home) cheaply. The play is by Chilean dramatist Ariel Dorfmann. {Advisory: long, dull play review follows}
This claustrophobic work features just two actors, a man and a woman. Each is resident in hell, which in this case is a psychiatric ward. In life they had been man and wife, but now, in the prison-like conditions of the ward, they don't recognize each other. This allows both to alternate playing psychiatrist to each other. We gradually learn the the husband dumped the wife for a younger woman; which inspired the wife to murder their two sons and at least one other member of the family. The husband committed suicide. A cheery pair. The conceit of the story is that each partner knows they can return to life if they can get their former spouse to confess his or her sins in front of a camera operated by whoever is in charge of this place.
Neither succeeds because neither partner is truly remorseful. They both, ultimately, confess that they would do it all over again if they had the chance.
Eugene O'Neill did a much better job with this whole idea in The Iceman Cometh. In O'Neill's scenario hell is a bar and the characters are genuinely remorseful--at least when they are sufficiently tanked--but it all leads to nothing. O'Neill's characters break your heart. You can see that their redemption would be simply; all they'd need to do is get sober. In Dorfmann's play the audience (or at least this audience member) has no identification with the characters. I guess Dorfmann wanted to drive home the futility of the church's remedies for human sin. Confess and your sins will be removed is the church mantra, right? But in modern times we all know enough about psychiatry and the unconscious mind to realize that our confessions are superficial and basically insincere, meant only to last long enough to shield us from hell fire. But Dorfmann's characters are so unlikeable that you end up contented that they will spend their days in endless dialogue, in hell, trying to get the other spouse to repent.
It was worth seeing but not a great play

Thursday, July 7

Not in the mood to do much writing today. I'm alone in my hostel, all the other tenants having moved on. My WiFi theft didn't work last night so I've been out of touch. Spent much of yesterday on the mountain that looms 1,300m. above the city. I have a few pictures but won't be able to use them till I can get WiFi. Undecided what to do tomorrow. My rent for the hostel runs out so I might just use that as an excuse to move on to Namibia. Disspirited overall.

Since I was in such a gloomy mood today it seemed like the time to do one of my long walks. I decided to try to walk to the big botanical garden. My map showed it as quite distant and up a hill but I figured I'd just keep walking till I got there. I trekked up a sloping road for about two hours. Then I came to a place where the road turned into a highway, first two lanes, then three, finally five. Cars were speeding by me at 60mph+. But I was determined to keep going. When the pathway beside the road petered out I found a drainage ditch which paralleled the road. I trod through this ditch for about a quarter mile hoping the highway would return to being a road forthwith. But, instead, the drainage ditch became more and more impassable. Shrubs grew over the top of the ditch making my way more difficult. Then I came upon evidence of a homeless encampment in the ditch. That scared me. The thought of meeting guys up here above the highway was not something I could face. I sat down to contemplate what I should do.
So back down the hill I went. But this time I headed straight down. I had an idea to continue my walk, but this time in search of the University of Cape Town. I knew it was somewhere in the city below me. It took me another 90 minutes of walking but finally I came upon the campus. I'd read in the Cape Times that the university theater was performing a play by the Chilean dramatist Ariel Dorfman. And there before me was the theater. So I bought a ticket for Friday night.
Then I decided to wander around the campus.

You can see that the campus is very much like UC Berkeley: on a hill overlooking the community is serves. And like most US schools this place loves to coat its buildings in Boston Ivy (Parthenocissus quinquefolia). Thus UCT is an ivy league school. \School is out of session so any conclusions I might draw are dubious, but from what I witnessed UCT is about half white and half everyone else. I saw absolutely no mingling of students of different colors--which is in contrast to Cape Town as a whole where there is significant blending of the races. I couldn't get into the library as it was reserved for students. Overall it seemed very much like any comparable school in the US. The one that came most to mind was St. Mary's U in the East Bay. To get back to my hotel I grabbed a minibus. It's interesting to see the different minibus cultures around the world. The Cape Town version is very similar to those in Georgia and Armenia. The bus is operated by a driver and a tout who takes the money and arbitrates or arranges seating. His job is to stuff as many paying customers in the van as the patrons will tolerate. What is unique here is that the tout works much harder than any place I've ever been before. When the van comes near an intersection--of which there are many--he whistles to anyone on the street hoping to attract their attention. If that doesn't avail he jumps out of the van and gets face to face with anyone who looks like a prospect. For the longest time I couldn't figure out what the tout kept shouting till I saw a sign in one van: "Wineburg" (shouted with a South African accent it sounds like some African language). Winebury, I gather, is the nether end of the line.
So today wasn't very touristically productive but I did get in several hours of walking which should add up to some weight loss before this trip is over, at least I hope so.

Tuesday, July 5

I somehow failed to publish my July 3rd post. It's on there now.

Pictures are of people I met in the park in Capetown:

Whenever I travel I run two parallel existences: one, is the guy who wants to meet people and see things and absorb as much of the world around me as possible; the second wants only to hunker down with a book or newspaper and relax. Today the second persona took over. But, as you can see, I made major progress today. For the first time I was able to take a photo and get it on the blog. To do this I had to figure out how to get WiFi where I could have extended time to make this all happen. The idea came to me when I noticed that the cafe across from the hostel had WiFi. I strode over there for a falafel and asked about the internet. The owner happily gave me the password. Now all I had to do was go back to the hostel and see if I can steal the signal from across the street. Obviously I succeeded. The gents above obligingly posed for a photo in the park. Since my ancient camera is partially broken (you can't see the image on the screen) I couldn't show them what I'd wrought. I feel badly that they never got to see this splendid representation.

Capetown's public park would seem familiar to anyone who had been in a thousand other similar places: Bryant Park in Manhattan, Rittenhouse Square, or several parks in London. Lawns big enough to contain picnickers and todlers, gushing fountains, small pools of water for the ducks and geese, and lots of stately trees. I sat on one of those classic park benches watching Capetown stroll by. Families pushing strollers; teens practicing skateboarding maneuvers; tourists with cameras; bicyclists; lovers strolling hand in hand; all the requisite elements. The weather was delightful. The sun poured warmth down through a few indifferent clouds, but the cool wind off the ocean moderated any attempt at making things too hot. I could literally feel the two influences, one on each shoulder. The seaward shoulder feeling almost cold from the wind, the landward shoulder almost ready to broil from the heat, but the combination was just right. We have these days in Oakland in January and February. The park was circled by deciduous oaks whose honey-brown leaves were still mostly on the trees. In this temperate climate it takes months for the full seasonal change to take place. There will probably still be leaves on those trees in August.
It was the kind of crowd you'd see in most American cities. Black teens, muslim families, chinese tourists, blonde girls in pairs, kids of every race frollicking on the grass. This place is so different from Johannesburg that they seem like two different countries. Except that I began to realize that in many ways Joburg and Capetown are like Oakland and San Francisco. One is genteel, the other tense, one is neat and orderly the other untidy and seemingly ungoverned, with one you think of expensive shops, with the other you think of graffiti and empty storefronts.
It would be easy to spend a month in Capetown. There are a thousand things to do and see. I'll try to discipline myself to leave in about a week as it will be time to get to Namibia. As always the urge to see/experience places wars with the urge to hunker down and wallow in the pleasantries of a modern city.

Monday, July 4

I hope I got the day of the week right.
The hostel driver dropped me off at the Joburg train station and I quickly found the ticket counter for the trains to Capetown. I asked for a sleeper ticket. "No sleeper, just sit," the lady told me. I was shocked. Even though I knew it was a possibility I was in denial. I slumped defeatedly away from the ticket counter.
So I thought I'd try the bus. Greyhound was there but their first bus was full, only the six pm bus was available and the fare was more than the train. "OK," I mumbled and reslumped away.
What should I do? I wanted to go at 12:30 on the train, but I didn't want to sit in an upright seat for 27 hours--the length of the trip to Capetown. I trekked around the terminal, backpack on my back, pondering. What if I rode in a seat for half the journey, slept one night in the midway city, then picked up a sleeper for the second half? I trod back to the ticket counter and tried to ask about this trick. "England and America are two countries separated by a common language, " goes the saying. Same for South Africa. But the lady behind the counter eventually figured out my idea, and said, No.
I didn't know what to do at this point. My mind was blank.
"Here's what you do, " the lady suddenly explained to me. "When you get down to the train talk to the Train Manager. Sometimes there are openings, accomodations, that he can help you with. No promises! No promises!"
I was ready to seize on any bit of hope so I bought a seat ticket and resolved to overcome my shyness and confront the Train Manager. I imagined a scowling, overbearing fellow who would be tired of all these people wanting special treatment. He'd surely bite my head off at a minimum.
But somehow I always end up getting more luck than I deserve on these trips. The TM was a friendly fellow of some mixed race, I think, perhaps Indian and African, in a starched white uniform with a very cordial manner. "OK," he said immediately, "stand over in the corner and I'll help you in a minute." Which he did. I got a sleeper. And what was most odd is that the train car with the sleeper berths was almost empty! Out of about 24 beds only seven or so were being used. (When we got close to Capetown another dozen or so boarded our car but even then there were vacancies.)
I tried to guess why there was such a discrepancy between what the ticket taker said and what was reality. At first I thought it might be some kind of graft thing where the TM made a little extra cash (I paid officially for a seat, he took my cash for a sleeper), but in fact he almost forgot to collect my additional fare. Only when we were on the outskirts of Capetown did he think to come buy and get the extra money.
Then I thought it might be a way to preserve a vestige of apartheid. Virtually all the seated passengers were black, all the sleeper, white. But the ticket taker was black. Why would she want to support such segregation. And, in fact, there were two mixed race guys in the berth next to mine, so it wasn't all white.
Maybe they are just inefficient in their ticketing.
I was slightly disappointed in the sleeper car. Because there were so few passengers there wasn't anyone to talk to. In Chinese trains the beds are close together and mingling is almost mandatory. In S.Africa the berths (containing 2 or 4 beds) are partitioned apart so that you really have to intrude on someone's privacy to talk to them.
And there was another problem: heat. There were no heaters on the train. "The train is very cold, " the TM told me offhandedly as he handed me my upgraded ticket. After pondering that comment a few seconds I began to wonder how I was going to keep warm all the way through the coming night. And the night was very cold--about freezing I'd estimate. My thin California clothes would never withstand that. But, again I was lucky, as an attendant came around at dusk and asked if I'd like to rent bedding for forty rand (about six bucks). I gladly agreed. Even with the bedding I was cold and slept fitfully, but I made it through and arrived in Capetown in good shape.
My brief look at Capetown is hopeful. The streets have folks of all races, unlike Joburg, and everything seems more urban and upscale. I suspect I'll like it here.

Sunday, July 3

As far as I can tell there are NO Starbucks in the Joburg metro area.

I got to go on a shopping trip with the white half of the ownership of this hostel. He has a black partner, Anthony, who I met first but the white guy seems to be the lead man probably because he supplied the capital. My guess is that Anthony had the experience and, more importantly, the connections to drivers and vendors.

We drove through the white suburbs. Every home (including this hostel) has a fence topped by barbed wire, razor wire or something equivalent. No doubt the owners fear crime but the effect is to give the finger to black empowerment.

We first went to a home improvement place comparable to Lowe's. Virtually every customer was white and every employee black. I assume that is because home ownership hereabouts is almost exclusively a white privelege. {I asked the hostel owners if they'd had any flack from the surrounding white home owners and they said only one caused problems: 'He just don't like anybody making money,' the white guy told me.}

The woman who supervised the cash registers was young and black with that look of severe efficiency you see in such people everywhere. I wondered if she had an opportunity to move up in the business or were all the top management positions reserved for whites. I should have asked her.

We then went to a vast mall that any American suburbanite would recognize. Here the crowd was a cross section of South African society with whites speaking Afrikaans, Asian immigrant families, blacks speaking african languages. Everyone was neatly attired. I saw no unsupervised teens dressed like ruffians as you would in most American malls. There is the suggestion that blacks are still proving themselves and wouldn't dare offend white sensibilities.

The tension between whites and blacks is palpable. I got to speak to many of the black employees of the hostel and was impressed with their balanced take on the society. The white guy was still poisoned by the habit of superiority. He couldn't resist occasional swipes. 'Blacks can do anything they like in this country,' he told me with a shrug of disgust. He related a confrontation he'd had with a black man the day before. 'Wait till Mandela dies,' the guy yelled at him, 'the blacks are going to take over.' Only out of respect for the old man had they foreborn to trample the resident whites underfoot.

South Africa seems, to this rampant capitalist, as if it is in a race. Can the black middle class grow fast enough to forestall nationalization or some sort of Venezuelan takeover? Will the white afrikaan speakers fight to preserve the system now in place or will they simply flee to Australia or Botswana or Holland? Will black home ownership grow fast enough to provide a mass of people with a stake in the system? I found it ominous that the government was turning a big chunk of Soweto into public housing instead of encouraging integrated home ownership. But that's my right wing take on things.

I've got to go pack. I hope to be on the train today but I don't have a ticket so maybe Ill end up stranded at the train station. We shall see.

Saturday, July 2

Maddening. I couldn't publish my posts and there were so many people waiting to use the computer that I couldn't diagnose the problem. But today I'm staying at home (my Johannesburg hostel) and trying to get my life back together--laundry, ATM, reading, blogging. {It turned out the problem was with the out-of-date IE browser this place has.

There is too much to tell..

I went on two 'tours', one a trip to the Apartheid Museum, Soweto (the black townships) and downtown Johannesburg. There were only two of us, a tall, blonde Australian woman, and myself. This allowed me to pester the driver with a thousand questions. Thus I learned a great deal.

This hostel is isolated out on the fringes of the metropolis, a bit like being in Livermore. Too distant for a taxi to downtown. Guests are dependent upon the lodge drivers to get you where you want to go. Since they offer lots of tours that isn't a problem for most folks. But me--I don't want to go on a guided tour, at least not my first day, so I'm stuck it seems. But then a tall, stocky black man, Pastor, befriended me. He assured me I could take a series of 15 passenger vans to Jo-burg. I jumped at the chance. 'You'll probably be the only white man on the bus,' he told me, which seemed just peachy to me. He directed me to walk about a tenth of a mile up the road and stick my forefinger out as if I were pointing to a distant cloud. This is the S.African sign of the hitchhiker/van seeker.

The road was not busy but I stood there, pointing. Pastor said the vans were white. What he didn't mention is that every other car in S.Africa is white. Thus I found myself pointing pointlessly as car after car sped by. Pastor had warned it might take a while to get a ride so I tried to be patient.

Then a tow truck stopped. It turned out I was hitchhiking--at least that's what the tow driver, a young black man in a full length red uniform thought. He invited me into his truck. I jumped. But I also worried. It was midday so murder for my meager cash seemed unlikely, but I also remembered all the people who had told me how dangerous S.Africa was--highest murder rate in the World or some such. I breathed shallowly and plotted how long it would take me to open the door and jump out before I was knifed.

We didn't talk but the brief ride was cordial and he let me off near a minibus station. 'Over there,' he pointed. I saw several shiny white busses waiting. The van I eventually rode was not shiny--full of dents if you must know--but it seemed simple enough. I grabbed a seat in the last row and tried to look and feel nonchalant. The other riders, 14 of them, took no real notice of me despite my unorthodox skin color. As we got ready to leave a woman boarded. Since there were no seats I got up to offer mine. Except that I'd forgotten there were a couple fold down seats next to me. As she tried to unfold the seat I crashed into her in my vain attempt to be gallant. She scowled. I blushed, apologized and sat down--my nonchalance now sacrificed. She took out a Blackberry and began to type. Inwardly I smiled. This was not a rural peasant going to market, this was a middle class person on her way to work or business. She seemed much more a kindred spirit which emboldened me to try to strike up a conversation.
'This is my first day in South Africa,' I announced in her general direction, trying to sound like just another traveller. She was suitably surprised. 'Really?' she replied. The trip lasted only about ten minutes so we didn't get much talking done but when it came time to transfer to the next minivan, the one that would take me to downtown, she walked me across the street to the proper vehicle. We parted, smiling. I'd succeeded in my first encounter.
The next van took me downtown. When I first got into the van a short black, bald man chuckled and turned partially around in my direction: 'Are some of us in the wrong place? he asked jovially. The trip to downtown was uneventful though I had no idea where I should exit the van. So I waited till we stopped. If nothing else this told me where to reboard for the return trip.\

What I was to learn later was that downtown Joburg is a unique place. Twenty years ago it was a white city with blacks doing the unskilled labor (provided they had their passbooks with them certifying their race and place of residence). But after 1994 all that changed. Now Joburg is a black city. The only whites are in banks and managerial jobs and they are only seen in their cars as they pass into or out of the burg. The streets are filled with black folk. But not predominantly South African black folk. Joburg is a city almost entirely taken over by immigrants from the contiguous African states--Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, et. al. The high rises that one sees from a distance turn out to be a sort of Potemkin Village. There is no one in them. The big hotels are guestless. The office buildings are officeless. The streets are busy. There are plenty of retail places to frequent. Trade is active. This is not Oakland where the streets are empty except at rush hour.
I wandered the streets for two or three hours looking for a book store. I could find none except for one religious place that sold bibles and all those books of selfhelp and self realization. Instinctively I knew to get out of the city before darkness (remember the days here are very short since it is winter) so I hopped a minivan back towards home. I ended up paying a bunch of money to a taxi because I couldn't figure out how to get back to the hostel, but I arrived safely.
The next day I took a tour that returned to Joburg, to the Apartheid Museum and, most importantly, to Soweto, the black townships.

There are some ways in which Joburg is similar to Hong Kong. A generation ago HK was a white run city, now whites are marginalized. Commerce in HK never waivered, of course, but there was some transition to a new economic model. Joburg today seems to me to be in transition. A black middle class is emerging, taking some managerial jobs, starting businesses. The first part of Soweto I saw was a revelation. Home ownership has transformed it into a beautiful, sun kissed neighborhood with spotless paved streets and kids walking the family dog. There are a few whites buying homes there--seven my driver told me.
Across the way, about 1,000 yards distant, the government is trying to do the urban renewal thing. They are tearing down the old Soweto shacks and building two story homes. If I didn't know I was in Joburg I would have assumed I was in Chicago. But there are no towers to tear down, just tarpaper shacks. My driver says the residents will get free rent in the new buildings, which to a capitalist like me suggests they will soon turn into slums. But clearly the old Soweto is disappearing to home ownership and slum clearing. In five years it will all be gone.
A new split is evolving according to my driver. Now South African blacks are resentful of cheap labor immigrants.

On Friday I went on a one day 'safari' to a park nw of our hostel. We rode around in our car for most of the day staring at elephants, and wildebest and zebras and warthogs, and, most significantly, a beautiful leopard that helpfully posed on a rocky outcrop ten yards ahead of us. {My camera messed up and I only got one indistinct photo of her/him.} It was a worthwhile trip but animals are not my thing so my reaction was moderate.
Today I'm hanging out at the hostel trying to get things in order. If I can figure out how to get back to Joburg I'll catch the train for Capetown tomorrow. But the logistics are difficult and it might take me one day more.