South African postcard 1
Well, we’ve successfully survived several days of our vacation in South Africa. It has been a blast.
We landed in Jo’burg late on the 19th, and were greeted by a friendly chap from the Emerald Guesthouse, where we spent the night. He gave us our first introduction to the thick accent Afrikaners have when they are speaking English.
The next day we got a complimentary shuttle ride back to O.R. Tambo, and flew down to Port Elizabeth. The security at the airport was ridiculously lax, so different from the United States. We picked up our rental car, a maroon CitiGulf with a manual transmission. I managed to get to our hotel in boring Summerstrand, despite having to drive on the left-hand side of the road and shift gears with my left hand. We spent the rest of the day bumming around the beach, and are some fantastic curry with mutton and later with pasta.
The next day we were picked up at our (relatively) posh hotel for a tour of all of PE. It started in the colonial center, through the tragically destroyed South End, out to the poverty of the townships. It was the oddest landscape I’d ever seen from an urban planning perspective: the buffer zones that the apartheid-era government had left between neighborhoods of different racial groups create a network of greenspaces that bear little relationship with topography. These buffer zones are in the process of being turned into sidewalks and schools and new neighborhoods, anything to erase the memory of apartheid. Despite the crushing poverty, there was a sense of hope, as substandard housing was being slowly but surely replaced by buildings with electricity and water. After the tour, we had a beer at a shabeen, and then we were dropped back at our hotel. We hopped in the car and drove to Addo Elephant Park, sleeping in a “safari tent” with a view out over the bush.
All the next day was taken up with the park. Some scattered memories, in non-chronological order: everywhere kudu, with males and their spiral horns escorting the females; a troop of elephants walking in formation next to us, so close you could touch them, the baby elephants nursing from their mother’s pendulous breasts; a jackal eating a meercat; vervet monkeys trying their best to get into our tent and steal our food; a herd of 50 buffalo walking slowly across the grassland and around our car; sightings of Cape grysbok, ostrich, blue crane, burchell’s zebra, and eland, but sadly no lions or black rhinos; the everpresent warthogs, the juveniles constantly fighting for fun, and the adult males alternately attacking each other and trying to quickly mate with the scarce females.
We landed in Jo’burg late on the 19th, and were greeted by a friendly chap from the Emerald Guesthouse, where we spent the night. He gave us our first introduction to the thick accent Afrikaners have when they are speaking English.
The next day we got a complimentary shuttle ride back to O.R. Tambo, and flew down to Port Elizabeth. The security at the airport was ridiculously lax, so different from the United States. We picked up our rental car, a maroon CitiGulf with a manual transmission. I managed to get to our hotel in boring Summerstrand, despite having to drive on the left-hand side of the road and shift gears with my left hand. We spent the rest of the day bumming around the beach, and are some fantastic curry with mutton and later with pasta.
The next day we were picked up at our (relatively) posh hotel for a tour of all of PE. It started in the colonial center, through the tragically destroyed South End, out to the poverty of the townships. It was the oddest landscape I’d ever seen from an urban planning perspective: the buffer zones that the apartheid-era government had left between neighborhoods of different racial groups create a network of greenspaces that bear little relationship with topography. These buffer zones are in the process of being turned into sidewalks and schools and new neighborhoods, anything to erase the memory of apartheid. Despite the crushing poverty, there was a sense of hope, as substandard housing was being slowly but surely replaced by buildings with electricity and water. After the tour, we had a beer at a shabeen, and then we were dropped back at our hotel. We hopped in the car and drove to Addo Elephant Park, sleeping in a “safari tent” with a view out over the bush.
All the next day was taken up with the park. Some scattered memories, in non-chronological order: everywhere kudu, with males and their spiral horns escorting the females; a troop of elephants walking in formation next to us, so close you could touch them, the baby elephants nursing from their mother’s pendulous breasts; a jackal eating a meercat; vervet monkeys trying their best to get into our tent and steal our food; a herd of 50 buffalo walking slowly across the grassland and around our car; sightings of Cape grysbok, ostrich, blue crane, burchell’s zebra, and eland, but sadly no lions or black rhinos; the everpresent warthogs, the juveniles constantly fighting for fun, and the adult males alternately attacking each other and trying to quickly mate with the scarce females.
