The High is the Low
South Africa, 28th to 30th April. Ian
Thursday was our last day in Namibia and we began
by driving up to Fish River Canyon, which is like a smaller version of the Grand
Canyon. While this was a worthwhile destination, if we had appreciated how much
driving we had ahead of us we might have given it a miss, or organised our
itinerary differently. After leaving the canyon we headed down to our first
stop in South Africa, and ended up driving until night
fall.
As we were filling out our paperwork at the border crossing I read a poster describing South Africa's new symbols, one of which is the new shield.
You can see (hopefully) that the motto contains characters that seem to represent click phonemes. I asked one of the border guards how it is pronounced. He didn't know that there was a shield or motto and, laughing, referred me to the two differently uniformed guys outside; he was "non white" (I neither know nor want to learn South Africa's echelons of racial discrimination) and the guys outside were white. They too had not heard about the shield or motto, and when I pointed it out on the wall they opined, authoritatively yet incorrectly, the shield was "something to do with the ministry of agriculture, and that the motto was from "a black language". Clearly, this has yet to seize the popular imagination in the manner anticipated by its meaning, which I believe is "unity through diversity" (strangely close to "e pluribus unum").
South of the border the landscape was arid and the driving, for the first time, became monotonous. Looking at rather than over the ubiquitous bushes and small trees they became surprisingly exotic, like corals in every conceivable shade of green. Set in sandy orange soil, it was if we were driving across a sea bed in which the water had been magically removed. At least we were had left behind the gravel roads of Namibia, whose corrugations and undulations could simultaneously generate both pitch and yaw. Further on, we even came to dual carriageways, which would have been superfluous in the much less populous countries in which we have been travelling until now.
Our stop that night was at town called Clanwilliam, where we paid ourselves into the local camp site (£7, including electricity) and then, breaking with our established pattern, headed into town for dinner. We had a perfectly satisfactory 1970's-style meal. In the morning, after our last night under canvas this year, we returned to the town for breakfast. Clanwilliam seemed to be a quaint, happy, gentrified resort town, which could almost pass off for the sort of place that you might run into on the eastern seaboard of the US, were it not for the more colourful diversity of inhabitants. There was a festival starting up and it all seemed jolly. On the edge of the town is a campus whose signage described it an "Agricultural gymnasium": what on earth is that?
Rich deep green citrus groves - oranges, lemons and limes - replaced the aridity of the previous day on our route towards Cape Town and the land was strikingly lush. The area may be favoured with more rainfall and there are certainly signs of more successful irrigation. Matching this, I found upon arrival in Clanwilliam that I could get a GPRS internet connection that, though possibly relatively expensive, seemed faster than the connections we had experienced in Namibia's internet cafes (though no matching the ethernet/wifi access I got in the choice hotels from where I posted my blogs). We have since learnt that the South Africans have been imprudently profligate with their limited water resources so the true price for the fecundity may not yet have been paid.
Yesterday lunch time we arrived in Cape Town. After our crib in Swakopmund I had low expectations for our guest house here, and we were all delighted and relieved by the degree of comfort and character that the place has: the girls' faces lit right up when the owner, Barry, showed them their room (and that was before they got to go in the jacuzzi in the courtyard garden, which is set in a little enclave with blue path lights that are very pretty in the evening).
One of Cape Town's sights is the waterfront mall, and although we're not shopping it was still fun to visit. Paula tells me that the Make Up Forever store reveals that the place is as smart as you need it to be. The city, as you probably know, shares the sunny ocean optimism of cosmopolitan coastal cities throughout the world and does not seem akin to the other places we've visited in Africa. We returned to the waterfront last night for dinner at an excellent jazz restaurant and our taxi driver (Jackson) told us that, "this country didn't used to be right but it's right now" and everyone is working together these days; he said that we should encourage people to come and visit now to assist with the country's continuing improvement. In apartheid times, being black, he wouldn't have been allowed into the area he was taking us. Now, as he says, all people come and go as they please. It does indeed seem like a great place to be, although I wonder whether the spirit of free access is realistically operative at the extremes: all the faces I see at the golf club and the mariner that we keep passing are white, and all of the people hanging around the encircling carriageways are black. I am trying to teach the girls what I can remember about the last days of apartheid and went to the standing exhibition at the gateway to Robben Island. I looked amongst the explanatory boards for quite some time but could find no mention of FW de Clerk. While Nelson Mandela clearly deserves centre stage I was disappointed by this: my recollection of that time is that de Clerk had Mandela out of prison and proper elections organised, as he had promised, pretty swiftly after gaining power. While he didn't have to spend two or three decades behind bars, he did need a different kind of courage to sweep Botha and his miserable gang aside from the helm of his own party, eschewing all of their reactionary proposals for phony "power sharing", and to persist upon a course that would take the National Party swiftly and irreversibly from office. And he was awarded the Nobel Peace prize alongside Mandela, so it's odd that he doesn't appear to merit a mention in the display.
Strangely for such a large city, we've seen Jackson a few times since he last dropped us off.
This morning we went up Table Mountain. We took the cable car, which was closed just after we got on it because of gale force winds. The phrase "gale force winds" is such a commonplace; what it means is, for example, that I saw a number of grown adults in full health getting blown over against the rocks that line the pathways at the top. One perplexed tourist saw his wife disappear from the viewfinder as he was taking her photo: looking up to see where she'd gone he found that she had been blown right off her feet. It would be imprecise to say that the wind "howled" but it was damn loud. This didn't stop Paula and Zoe from going on a guided nature walk for around an hour while Heidi and I nursed our Windhoek lager and orange juice in the cafe. Not only was this, for me, the only unenjoyable episode on our trip, famous view notwithstanding, it was one of my more miserable non-work experiences of recent years. Oh well... We grabbed a perfect healthy lunch back at the waterfront and this restored my spirits.
Later, we went, half an hour early as requested, to board the boat trip we had booked to Robben Island. When we arrived we found that instead of being 30 minutes early we were 30 minutes late: it seems that we've spent the last three days in the wrong time zone. The amused girl at the ticket office kindly let us switch our non-refundable trip to Monday. It was bizarre to look back at everything we've done since then (arrival in Clanwilliam, where it was surprisingly dark, turning up to our reserved table unknowingly an hour late, discussing the time with Jackson when he would meet us and synchronising watches etc) given this new knowledge. Really odd!
As we were filling out our paperwork at the border crossing I read a poster describing South Africa's new symbols, one of which is the new shield.
You can see (hopefully) that the motto contains characters that seem to represent click phonemes. I asked one of the border guards how it is pronounced. He didn't know that there was a shield or motto and, laughing, referred me to the two differently uniformed guys outside; he was "non white" (I neither know nor want to learn South Africa's echelons of racial discrimination) and the guys outside were white. They too had not heard about the shield or motto, and when I pointed it out on the wall they opined, authoritatively yet incorrectly, the shield was "something to do with the ministry of agriculture, and that the motto was from "a black language". Clearly, this has yet to seize the popular imagination in the manner anticipated by its meaning, which I believe is "unity through diversity" (strangely close to "e pluribus unum").
South of the border the landscape was arid and the driving, for the first time, became monotonous. Looking at rather than over the ubiquitous bushes and small trees they became surprisingly exotic, like corals in every conceivable shade of green. Set in sandy orange soil, it was if we were driving across a sea bed in which the water had been magically removed. At least we were had left behind the gravel roads of Namibia, whose corrugations and undulations could simultaneously generate both pitch and yaw. Further on, we even came to dual carriageways, which would have been superfluous in the much less populous countries in which we have been travelling until now.
Our stop that night was at town called Clanwilliam, where we paid ourselves into the local camp site (£7, including electricity) and then, breaking with our established pattern, headed into town for dinner. We had a perfectly satisfactory 1970's-style meal. In the morning, after our last night under canvas this year, we returned to the town for breakfast. Clanwilliam seemed to be a quaint, happy, gentrified resort town, which could almost pass off for the sort of place that you might run into on the eastern seaboard of the US, were it not for the more colourful diversity of inhabitants. There was a festival starting up and it all seemed jolly. On the edge of the town is a campus whose signage described it an "Agricultural gymnasium": what on earth is that?
Rich deep green citrus groves - oranges, lemons and limes - replaced the aridity of the previous day on our route towards Cape Town and the land was strikingly lush. The area may be favoured with more rainfall and there are certainly signs of more successful irrigation. Matching this, I found upon arrival in Clanwilliam that I could get a GPRS internet connection that, though possibly relatively expensive, seemed faster than the connections we had experienced in Namibia's internet cafes (though no matching the ethernet/wifi access I got in the choice hotels from where I posted my blogs). We have since learnt that the South Africans have been imprudently profligate with their limited water resources so the true price for the fecundity may not yet have been paid.
Yesterday lunch time we arrived in Cape Town. After our crib in Swakopmund I had low expectations for our guest house here, and we were all delighted and relieved by the degree of comfort and character that the place has: the girls' faces lit right up when the owner, Barry, showed them their room (and that was before they got to go in the jacuzzi in the courtyard garden, which is set in a little enclave with blue path lights that are very pretty in the evening).
One of Cape Town's sights is the waterfront mall, and although we're not shopping it was still fun to visit. Paula tells me that the Make Up Forever store reveals that the place is as smart as you need it to be. The city, as you probably know, shares the sunny ocean optimism of cosmopolitan coastal cities throughout the world and does not seem akin to the other places we've visited in Africa. We returned to the waterfront last night for dinner at an excellent jazz restaurant and our taxi driver (Jackson) told us that, "this country didn't used to be right but it's right now" and everyone is working together these days; he said that we should encourage people to come and visit now to assist with the country's continuing improvement. In apartheid times, being black, he wouldn't have been allowed into the area he was taking us. Now, as he says, all people come and go as they please. It does indeed seem like a great place to be, although I wonder whether the spirit of free access is realistically operative at the extremes: all the faces I see at the golf club and the mariner that we keep passing are white, and all of the people hanging around the encircling carriageways are black. I am trying to teach the girls what I can remember about the last days of apartheid and went to the standing exhibition at the gateway to Robben Island. I looked amongst the explanatory boards for quite some time but could find no mention of FW de Clerk. While Nelson Mandela clearly deserves centre stage I was disappointed by this: my recollection of that time is that de Clerk had Mandela out of prison and proper elections organised, as he had promised, pretty swiftly after gaining power. While he didn't have to spend two or three decades behind bars, he did need a different kind of courage to sweep Botha and his miserable gang aside from the helm of his own party, eschewing all of their reactionary proposals for phony "power sharing", and to persist upon a course that would take the National Party swiftly and irreversibly from office. And he was awarded the Nobel Peace prize alongside Mandela, so it's odd that he doesn't appear to merit a mention in the display.
Strangely for such a large city, we've seen Jackson a few times since he last dropped us off.
This morning we went up Table Mountain. We took the cable car, which was closed just after we got on it because of gale force winds. The phrase "gale force winds" is such a commonplace; what it means is, for example, that I saw a number of grown adults in full health getting blown over against the rocks that line the pathways at the top. One perplexed tourist saw his wife disappear from the viewfinder as he was taking her photo: looking up to see where she'd gone he found that she had been blown right off her feet. It would be imprecise to say that the wind "howled" but it was damn loud. This didn't stop Paula and Zoe from going on a guided nature walk for around an hour while Heidi and I nursed our Windhoek lager and orange juice in the cafe. Not only was this, for me, the only unenjoyable episode on our trip, famous view notwithstanding, it was one of my more miserable non-work experiences of recent years. Oh well... We grabbed a perfect healthy lunch back at the waterfront and this restored my spirits.
Later, we went, half an hour early as requested, to board the boat trip we had booked to Robben Island. When we arrived we found that instead of being 30 minutes early we were 30 minutes late: it seems that we've spent the last three days in the wrong time zone. The amused girl at the ticket office kindly let us switch our non-refundable trip to Monday. It was bizarre to look back at everything we've done since then (arrival in Clanwilliam, where it was surprisingly dark, turning up to our reserved table unknowingly an hour late, discussing the time with Jackson when he would meet us and synchronising watches etc) given this new knowledge. Really odd!
Posted: Sat - April 30, 2005 at 10:02 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM