Flying part two

The thrill-seeking trio trimmed the tree-tops yesterday in their quest for adrenalin rushes - although "I wasn't as frightened as I expected" reported the youngest member of the party. SA offers rather understatedly named "canopy tours" in various locations around the country - this one was again in the Magaliesberg (which I learned yesterday is pronounced with a hard H on the first G - ma-HA-leesburg). It's a brilliant idea - find a ravine filled with trees and criss-cross it with cables - hook up tourists and push them off the platforms. Great fun. It was also billed as a tour of the history and ecology of the area, but the gung-ho guides didn't bother with any of that hippy nonsense; instead they made lots of jokes about how dangerous the exercise is, ratcheting up the drama - "please write a contact name on the form so we can call someone to identify your body"; "we take your lunch order now but the cook waits to see if you come back"; "see that brown rock over there behind the platform? That's a bushman cave painting. If you don't brake on this run you're going to make it browner." Great fun. It's also a fantastic way to travel - we should rig up all the tall buildings in city centres and have more fun commuting.

We spent the evening at Moyo's, an African restaurant in a secure compound - there was music in the piazza when we arrived but this was rained off by a massive storm which started at ten and seemed to last all night - luckily there were several types of music going on inside the restaurant (including a group of waitresses who put on a well-choreographed dance routine), face-painting, transvestites on stilts, and far too much to eat - including kudu and springbok. More fun - although we had to make the usual adjustment of social conscience when walking and driving past the security staff guarding the entrances, guarding the cars, guarding my complex, protecting the lucky privileged, acting as human deterrents - they looked glum, in no mood for wishing anyone happy new year, and one can only sympathise - but then we, the lucky privileged, seem to need them there, all the time, even on new year's eve.

Flying

More photos from the balloon trip. I've always loved photos of the earth from the sky; this was the first time I had a chance to take some myself.

In the margins of tourism

Getting into full holiday mood, L, E and I spent yesterday in an elephant "sanctuary" (elephants rescued from the wild, etc.) and this morning in a hot air balloon above the Magaliesburg hills - both exciting experiences with a satisfactory level of anticipated thrills. Elephant skin is hard and tough with bristly hair all over, and their eyelashes are like wire brushes - but the backs of their ears, their tummies and the pads under their feet are soft - we know because we've felt them; these massive, powerful animals submit to these palpitations by tourists with incredible patience - or perhaps they like it in some surreal dream of interspecies sensuousness, who knows? For the tourist it certainly feels like an incredible privilege to be allowed this intimacy without being "flattened like a pancake" as the guide said would happen with a real wild elephant - which can run at 35 km per hour so "don't bother to run" if they charge you.

Ballooning is also a great experience - flying is always wonderful in whatever form, I think, but this was particularly exciting and yet relaxing at the same time - when the gas burners aren't on there's total silence, the basket slowly rotates, the land passes smoothly and dreamily underneath (today, at least - this depends on the wind, and today was calm; the "captain" refused to answer questions about emergency landings), and you finally come in to land with a gentle bump - the ground crew was waiting for us and manoeuvered the basket on to the back of the truck before we got out - this giant, fragile structure was pushed around by two men as it hovered a few feet above the ground. The scenery was very beautiful.

But in some ways the more significant thrills of being in Africa come from the unanticipated and unfamiliar - a family of meerkats begging around the restaurant tables; bromiliads (which I've only ever seen in pots) growing wild under the trees; a troupe of monkeys passing through the trees at the edge of the balloon field ("we get baboons too"), giant shiny black beetles with white legs wandering through the undergrowth; the language of the guides ("ooh, if that big elephant nudges you you'll fly like superman"; "they're on African time, man, if not today then tomorrow"; "if an elephant does chocolate mousse for poo we know she's sick"), the use of paraffin lamps instead of electricity for illumination at night (and the rather worrying fact of total darkness all around these small pools of light, darkness filled with insect noises and various rustles), the extraordinary vegetation everywhere, the red earth, the vast cloud-decorated sky, and so forth - it's the context that makes it all so special.

Animals and trees

Some random images from my excursions over the past few days... a scratching post; a giraffe licking a car roof (reason unknown); an ostrich considers eating the camera; a duck and an ibis; a cub sleeping comfortably; trees.

Sun City

I remember Sun City from ages ago, when I was a student - it was a symbol of the apartheid regime, and musicians who performed there were generally reviled: the roster of the dissed included Elton John, Tina Turner, Rod Stewart, Queen and Ray Charles. The history is that Sun City was created as a casino in the late 70s in one of the "Bantustans" which happened to allow gambling and topless "revues" - and white South Africans from nearby Johannesburg and Pretoria flooded in to ogle and lose their money. Sun City is still going strong - and now includes a golf course (designed by Gary Player, also reviled) which features real crocodiles in the water hazard at the thirteenth hole.

I felt that I had to visit Sun City, once, just to see how kitsch and absurd the place really is - and I suppose I wasn't disappointed. The faux Lost City/ H. Rider Haggard decor is totally over the top and totally tasteless, but what's even more amazing is that one of the main attractions is a fake BEACH, with real sand, around an artificial lake which produces artificial waves every few minutes (a horn blares a warning so toddlers can be quickly removed). Tourists and South Africans - nearly all white - crowd this place out, although the real sea and real beach are a mere 400 kilometres away. There's also a fake African forest all around this ersatz seaside which oddly enough is fun to explore - after thirty odd years the extraordinary (real, not plastic) vegetation has grown wild and has asserted a sort of ownership of the place, transcending its artificial origins (apparently some 80,000 plants were trucked in) - although the illusion of authenticity is punctured now and then by architectural intrusions like a giant gong and a massive torch-lit staircase to the actual Lost City (a hotel). As so often in SA, my reactions to the place were ambivalent - it was worth a visit just to see the sheer scale of the lunacy of the people who dreamed the place up; and it's a safe environment (always a factor); but on the other hand bad taste has a pretty limited appeal once you've got over the initial impact, no matter what the scale.

The sky

Some photos from my balcony - first, during an amazing electrical storm the other night - the entire sky flashes bright as day; then lighting crackles in various directions, sometimes from the earth to the sky (it seems), sometimes horizontally, sometimes in the more normal way from the sky to the earth; the sound is very loud rumbling, roaring, tearing; rain comes down in rods of water. Then, from one of the routinely spectacular sunsets. The sky here is a constant feature, full of activity.

Tame lions

Yesterday I went to Lion Park, a zoo of sorts on the edge of Johannesburg - this place is detested by genuine animal-lovers and conservationists because eighty lions are kept in captivity for no particular reason except to make money - although the staff claimed when I asked that the first lions to be kept there were saved from the wild - and their descendents can no longer be released because they wouldn't survive - they're too tame and don't know how to hunt. They also claim that a number of cubs are "rejected by their mothers" and have to be raised by hand - providing a fantastic opportunity to let visitors get up close and pet them - tame indeed.

The enclosures for the lion prides are pretty big - obviously there are fences around them, but the entrance gates are left wide open for visitors to drive in and out (there are signs up telling you to keep your windows closed, but this isn't enforced - I saw a few people hanging out of their car windows, taking photos). I wondered what was stopping the lions leaving their enclosures - the area outside is full of springbok, impala, zebras, giraffes, humans, etc - so it looked as though they could practise a bit of hunting just for the hell of it if they felt like it. Lo and behold, I saw a group of lions wandering towards an exit gate... One of the park staff - with NO PROTECTION - walked up to them and told them to go back in, patting them and tickling them under the ears to encourage them to go with him. The lions accepted this and followed him back in to the enclosure. At one point a young lion took a run and jumped up at him, nearly flattening him - the guy staggered and cuffed the lion back - all good clean fun, it seemed, but at this point I was expecting to see an unscheduled snack for this particular group of carnivores. Not quite that tame, surely?

Gold

Phew... made it to the Christmas break. This isn't a blog about work, otherwise I'd have some stories to tell; suffice to say I'm ready for a holiday - and apologies to anyone I haven't emailed, or to whom I've only sent cursory uninformative emails - or in other words, apologies to everyone who knows me.

Last Sunday I did manage to get out and do something - I went to the Gold Reef City theme park, not to go on any of the rides (although the background screams of people riding the Anaconda and the Tower of Terror were quite distracting) but to do the tour of a gold mine - the site of the theme park was a functioning gold mine employing 30,000 people until 1977, when mining was discontinued, not because the seam had run out (you can see and touch the gold ore - it's a band of black rock about a metre wide) but because they'd gone so deep that it was no longer economically viable to mine it - they'd got to level 57 at 2,500 metres underground, and it took the miners two hours just to get to get there. (And this isn't the deepest - Western Deep, also in Joburg, is the deepest in the world at 4,000 metres and is still active.) At Gold Reef City you go down in a miners' cage to a mere 220 metres but it's still a fascinating experience - you see and hear a demonstration of drilling (it's loud), and at the end of the tour you see a gold bar being poured - you're also allowed to pick one up (not the hot one but one that's cooled down) - you're told that if you can pick it up with one hand you can keep it - but as it weighs 14 kilos and it's a stretch to get your fingers around it, they're not risking much...

What's striking about the whole experience is how much sheer effort goes into getting gold out of the ground - even with dynamite they can only move forward in a shaft one metre a day, and before they had electricity everything was done by hand - it took six hours just to hammer a hole in the rock big enough to put a stick of dynamite in... A ton of ore produces a mere four grams of gold... the temperature at the rock face at four kilometres underground can reach fifty degrees (air has to be refrigerated and pumped down so the miners can breathe it) ... and the human cost has been staggering, running at about 160 deaths a year (not counting related deaths like silicosis) until safety standards started to improve in the past ten years - SA has always had a poor safety record for mining in general (240,000 workers went on strike just last year to protest at bad conditions across the industry). Apartheid and its legacy has also had a role in this, of course, as most rockface workers were black and worked long hours and years for a pittance - a very small museum in Gold Reef City (not included in the tour!) documents the appalling conditions and statistics of decades of exploitation very close to slavery. By the time I left Gold Reef City I felt that in a rational world gold would undoubtedly stay in the ground where it belongs.

(Above: the minehead; pouring molten gold.)

Found art

This weekend I visited a botanical garden-like garden centre where they talked me into buying enormous pots for my purchases "because the plants will grow a lot" and I checked out Nelson Mandela Square - which turned out to be an extension of Sandton City Mall - a giant statue of Nelson looks out over another contemporary urban piazza surrounded by eateries, including one called The Butcher (best meat in Johannesburg, apparently; although there's another one called The Carnivore which offers zebra steak, lion chops, and crocodile ragout, which must be a serious contender). It still seems very strange to me that the city's public spaces - or at least the ones that are considered safe to visit - are all in commercial centres. Perhaps I'll get used to it. Or perhaps not. I'm looking forward to the holidays, when I'll get out of this surreal elitist enclave and see what the real country's like.

In the house I left I found some abandoned paintings - I liked two of them very much, so I cleaned them up and brought them with me (actually I got permission from the previous owners, who didn't want them any more); see above. They bigger one has been framed so badly that the painter's signature is nearly completely covered over; the green one is signed "Rubuni". I found the wooden giraffe, on the other hand, signed by "Misheck", in one of the African art shops in Sandton. I think he's wonderful - a very wise and ironic looking giraffe.

Tshwane traffic

Johannesburg is the city built on gold, or rather, now, the absence of gold - the south-west section of the city is resting on a honeycomb of old mine shafts - it might collapse one day and sink a couple of kilometres. Johannesburg (or Joburg, or Jozi) is the biggest city in SA at some 8 million people (the census is very approximate) but it's not the administrative /governmental capital of South Africa - that honour rests with Tshwane (which is also called Pretoria), some forty kilometres to the north. It's an unfortunate part of my job to have to go to talk to people in government now and then, which means hours in the traffic - there's one motorway, the notorious N1, which often crawls at stop-start walking speed for half the journey - it regularly takes two hours to cover those 40 kilometres, especially starting at any time between 7-10 a.m. and 4-7 p.m. Thousands of people do this as a daily commute. A high-speed train line is being built, partly to help with the influx of visitors for the 2010 World Cup, but it's hard to believe this will make much of an impact - the distances within the two cities are enormous, and most people will want to use their cars to get to their actual destinations, not just to the main train stations. The problem is compounded by the appalling public transport situation in the cities - there are very few buses (and they're not safe anyway) and thousands of "taxis" - unmarked minivans which stop anywhere and everywhere and drive at top speed the rest of the time, cutting up the rest of the traffic, so also not safe.

I've been to Pretoria twice in the past 24 hours so feel particularly affected by this - eight hours of my life in a traffic jam - when it's a country with an enormous amount of space and an enormous amount of natural wealth - and yet some 200,000 cars a day are channeled into one clogged road. It can't help global warming much, either.

On a more positive note, I love my new flat, so it's nice to get home when I do. Pix above: the swimming pool (I haven't used it yet but it's nice to know it's there, waiting), the gas-fired barbecue on my balcony (ditto about usage); and the flat from the road - mine's the top one.

Above it all

I'm now in the new flat and it's much better; as I expected, I no longer feel a constant low-level semi-conscious worry about whether I've locked all the doors properly, whether the panic button is in my pocket, if my mobile phone is in the same room as me, etc. I'm now down to two small keys and a clear view of the sky. And I'm actually seeing more birds, as they seem to like rooftops, telephone wires and streetlamps - last night at sunset there was an amazing cacophony - most of the birds here are very LOUD, particulary the pin-headed Guineafowl and the curvy-beaked Hadeda, which likes to blare out like a foghorn as it flies - you can hear them coming, and on my new balcony they fly past at head level - a deafening experience.

I don't have internet in the new flat yet so blog entries here will be limited for the next couple of weeks until the phone's installed (and there are no wireless networks in range, alas) - in the meantime I have to come back to the old house to use the landline and ADSL.

Above: view from my new living room - note the absence of bars, walls and fences. I'm above all of that now. Then: the balcony; a hadeda across the road; sunset last night from the bedroom.