Spinning

In Italy, and perhaps other countries, "spinning" is something you do in a gym on a bike with no wheels (I've always thought spinners ought to be linked up to the national grid in some way, as an alternative source of energy). In SA I was puzzled by references in the media to spinning being a menace to the public and a massive irritation to people who live in neighbourhoods where it's practised, which seemed a bit over the top. Then this link explained it... impressive, but a skill of limited application, one would think.

Rhinos, Lions etc

This morning was bright and sunny so I set off to the Rhino and Lion Park, a hybrid zoo/game reserve on the outskirts of Joburg - apparently the closest place to the city where you can see some of the big five: buffalo as well as, obviously, lions and rhinos - though I only saw the rhinos at the last minute when I was leaving the park, as they roam free so aren't that easy to find. The lions, on the other hand, are in pens, so it's easy to find them. Apart from the "brown lions" this park also has white lions and white tigers - as well as, er, non-white tigers - and a "creche" area where baby predators can grown up safely surrounded by electric fences and tourists like me.

More interesting, for me, was the "hippo pool" area where you can walk along paths past sleeping lions and tigers and climb onto observation platforms and take a look at African lake life - I didn't actually see any hippos, but I was the only human there, which made it feel more atmospheric - I saw a couple of lizards circling each other endlessly in some intense reptilian ritual (if I went right up to them they disappeared into a bush, but they came back immediately when I moved away, and returned to their mobile Mexican stand-off); and I saw a group of bright yellow butterflies exploding away from some significant but featureless patch of grass and returning, over and over. On the way back to the car a tiger (I think) roared in the undergrowth a few metres away from me - behind a strong fence, sure, but scarey anyway - the instinctive reaction to this sort of noise is uncontrollable, I find. And when I got back to my car I found I had a visitor crawling over the back seat - a small bright brown and iridescent green stag beetle. And of course all the time and everywhere there's the lush vegetation, the flowers, the spiny trees with their weird seeds, the birds... It's always well worth while to get out of the city.

Above: white lion, white tigers, pond life, butterfly dance, lizard fight, storks come in to land on a rhino (note the baby behind the mum), the beetle hitchhiker.

Lesotho

I escaped from the office on Wednesday and went to Lesotho - a one hour flight in a very small plane with eight passengers - to take part in a schools event a couple of hours drive out of the capital, Maseru. Lesotho is variously billed as "the mountain kingdom", "the Switzerland of Africa", "the kingdom in the sky" (because the entire territory is above 1,000 metres) and also "thirty years behind South Africa". It has an interesting history - for a good part of the 19th century the first king, Moshoeshoe the first, manoeuvered and battled to maintain some sort of independence for his kingdom, accomodating European missionaries and accepting treaties with the territory-hungry British and even going to war to escape from local rule from the Cape colony and return to being a British protectorate - which was a better deal, apparently. Lesotho was never part of South Africa and so escaped apartheid - but by the same token suffered from being surrounded by a hostile, powerful neighbour - and so is still a very poor country.

Lesotho is very beautiful - mountainous, green, unspoilt - and feels much more African than what I've seen so far of SA. Immediately outside the small capital you see vast open spaces with the occasional small village; men (and boys, some of them very young) wear traditional blankets and carry sticks and stand around looking after very small herds of cows and sheep. The Basotho (the name for inhabitants of Lesotho) are very friendly, hospitable, and laid back (the language is called Sosotho). The schools put on a great event for us - a history lesson, songs, dances, speeches, displays of national costume (some of them minimal, consisting mostly of a layer of ochre), constant ululations by the women. I asked the teachers how much time they spent rehearsing the well-choreographed performances and they said no time at all - the kids arrive in school already knowing these traditional songs and dances - they learn them at home. A pretty good alternative, I'd say, to Cartoon Network.

It was a working visit so I didn't see much more, but I'd love to go for a holiday - there is in fact a ski resort in the higher mountains, so it'd be great to go back in winter and ski. In July. In Africa.

Above: how mountainous is my kingdom; school uniform; peacock dance; gumboot dance; teacher in a blanket; we have table mountains too. I wish I knew how to upload audio files - the singing was sublime.