The last post

I've been in South Africa for nearly two years now - which means I'm seeing my third spring, with the jacaranda trees once more in exuberant blossom, astonishing me every time I see them, like chemical clouds blown in from some alien planet and temporarily snagged in among the normal vegetation, invaders lining the streets, enlivening the parks. See my first reference here - two years ago.

And so enough of this blog, I think. I've started to repeat some experiences (and I might still get excited when I see a lion up close, but I realise it's a bit different via a blog, for the tenth time) - and I suppose the novelty of living here has worn off to some extent - although in many ways I still find it a very strange place, and a long way from home. But I'm no longer having those "wow" moments which I wanted to share, through this blog; this is undoubtedly a failure on my part, there's certainly a lot more of this massive country to explore and much more to learn - but my next holiday will be in Europe, because I miss it and need to go back, so I'm not going to have much that's new to report for the foreseeable future. In some ways I suppose the places I've already seen in SA and the photos I've taken have captured some of the surface essence of the country. There's a LOT more to say about South Africa, of course - it's an incredibly complex country and you probably need to have lived through its recent history to have any real insight into what people have experienced, and suffered, and you probably need to be a historian or a sociologist to address the big themes - so anything beyond superficiality is well outside my knowledge and ability - and this format.

So enough. I don't like blogs that just stop without explanation, or stutter into silence with a few final random posts - and this one was heading that way - so let this be a full stop. Thanks for visiting, and thanks especially to the few who came regularly to check on me.

"Go well", as they say in South Africa.

Above: jacaranda trees I can see from my balcony.

A lesson from the Minister

The Botswana Daily News of 30 August carried a front page story about a visit to Kasane, in the far north of the country, by the Assistant Minister for Public Administration, Mr. Masisi. The Minister told residents that they could help to eradicate poverty by ceasing to expect handouts from government and that they should become more autonomous by setting up businesses such as bee keeping, vegetable production and fishery, "among others".

The residents responded that they found it difficult to make a living in such a fashion because there was a chronic water shortage in Kasane so vegetables didn't grow, while requests to government for new plots of land took more than five years to clear; they also had problems with wild animals and annual floods destroying any crops they planted. The Minister answered these objections by saying that residents should irrigate their back yards "with used household water and to desist from washing their cars using hosepipes in order to save water". So there. Just how many Kasane residents actually own cars isn't stated; and the journalist's personal views on the Minister's advice are not given.

Gabarone

I had a quick business trip to Botswana - the capital, Gabarone, is just down the road by African standards - a mere 50 minute flight. Botswana is one of the success stories of the continent - the fastest growing economy in the world from 1966 to 2005, mainly due to the discovery of diamonds - but more than that, a governing class that resisted the robber baron mentality of many of their neighbours and ploughed a lot of that wealth into schools, hospitals, and employment. In 1970 GDP per head was 200 dollars, only 2% of the population completed elementary school, there were 100 University students, and there was a single paved road 12 kilometres long. Now the GDP is over 14,000 dollars per head and adult literacy is now 74% against a subSaharan average of 58%. There is also very little crime, a wonderful and relaxing contrast to Botswana's delinquent southern neighbour. However, there are some big clouds on the horizon - the diamond fields are expected to dry up within ten or fifteen years, there's very little other industry to speak of, and arable land is a mere 0.7% of the total - most of the territory is dominated by the Kalahari desert.

I didn't see much of Botswana - just the road from the airport and the pedestrian street in the centre - the latter, oddly enough, reminded me of the pedestrian areas in provincial Eastern European towns: grim institutional architecture, large open spaces covered in large flagstones with no provision for trees, and people using these spaces to sell a motley variety of goods, from shoes to vegetables to CDs to crafts to clothing - but with no attempt at pressure salesmanship or indeed any salesmanship at all - take it or leave it; this is also relaxing and refreshing.

Drakensburg revisited

Although Johannesburg is a vast, sprawling city - sixty kilometres across - with lots of green spaces, the restrictions on walking make it feel claustrophobic. (Whether these limitations are really necessary or just paranoid wimpishness is another matter - lots of people do go walking in public parks etc but the sense of background risk is always there - muggings certainly do happen, and recently there's been a spate of mountain bike hijacking - so you're not necessarily safe even on a fast bike...) A lot of Joburg residents must share this claustrophobia, because on any weekend, and particularly a long weekend, there's a vast exodus for those who have vehicles and can afford it - which brings another level of risk to all involved, as SA has some of the worst traffic fatality statistics in the world, mostly due to extraordinarly dangerous driving (I've learned to keep a careful eye on any car I overtake as casual drifting across lanes is not uncommon.) But once you get off the major motorways you're very soon in rural SA which is another reality entirely - few cars, few buildings, small sleepy-looking towns, the occasional cluster of "informal housing", baboons at the side of the road (or crossing the road, another hazard), a bush fire now and then - and then, (going south east) at the edge of the flat and rather dull highveld, the spectacular scenery of the Drakensburg mountains.

I've been to Cathedral Peak before - the longer I stay in SA the more I'll revisit places, inevitably, though I'll try not to repeat myself too much in this blog. Here are some more photos. The contrast with city life could hardly be more extreme.

Vegetarians not welcome

Menus in Namibia tend to be weighted towards the carnivorous. Above: pork knuckle "guaranteed at least 800 grams"; "bushman skewer" of ostrich, crocodile, zebra, kudu, and, er.... chicken. We also ate warthog, hartebeest, springbok, gemsbok, impala and er.... snails.

(and yes, I've noticed the contradiction between the previous post and this one: we don't like to see our animals stuffed and hanging on walls, but we don't mind eating them.)

Taxidermy

On the way from the airport to Windhoek you see these extraordinary signs at the side of the road (first three photos) - on the way back we were curious enough to call in - the souvenirs were pretty standard and we only bought a single car sticker - but we were encouraged to visit the taxidermy workshop and sales point, which was a surreal experience: many of the animals we've gone to great lengths to see in their natural habitats had been captured, frozen in position like 3D snapshots - in hyperperfect detail. It was spooky; we agreed that we wouldn't like to be locked in overnight... Would anyone like to buy half of a full-size elephant to stick on your wall?

Walvis Bay - the return

I've blogged about Walvis Bay before - so here are just a few more photos to illustrate again the contrast between the richness of the marine life there and the barreness of the land - it's an amazing moment when you reach the sea after hours of crossing the desert.

Above: the jetty; jellyfish; pelican; dolphins following the boat; humpback whale with its head out of the water; seal colony (all the dots are seals - they bleat constantly like a vast herd of sheep; the bigger colonies can't be approached because of the SMELL); jackal on the beach (the small doggy shape near the water - they prey on seal pups); dolphins in the bay. There are sharks too but we didn't see any.

More desert

Above: rock mountains, sand mountains; the giant nest was built by a colony of social weaver birds - a small bird - the entrances to the individual nests are underneath. "Namib" means "vast", and the Namib desert is considered to be the oldest in the world - 55 million years; visiting it does feel like being transported to an alien, inhospitable, prehistoric world.

Sossusvlei

Back to Namibia for a holiday (yes I know I seem to get lots of holidays, but maybe that's because I flee Joburg every chance I get; the rest of the time I'm working very very hard, honest). We started at one of the main tourist destinations in the Namib desert, Sossusvlei, where you can see red sand dunes up to 300 metres high - and lots of them. Despite its fame, Sossusvlei feels very isolated - you have to drive for about five hours to get there from Windhoek, most of it on dirt roads, and the handful of lodges are clustered around the gate to the national park; once inside the park you drive for another SIXTY kilometres, through a plain bounded by the magnificent red dunes, to get to the actual vleis (there are several) - vleis are salt pans which are nearly always dry - we were told that the last time water was visible was four years ago, and the last time Sossusvlei was a lake was nine years ago.

There aren't many animals - a few gemsbok and steinbok, quite a lot of beetles (which defend themselves either by dashing for the nearest bush, if there is one, or otherwise by putting their heads in the sand and their bottoms in the air, as if they think they're less visible that way) and some birds around the few scrubby trees that manage to survive. The views are truly awe-inspiring, especially when the wind is whipping sand clouds UP the sides of the dunes and spraying them off the tops - you can see how these dunes slowly move in vast solid waves across the desert - and there's a hundred kilometre wide strip of them running for nearly a thousand miles down the Namibian coast. One of the great sights of the world.

Above: luxury tent (including instructions on what to do in a sandstorm - stay inside, and hide in the bathroom if it gets really bad - and the warning that "only minimum services will be provided" during such a storm); view from the tent; desert scenes.

World Cup - some modest proposals

The flags have disappeared off the cars, the media are desperately scraping the bottoms of barrels for the final stories about Spanish celebrations (and profound disappointment for everyone else), and I can gratefully return to ignoring football for another four years. I concede that there were a few exciting moments during the WC, mostly early on, but by the time it got to the final I (and I suspect most non-Europeans) didn't really care who won - and it was pretty dull and unedifying to watch 22 men hack at each other for two hours until eventually, by the laws of statistical probability, the ball went into a net - it hardly mattered which one. Like most of the other games it could've gone either way, and I'm sure that if you replayed the whole WC you'd get a totally different set of results - referee decisions and sheer luck count for as much or more than skill and determination.

The real problem with football, in my view, is that there aren't enough points. I can't think of any other sport in which a single point, struggled for over hours of play, can make the difference between winning and losing. The best side can lose because of a linesman being distracted by a seagull or because the ball happens to hit someone's hand, or someone accidentally gets kicked in a melee in the goalmouth. This is ridiculous. The game cries out for drastic reform. Football would be much fairer and far more interesting if there were more points. I therefore offer the following suggestions to improve the game of football and make the next World Cup more worthy of attention:

- have a points system for everything that happens: ten points for a goal, one point for a free kick, two points for a corner. Minus two for a foul, minus four for a penalty, minus one for spitting. Two points for actually dribbling with the ball (rather than just dribbling) and passing an opponent. Show the running total on the scoreboard for everyone to see.

- admit that football is a contact sport. Allow the players to crash into each other, cut each other down, hold on to each other's shorts and shirts. Let play go on, no stoppages. The players can wear body armour if they want, it's up to them - rugby players don't seem to need it and don't complain nearly as much.

- get rid of the offside rule. It'll be a tactical decision how many players hang around in each goal mouth; it's the same for each team, so completely fair. Only the goalkeepers would complain, because there'd be more goals. That's the point, we want more goals. (Alternatively, wire up the pitch so that any player running offside gets a faint electric shock; there'd be no more forward passing to players in an offside position, because they'd be writhing on the ground, incapacitated.)

- widen the goal; make it twice as wide.

- have a wild ball now and then, i.e. throw an extra ball on the pitch at random moments, like in pinball. That would keep the players on their toes. And we'd get more goals.

- have a random period of five minutes when the referee and linesmen can join in the game on the side they prefer - on the same side or different sides, as they like.

- equip the spectators with paintguns and two paintballs each - one green and one red. They can shoot the green ball at their favourite player and the red ball at the player they hate most. At the end of the game the player covered with the most green paint gets a reward, the player with the most red paint is banned from the next five games. (This would also encourage all players to keep running, all the time, to present a more difficult target.)

I'm thinking of applying for Seth Blatter's job - with the set of suggestions above I could transform the game of football into something actually worth watching.

Elephant makeup

Above - an elephant at Dave's waterhole carefully applies some muddy water eyeliner and walks off, apparently satisfied with the results.

Bush camp

The first game reserve I went to was Timbavati, a part of the Kruger. Last week I went back to Timbavati and stayed in a bush camp - a more rugged version of the lodges, many of which offer five-star service, including jacuzzis and high-tech heating units. The bush camp offers something different - no heating at all, for example, minimal lighting (running off of solar-powered batteries), and a bathroom tacked on to the back of your tent, which makes for refreshing dawn ablutions when the temperature is not far above zero.

The approach to seeing the game is also different - the morning excursion is a walk, rather than a drive, which leads to the usual nervousness when you hear a buffalo coughing close by; and if the guides hear a lion or an elephant not too far away during the day they'll invite you to hop into the range rover and go and take a look at it. The senior guide, Dave, who is the owner of the camp and an extreme wildlife enthusiast, also took us out at lunchtime to sit at the edge of the local waterhole for a couple of hours and watch whatever was coming and going. At one point we saw a lone elephant which was walking along the side of the lake stop short, clearly startled, - and a tail disappearing into the trees - it was a large male lion which had been lazily sitting in the shade, also watching whatever was coming and going, including us. Dave told us to jump onto the vehicle - not for safety, as I thought at first, but to follow the lion.

Dave is planning to build a "sleeping platform" at the waterhole this year - so his visitors can sleep out under the stars and watch whatever comes and goes through the night. This sounds great - I'll go back when the platform's ready.

Above: leopard; leopards in trees (we parked next to them; they were two metres away, at head level); the lion that watched us sitting all unaware at the waterhole; a lilac breasted roller; forty elephants at the waterhole; the tent; bush bathroom; the waterhole at sunset.

Italian disaster

Pace the debate about whether the WC should have been held in South Africa at all, I dismounted from my moral high horse when the event got underway - and went to Ellis Park yesterday to sit in the blazing sunshine (in my corner) and watch the world champions (of football) get knocked out of the competition. Frankly they deserved it - for the entire first half of the game they all seemed too tired - or too old - to run. By the time they woke up it was too late - Slovakia felt pumped up and confident and kept knocking in goals.

The atmosphere before the game was better than the match itself - lots of fans had dressed up and painted their faces, and the sponsors offered various activities in and outside their mini-pavilions, so there was music (Coca-Cola) and dancing (Sony) and face-painting (Visa) and gimmicks like being allowed to sign one of the biggest footballs ever made (Hyundai). When the game started the chanting of the Italian fans behind us was louder than the vuvuzelas, but after the first Slovakian goal they went very quiet apart from occasional bursts of scurrilous abuse directed at the Slovak goalkeeper - who did in fact seem to feign an injury every time he was touched.

I was struck by how small the field seemed compared to how you see it on TV; and how it was impossible at times to understand what was happening on the pitch (in my corner we all had a fit of collective joy at the Italian equaliser - only to realise eventually, when there was a goalkick, that it had been disallowed); and I was also struck by how slow all the players seemed to be - but perhaps that was just the ponderous pace set by the lethargic Italians. Going to see a World Cup match was certainly worth doing once, but on balance I'd say football is better on TV - you can change channel or go and make a cup of tea if it gets too boring.