WH in SA

The last post

2010-10-17T08:48:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-03T13:22:00.001-07:00

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

2010-09-03T13:04:00.001-07:00

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

2010-08-28T22:21:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-27T10:17:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-27T09:52:00.001-07:00

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

2010-07-23T03:08:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-22T00:28:00.001-07:00

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

2010-07-21T23:35:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-12T21:57:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-26T20:27:00.000-07:00

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

Bush camp

2010-06-26T10:38:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-24T23:53:00.000-07:00

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.

World Cup fever humbug

2010-05-26T12:42:00.000-07:00

The World Cup (of football, in case you're wondering) is nearly upon South Africa - the first African country ever to host this juggernaut of commercialisation and proxy patriotism. There aren't many public signs yet of popular enthusiasm for this spectacle - in the past couple of weeks the vendors at traffic-lights have started selling WC paraphernalia, and quite a lot of people have bought little SA flags to fly on their cars - but otherwise it seems to be only the official sponsors who are attempting to whip up emotions with lots of advertising. The football extravaganza appears to be a good reason to drink beer, make telephone calls, use your visa card, and so on - in other words to do everything you're usually exhorted to do, but even more so.

On the other hand, entire categories of people are not happy with the World Cup being held in SA, or rather they're not happy with the money being spent on it when SA has economic and social problems which in any objective scale are far more worthy of attention and investment. Recently the transport workers and municipal employees have been striking for better wages, while the national union of miners is threatening to follow suit and pitch the country into darkness just when the floodlights need to stay on for the football; and soldiers are threatening to abandon the borders and let thousands of foreigners stream across to gatecrash the party. An increasing number of communities have been staging "service delivery protests", in which they block roads, burn government buildings, stone the police, etc., to draw attention to the fact that they have limited running water, poor sanitation, no electricity in some cases, and generally a very low standard of living, partly due to the government's failure to provide basic utilities and housing. None of this is new, but all of these groups particularly object to the money being spent on the World Cup. As one young woman expressed it, "How can they find the money to build stadiums but not libraries?"

It might not be so bad if a case could be made that the new stadiums will provide jobs and generate income in the future, or will at least serve their communities in useful ways. But it's already clear that most of them will fail to cover their running costs when the WC is over; they're likely to go bankrupt pretty quickly. SA has so far spent some 2.6 billion dollars on new stadiums - ten in nine cities; only three of these have a local football club which could help to cover costs in the future. The stadiums in smaller cities don't even have transport infrastructures to get people to the gates when the World Cup is over - presuming that there'll be any events to go and see.

SA has made great efforts to be generous hosts for the WC, and the event itself will probably be a success - but six weeks from now it could well begin to strike home that an awful lot of money has simply been wasted in the name of national pride - and for a few games of football.

The names

2010-05-19T12:07:00.000-07:00

It struck me when I first got here that the majority of place names in Johannesburg sound very British: immediately around where I live you can find Sandton, Hyde Park, Kew, Waverley, Melrose, Craighall, Parkhurst, and Greenside. Here and there across the city are Afrikaans names: Strijdom, Bloubosrand, Klippoortje, Weltevreden, Braamfontein, Roodepoort. You have to look a lot harder for names in African languages, and these are mostly in Soweto: Jabulani, Moroka, Mofolo, Naledi, Zondi.

All of these names have their own charm - but the distribution shows that the very naming of South Africa, like so many things here, is still very much marked by the colonialist and apartheid past; names are far from neutral. There are moves to change this: the city of Pretoria has officially been renamed Tshwane - although it will take a long time to change all the street signs and the maps, let alone what people call the city when they talk about it. The larger metropolitan area of Durban is called eThekwini, while Polokwane used to be Pietersburg. A whole long stretch of the R24 in Johannesburg is being renamed Albertina Sisulu Road, replacing some eighteen other street names including Market Street and Main Reef Road. A lot of the changes commemorate heroes of the struggle against racial discrimination: Pretoria Hospital became Stephen Bantu Biko Hospital; Coronation Hospital became Rahima Moosa Mother and Child Hospital, and Johannesburg Hospital is now Charlotte Maxeke Hospital. This all seems fair and laudable, although some lament the loss of history for the sake of political correctness, and many criticise the cost of changing street signs, municipal stationary, etc, when the money could be better spent on schools and health care etc.

And some see the funny side: a radio advert for the TomTom GPS navsat device features someone stopping to ask for directions, to be told: "Take this first left on Sekoto which used to be Becker Road, then the second right on Mahlahtini which was once Robin Avenue, then go straight on when it changes to Ntemi Piliso, the street formerly known as Prince."

Rock art

2010-05-05T10:35:00.000-07:00

Long before the European colonialists arrived, the San people were living a fairly hand to mouth existence in SA - and producing some astonishing art. The oldest wall paintings found so far are some 3,600 years old - not as old as European stone age art, but apparently that's because the conditions for preserving the paint - and the rock - are better in Europe. However, the San produced thousands of these paintings - there are hundreds of sites all over SA and undoubtedly there are more to be found. These paintings continued to be produced well into the colonial age - perhaps into the late nineteenth century - in the 1930s elderly San people were able to show researchers some of the painting techniques they'd learnt as children. The paintings are usually found under overhanging rock faces, and analysis of the composition of the paint reveals strange mixtures of minerals, plant juices and blood - suggesting that the paintings played a part in religion and ritual. The mythology, however, is largely lost - the usual fate of a civilisation without writing. It's fascinating to speculate about the meanings of these paintings, beyond the obvious representational significance.

In Welgevonden I saw my first cave painting site, in a beautiful location with a view of a valley. There was a small sign saying that the paintings had been inspected by someone from Wits University and that they were "several hundred years old" - and therefore they shouldn't be touched. I took a couple of photos as above which didn't come out too well - so to give you an idea of how spectacular these paintings can be I've added some others I found on the internet - see if you can tell the difference.

Check out this site if you want to see more.

Welgevonden - other animals

2010-05-01T01:29:00.001-07:00

Welgevonden is a new reserve - created in 1993 - and is relatively large - 40,000 hectares - so in trade jargon it's "not yet at its carrying capacity", which means there aren't many animals for its size. This can be frustrating, as you sometimes drive for quite a long time without seeing anything except trees and bushes and a few examples of the disparagingly named "general game" (e.g. zebras, wildebeest, impala, waterbuck - all considered to be beneath comment back at the lodge). For example, the reserve has 120 elephants but we didn't see a single one.

On the other hand you never know what you will find - a fledgling black chested prinia flew into the land rover at one point and stunned itself - it flew off again a few minutes later. At one point we were hurtling along a track and I saw a large cat right next to the road, not moving- it took a moment for it to occur to me that this was actually an odd place for a cat to be - I shouted out, we stopped the vehicle and reversed - it was a caracal, a type of lynx, which was hunting some birds a few metres away. Cat and birds ignored us for a couple of minutes, then the caracal got bored and wandered away. I found out later that this sighting was extremely rare - the ranger had only ever seen one once before, and some of the South Africans at the lodge had never seen one in decades of visiting game reserves - and we'd nearly run over it.

Above: prinia, caracal, eagle owl, lions, giraffe, young exemplar of general game hardly worth noticing - but beautiful.

Chameleon hunting

2010-04-30T23:38:00.000-07:00

Last week I went to Welgevonden game reserve in the Waterberg, three hours' drive north of Joburg - and therefore practically next door, in terms of SA distances; and yes I know I've said in earlier posts that I've already been on enough game drives to last me the rest of my life, but at least it's a way to get out of the city and see some countryside - the animals are a collateral bonus - and once I'm there I find I can't resist the five a.m. wake-up call (someone blowing a kudu horn, in this case) to go on the dawn drives.

Our ranger, Dean, happened to mention that there were a lot of chameleons in Welgevonden. This is perhaps my favourite creature in the whole of existence so I asked if he could find us one. "Difficult," he said, and that seemed to be the end of it it, but then on the evening drive Dean was shining a lamp around while driving (a talent that all rangers have to develop) and he suddenly stopped the land rover, jumped out, crashed through the bush for twenty-five metres, and came back with a flap-necked chameleon. I'd already been impressed by this ability to spot chameleons in the dark during my first ever game drive in the Kruger, and I asked Dean how he did it. The secret is, he said, that chameleons don't bother to camouflage themselves at night-time and revert to their "at rest" colouring, which is the beautiful bright green you see above. If they're hiding in a tree with dark green leaves they'll stand out as the lamp passes over them as brighter patch against the background. This is the theory - however Dean found another chameleon the next night, closer to the road, and even with the lamp shining full on the tree I couldn't see it. I'll need a few more lessons before I can become a successful chameleon hunter.

The long Easter

2010-04-24T22:30:00.000-07:00

A break in the blog.... I had an extra week in the UK due to the venomous volcano and got back to a rainy, autumnal Joburg yesterday.

Hlane

2010-03-27T05:09:00.000-07:00

Caught up with Kenya.... and last weekend I went back to Swaziland, this time to Hlane reserve - where there's no electricity except a modicum for the restaurant provided by solar powered batteries - the restaurant closes promptly at eight o'clock and everyone goes to bed. The thatch-roofed cottages are lit with paraffin lamps and there's nowhere to recharge a phone or camera batteries - life before electricity must've been tough. You can hear lions roaring not that far away but they're behind a fence, in theory (although a waiter told me the fence had come down in a storm a few nights earlier - so how good a fence can it be?). You're woken in the morning by impala coughing gently as they graze the grass outside your front door.

Guides take you on bush walks (armed with a knobkerry, which is another version of a short stick). I'm starting to vastly prefer walking to driving in a land rover, because you see more detail and you never know what you're going to stumble across - in Hlane we stumbled at one point upon a rhino, a mere six metres or so away with nothing between us except some scrubby bushes and thin trees. The guide held up his hand, which is the signal to stop, and we stood watching the rhino for five very long minutes - and the rhino stood watching us, turning its head from side to side to get a better view. Then the guide eventually beckoned us away. This was exhilirating. I suppose the guides know their animals and don't take undue risks with their customers, but it certainly felt very different from looking at a rhino in a zoo. I didn't take any photos because I found that I wanted quite strongly to stay focused on what the rhino was doing and be completely ready to run if necessary; recording the experience became very much a secondary consideration.

Above: impala, insects, plants, hippo skull, two hippo skulls.

Witchcraft - performance assessment

2010-03-26T22:22:00.000-07:00

According to an article in the Nairobi Standard, witchdoctors are sometimes held accountable for their work - in West Pokot district a few days ago a witchdoctor ended up in hospital after being beaten up for failing to perform as promised. Two boys from his village had paid him to help them pass their school leaving exams, forking over thirty thousand Kenyan shillings - about 280 euros - for his services. The witchdoctor gave them some herbs "and other black substances" to eat before each paper. The boys had full confidence in this procedure, apparently without reference to what they actually wrote down in the exams - they told their friends and parents that they'd performed brilliantly. Their actual results, however, were dire. When they learned how badly they'd done one fainted while the other one "screamed for help" - a mob gathered and duly went off to punish the witchdoctor - not for being a bogus old fraud who preyed on the gullibility of young men but because his charms had failed to deliver the goods. No criticism of the young men themselves is stated or implied - one of them is quoted as saying "We could not compare our lives to the money he wanted. Good academic performance would shape our lives forever." But surely... if the witchcraft had worked... it would have been cheating?

Above: random photos from Kenya.

Lake Elementaita

2010-03-26T11:45:00.000-07:00

Lake Naivasha is a fresh water lake. Flamingos prefer salt water, apparently, so I drove for another hour or so to Lake Elementaita which is somehow salty although nowhere near the sea (but then why are seas salty anyway? This has always been a mystery to me. Rain is never salty, and you'd think that a few billion years of rainfall would have resulted in fresh water everywhere. But then what do I know?). When we got to Lake Elementaita the guide said that it wasn't a good day for seeing flamingos - the water level was low and there weren't very many of them. But there were several thousand, which by my standards is a lot of flamingos. The lake is very shallow and they were standing way out in the middle of the lake; so I've had a better view of flamingos in Joburg zoo - but then again it was impressive to see so many of them, in an environment that they'd chosen - up to their skinny little knees in muddy, salty, smelly water.

Crescent Island

2010-03-23T12:13:00.000-07:00

On one side of Naivasha Lake there's a wildlife sanctuary called Crescent Island, which isn't an island any more - the water level has fallen over the years and now it's a wide land bridge with parts of the lake on either side. A guide will take you on a long walk which is quite magical - there are lots of ruminants and they're pretty used to human pedestrians, so you can be surrounded by zebra, giraffes, galloping wildebeest (who seem to spend a lot of time running around to no particular purpose), gazelles, waterbucks, umpteen bird species etc.

There are also pythons - I didn't see a full grown one, which can grow to several metres, but the guide showed me a nest of newly-hatched babies - a mere foot or so long. The English woman who lives on the island in a beautiful cottage and collects the visitors' fees (she's been in Kenya since 1970 and has "seen a few changes") said that her daughter's dog had been eaten by a python- they don't hunt, exactly, but they lurk in the undergrowth and whack any passing small mammal with their powerful tails, stunning or injuring it, then they twine around and crush the victim, breaking all the bones - then they cleverly dislocate their jaws so they can swallow it whole; then they'll lay dormant for a couple of months, digesting. I asked the guide if the mother of the baby pythons would still be around. Yes, he said, she'd be nearby somewhere. Was he sure, I asked, that they never attacked humans? Not usually, he said, but if I tripped and, say, broke my ankle, a large python might become interested and make a stab at swallowing me, after salivating copiously all over me to make me slip down more easily. I really must stop asking guides questions.

Above: Maribu storks; baby python; demonstration of the circumference of an adult python using a shed skin; live trees; a dead tree riddled with woodpecker holes; wildebeest playing their favourite game of running in a circle for no particular reason.

Lake Naivasha

2010-03-22T10:45:00.000-07:00

At Sopa lodge at Lake Naivasha, about a hundred kilometres north-west of Nairobi, you can ask a guard to accompany you down to the edge of the lake (the guard is needed to keep you away from buffalo and hippos, rather than vice-versa: buffalo and hippos can pretty much go where they want) and you can watch flocks of pelicans heading home, or somewhere, at sunset. Hippos semi-submerged in the shallows seem to share a joke now and then, making a deep "nyah nyah nyah" trumpet-like noise which they apparently produce through their nostrils. Animals of all sorts wander around the unfenced lodge, including monkeys, giraffes, various types of antelope, and - at night - hippos as well, who come out of the water to graze in the dark.

The guards - who accompany you to and from your room - are equipped to protect you with: a short stick - this is Kenya, after all, so there's none of the nonsense you get in the Kruger with large-bore rifles at the ready. I asked one of the guards about how effective a short stick would be against a charging hippo. "If you start running," I said, "Should I follow you?" "No," he said, "I'll be trying to distract the animal. You run in the opposite direction." Then he laughed. I still don't know if he meant it.

Above: the lake; yellow fever trees - a type of acacia (the bark really is yellow and somewhat furry - if you rub it the fur comes off and it's a beautiful lime green underneath; years ago people thought it caused yellow fever, but this is only because it tends to grow in swampy areas where mosquitoes breed; but the name stuck. Give a tree a bad name...); giraffes on the path; Colobus monkeys - which hang around outside windows, hoping for free food; pelicans on the lake.

Hell's Gate

2010-03-18T13:35:00.000-07:00

I popped over to Kenya for the weekend. Not really - it's a four hour plane trip so hardly a hop - but I needed to go for work so went a couple of days early and explored the country north of Nairobi. I expected it to be very hot, being on the equator - but the weather was perfect, warm but with a breeze and a refreshing temperature drop in the evening - Nairobi is at 1,800 metres so even higher up than Joburg. March to May is a rainy season and the countryside was very green - and the drop into the Rift Valley as you travel north-west out of Nairobi is spectacular.

First stop was Hell's Gate national park, an area containing two extinct volcanoes and some impressive evidence of volcanic activity - there are chunks of obsidian littered all over the place and some thick seams in the rock formations. A guide takes you along Hell's Gate itself, a gorge - full length 17 kilometres. There are signs warning you to "watch out for flash floods" - according to the guide you have about an hour to get out of the way before the water starts roaring through - plenty of time, unless of course it rains somewhere upstream and you don't notice in time. The gorge is still very much being formed - at one point you can see graffiti scratched into the rock several metres above you which includes the date 1989, which is not so long ago. The gorge walk is great fun - amazing scenery and lots of detail to check out, such as steaming hot springs supporting neon green algae and the occasional leech easing through the muddy shallows.

Above: the rift valley; the gorge.

Swazi Booty

2010-02-27T02:33:00.000-08:00

My fascination with souvenir shops continues.

Above: Swazi ankle bracelets worn while dancing (each pod is formed by an insect laying an egg on a tree - don't know what insect - the pods are collected, the larvae removed, a seed inserted, and the pod sewn up again - the anklets make a wonderful liquid percussive noise when shaken); metal rhino; bead sheep - I love the way these sheep have gaps between the bead spirals - they're like models of complex molecules with heads and tails stuck on.

More Swazi

2010-02-25T08:55:00.000-08:00

Above: it's true about the dung beetles; spider; traditional beehive hut - fun concept but no windows - to decline if offered as accomodation; road transport without seatbelts; sausage tree (each sausage a foot long); a cleaner lake than the one next to the camp.

House on Fire

2010-02-24T11:08:00.000-08:00

Near Mlilwane is House on Fire - a "cultural meeting point" / concert venue / hotel / imaginative folly which is good fun and which is a world away from the rustic African idyll of the rest camp. Their web site will give you a flavour of the sort of place it is. I had lunch there and admired the sculptures by Shadrack - which are for sale but at a pretty hefty price. When I'm a millionaire and have a big house to put them in I'll go back and buy the lot.

Mlilwane

2010-02-23T08:56:00.000-08:00

I went to Swaziland again at the weekend and stayed in the "rest camp" in the Mlilwane game reserve - which claims to be the oldest reserve in the Kingdom. Many of the wild animals in the reserve have certainly got used to humans - the camp is unfenced and warthogs, impala, zebra, ostriches, monkeys and guinea fowl all wander in and around in a very relaxed manner. The cabins are made of thin planks of woods so it's quite possible to be woken up in the middle of the night by a duiker (a small antelope) coughing next to your head - a strange sound half way between a cough and a dry heave. The restaurant has a veranda next to a murky green lake much visited by ibis, egrets and herons - a tree has been sunk next to the railing to stop guests leaning out to feed the crocodiles - I though this was a joke at first, then a waiter threw some bread over the railing to prove his point - there was a roiling of fish and then sure enough a small croc shot out from under the veranda and chomped very fast on something - a fish sandwich maybe.

There are no lions or leopards in Mlilwane (they say) so it's considered safe to walk or rent a bicycle to get around, which is very pleasant compared to the standard game reserve experience of being thrown around on a land rover for hours on end. However, there are hippos in the reserve, and they're responsible for most of the human fatalities in Africa - the advice, if a hippo faces you and seems to be working up to a charge, is to get behind a tree, even a small one - hippos are very myopic and they can't jump, so they only tend to charge across flat land - if they can still see you. What you should do if there aren't any trees around isn't clear; although perhaps the Mlilwane hippos are so used to human visitors that they can't be bothered to charge them any more. Anyway, I didn't see any hippos at all - and I managed not to fall into the lake while slipping bread to the crocodiles; so here I still am.

Above: ostrich at the camp fire; vervet monkeys on a wall; the murky lake (note the egrets in the tree - the white dots); a blue duiker; a warthog - they often get down on their knees to graze, which seems to be a fairly serious design flaw - why don't they have longer necks? or shorter legs, for that matter.

Plague and demons

2010-02-10T09:43:00.000-08:00

I've just finished an excellent book about the AIDS epidemic in SA, Three-Letter Plague by Jonny Steinberg - this was recommended to me by my friend Charles who runs a wonderful blog over here (and who is himself a brilliant fiction writer - do buy his books!)

Steinberg's book is about a Medecins Sans Frontieres attempt to set up an antiretroviral treatment programme in a poor village in rural Transkei - but it's even more about a local man's reluctance to be tested for HIV and Steinberg's attempts to understand this reluctance. It'd be pointless to try to summarise the whole book here - I suggest you read it - but it goes a long way to explaining the gap between African traditions and what people like me take for granted about modern health care. There's a tension in the fact that the author is white and the protagonist is black - but this is addressed directly at various points, and perhaps it's helpful in some ways for a white South African to act as an interpreter of African culture for an ignorant white Englishman like me.

I found much of the book very uncomfortable reading - the narrative about the AIDS epidemic itself (one in eight people in SA are HIV positive; 800 South Africans die of AIDS every day) and the various obstacles that health workers have to overcome or fail to overcome; but also the accounts of magic and witchcraft which are an integral part of rural culture in SA. I have almost no tolerance towards religion and mysticism in any form at all, and I'd willingly go ten rounds with any Christian, so there's no reason for me to expect myself to tolerate superstition any more in African culture - but then this clashes with a willingness to try to respect the beliefs of people whose views are different from mine - shouldn't I suspend my cynicism towards a culture I know very little about, at least initially? However this sort of thing astounds and repels me:

- babies sleep badly because they're sensitive to evil spirits; the dead can visit you in your dreams and ask you to perform rituals for them; envious neighbours can cast spells to make demons visit you while you're asleep and force you to eat raw meat or have sex with them; epilepsy is caused by demons who attack their victims from within their bodies; the tikoloshe demon is a foot tall, has an old man's face and a long beard, and his penis is so long he carries it over his shoulder - he is visible to children and the adults he has sex with - he's willing to murder the enemies of his human lovers; the impundulu appears as a handsome young man and seduces women when they're alone; and so forth.

Steinberg writes, "I was struck for the first time by the full weight of what it means to live in a magical world... in which the gap between ill wishes and the means to fulfill them closes. Those who wish to ruin you can do so by little more than wanting it."

My own reaction is: what nonsense, what ignorance. But my response is certainly very limited, as these beliefs are apparently still central to the social and psychological reality of people in rural areas here - astonished rejection isn't going to help understanding. The relation between a belief in witchcraft and attitudes towards AIDS is complex and indirect and again I won't attempt to summarise it here - but Steinberg's book challenges all sorts of (Western) assumptions on all sorts of levels - which is a rare and worthwhile achievement for any book.

Zuma's twentieth

2010-02-06T23:04:00.000-08:00

I'm still struggling - and will go on struggling - to understand the cultural complexities of this country. The other evening I had a lesson in the distance from continental Europe in regard to the private morality of public citizens:

For the past couple of weeks the media have been full of the story of President Zuma fathering a child out of wedlock with the daughter of an old friend of his - the old friend didn't know about this relationship before the news broke (and the mother, Sonono Khoza, bizarrely tried to deny the existence of the baby in the first place). This seems to be one too many sexual relationships for most people - after all, Zuma already has four current wives and 19 children, and the ANC has been working hard to defend its leader's hyperactive sex life as a perfectly acceptable embodiment of traditional Zulu cultural values. However, Zuma was already living under the shadow of a rape trial from four years ago - he was found innocent - and the latest bulletin on his sex life seems to have tipped the balance of public opinion - his polygamy starts to seem like a post-hoc justification for just not being able to keep it in his pants. Another unfortunate detail for Zuma is that the ANC Youth League launched - the day after the story broke - an anti-HIV/AIDS campaign with the slogan "one boyfriend, one girlfriend" to encourage all South Africans everywhere to stick to one partner and use condoms (Zuma clearly failing on both counts with Sonono).

Until now Zuma himself has seemed to be relaxed and confident about his polygamy - he's said in public fora that he feels it's more moral to acknowledge multiple relationships and legalise them rather than follow the Western custom of having secret affairs (possibly with a dig at a certain French president who was an unacknowledged polygamist, and an American president who famously didn't have sex with a woman who nevertheless had sex with him). The latest scandal rather undermines Zuma's earlier position.

The other evening I was was having dinner with a group of South African teachers who asked me at one point what I thought of the Zuma story. Partly to be polite, I said that his private affairs had, perhaps, little bearing on his political ability, and that the ultimate judgement should be about whether he's helping to solve SA's many problems. But this was a European view. The teachers all disagreed with me - Zuma was a public figure and he needed to set an example in everything he did; his disregard for public opinion about his private life was a reflection of his arrogance, etc. The conversation continued and at one point Zuma was compared - very negatively - with the saintly Mandela, and I finally realised that what's underlying the apparently prurient public obsession with Zuma's sex life is a deep concern that Zuma represents a massive falling away from the high ideals of the old ANC and the great optimism generated by the fall of apartheid. Many South Africans are dismayed by the lost opportunities of the past twenty years - and they feel that politicians like Zuma are much to blame. Zuma's personal peccadilloes are symptomatic of a much wider malaise - he's now embarrassing his electorate on top of disappointing them, and even those who started off wanting to give him the benefit of the doubt are not in the mood to forgive him for the fling too far.

Dassie dung data danger

2010-01-31T05:13:00.000-08:00

I blogged before about the crystallised urine and poo from dassies, the large guinea-pig-like creatures, being used in perfumes. Well as if that isn't weird enough, a battle of words (and possibly resources) has broken out between"foreign" perfume manufacturers, who are placing orders for TONS of South African dassiepis (sic), and cash-strapped researchers at the University of Cape Town who regard the middens of dassies as invaluable sources of information about biodiversity. These dassie toilets - some of which are half a metre deep and go back forty thousand years - contain the pollen of plants that passed through the dassies of the time, and according to the scientists "you can work out migrations of species and climatic conditions - it's an essential archive to help us understand better the impacts of future climate change". So what's it to be - dassiepis dabbed behind your ear, or scrutinised under a microscope to help save the planet?

Space invaders

2010-01-31T04:51:00.000-08:00

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I've never been particularly interested in gardening, but when I moved into my flat I bought a few pot plants for the balcony, just because it looked so empty. This summer has been extremely wet - storms nearly every day - which has meant that I haven't needed to worry much about watering these plants, they've grown like mad things all on their own. The pots have also been invaded by a variety of other species. I rip out the bigger weeds when they start to outgrow the original occupants, but each pot now sports a rich undergrowth which is too much trouble to get rid of.

I've never seen birds paying any attention to my pot plants, so all of these visitors presumably arrived through the air - which just goes to show how efficient plants are at propagating themselves - one has even taken up residence in a crack in the side of the building - and this is a new build. But on the other hand I was watching a DVD of the BBC Life series the other evening and David Attenborough pointed out that plants have been around for half a billion years - so they know a thing or two about moving into available spaces.

Muti killings

2010-01-12T22:04:00.000-08:00

A big story in the SA media at the moment is about the disappearance of an eleven-year old girl from her home near Pretoria on New Year's eve - her mutilated body has just been found. Police are investigating possible links to at least three other disappearances. These things happen all over the world, of course, unfortunately, but in this case the motive for this unimaginably despicable crime appears at least partly to have been for muti killing - that is, the harvesting of body parts for use in witchcraft. The news stories say that a suspect has been arrested who is already known to have sold human body parts to a sangoma - a traditional healer; body parts are considered to be extremely powerful, apparently, when used in witchcraft rituals of various kinds.

These African words aren't translated into English in the media - they're part of the SA vocabulary, as the practice of muti using body parts is well known across Africa, and related crimes happen fairly frequently. Journalists universally condemn the practice - but I heard on a radio phone-in programme the other day, chillingly, that the police find it difficult to investigate these crimes because it's considered "bad luck" to even talk about muti, let alone help the police in their enquiries.

Happy new year!

2010-01-09T06:09:00.000-08:00

Back - I had a wonderful holiday in Italy, thanks, how was your holiday if you had one? - now I'm back to work and to a very rainy South African summer - not hot at all, so far, but no snow either so it could be worse. I still have to tune in to my SA persona, it feels odd to be split across continents again.

Above: Smart like a Christmas tree; one of the best cappuccini in the world; Roman sunset.

Summer holiday

2009-12-14T12:48:00.000-08:00

I'm away for a while. Please come back in January.

Tiger vs. skinny bird with silly haircut

2009-12-10T09:54:00.000-08:00

I took this odd clip at the Lino Park: you've heard of alien vs predator, shark vs bear, Brown vs. Cameron - well here's tiger versus what would normally be a small snack, one would think. Of course tigers are not native to Africa, so it could be that the bird is just too bird-brained to be instinctively terrified. Or perhaps they've become good friends through long incarceration in adjacent pens and they were just chatting through the wire like they do every day.

Can anyone name the bird species?

More animals

2009-12-08T09:54:00.000-08:00

... a few pix from recent excursions; nowhere new, just the usual zoo and Lino Park (that's Rhino and Lion Park, conflated). I don't even know what they all are - what's the giant rat-like thing?

Killing a bull

2009-12-08T08:58:00.000-08:00

Over the past couple of weeks there's been a big public debate (or is it really a media debate?) about a Zulu ritual called ukweshwama, in which a newly accredited regiment of some forty young men are obliged to kill an adult bull with their bare hands. Exactly how they did this was a bit murky, as the ceremony is sacred and so external observers are not allowed. However, Animal Rights Africa recently managed to get hold of some details and some photos, which showed that the bull is treated pretty badly for a while (eyes gouged, tongue ripped out, genitals manhandled, etc.) before eventually having its neck broken; ARA then presented a legal action in a SA High Court to have the ceremony banned. The legal action failed, because the judge accepted the evidence of the Zulus themselves that the bull didn't suffer, much, and their assertion that the ritual was essential to fulfill a cultural requirement, in which the power of the bull is transfered to the neo-warriors and then to the Zulu monarch, King Goodwill Zwelithini (although this reasoning is undermined a bit by the fact that the ritual had fallen into disuse and has recently been revived).

It's difficult to work out what to think about all of this; on the one hand a "modern" "liberal" (and I sometimes like to think I'm one) will decry needless cruelty to animals - it's a clear case, even for meat eaters - we like to think the steak in front of us didn't suffer too much on its way to our plate. On the other hand it also seems right to respect the religions and traditions of others, and it's somehow patronising to assume that "progressive" values are correct and those of traditionalists are wrong. Moreover, as so often in SA, the debate is mixed up with race issues - Zulus weren't allowed to practise their traditions under colonial and then apartheid rule, so if the new South Africa means freedom and tolerance for all cultures, then who is anybody to dictate moral standards to anyone else?

However, there seems to be a line beyond which most people would not accept a cultural practice just because it's a tradition - infibulation, for example, is pretty certainly beyond that line for the vast majority of the human race in the twenty-first century. Perhaps bull-baiting should be over the line too - and perhaps as a European I should be talking to the Spaniards I know about this very issue.

The evening light show

2009-12-05T08:24:00.000-08:00

Most rainfall in South Africa is in the summer, and for the past couple of weeks in Johannesburg this has been delivered by a spectacular storm every evening, generally starting about seven o'clock but sometimes earlier. The rain comes down in bullets - I hear this on my roof, to the extent that conversation or watching TV is impossible over the background roar. At the peak of the storm there's bright cracking forked lighting, generally travelling as normal from the clouds to the earth, but sometimes licking horizontally across the underbelly of the cloud cover. Before, during and after the storm there are all-sky flashes of light which can go on for several hours - this is almost theatrical, like storm effects at the opera. Here are a few seconds from last night:

The rest of the Universe

2009-12-01T08:36:00.000-08:00

Over the past couple of weeks I've been working my way effortfully through a book which was often very difficult (to me at least) but at the same time poetically written and awe-inducing because of its subject matter - is the universe infinite or finite? and if the latter, how might we measure it? The book is How the Universe Got its Spots by Janna Levin, an American astrophysicist or perhaps cosmologist. It's an unusual mixture of personal diary and an attempt to explain the mathematics and topology of the universe to a lay person - her mother, originally. I can't pretend to have understood more than fifty per cent of it, but Levin succeeds in explaining quite a few of the concepts that have eased into popular culture - and corrected a few of my popular misconceptions too. How about this, for example?:

"The big bang is not an explosion in space like a star exploding, where a ring of nebulous material surrounds an identifiable centre. Rather the big bang is the creation of space itself, of time. There is no sense to the question: how long was it before the big bang happened? Time started with the big bang. There is no sense to the question: where did the big bang happen? It happened everywhere. The earth is at the centre in a sense. Every galaxy is at the centre. The centre is everywhere. The first sketch of our universe, its birth, life and death, begins here."

How can the universe be finite? It would be like one of those video games where one edge of the screen is the same as the opposite edge - if you travel in one distance long enough you get back to where you started. More amazingly, Levin suggests that we can measure the distance between these two identical locations in space by comparing the tiny differences that exist in background radiation and matching them up in both directions - mapping the patterns of "spots" to find those that are the same - they would in fact be the same places.

What does this have to do with SA? Not much - except that my flat here in Dunkeld turns out to be the centre of the universe, just like the place where you are now; and one of the pleasures of going to nature reserves in SA is that they're a long way from cities and so there's no light pollution - you can lay on the ground at night and stare up at an astonishingly bright Milky Way - which is the rest of our galazy, seen edge on, consisting of millions of stars; and is one of billions of observable galaxies - the universe might be finite, but it's certainly very BIG. It tests my brain to consider such things even for a few minutes; I can't imagine a life dedicated to investigating the physics - and topology - and spots - of the universe.

Imilongi KaNtu Choral Society

2009-11-29T08:32:00.000-08:00

Today I went to Soweto to see the end of year concert by Imilongi KaNtu Choral Society - a choir that's been going for 25 years and has performed all over the world. It was a marathon event, lasting over three hours and covering an eclectic range of music from Handel and Mozart to local composer S.J. Khosa and traditional chants and dances. The audience joined in and encouraged the performers with whistles, shouts, ululations, applause and hand-waving - and a bit of dancing in the aisles too. Some of the ladies in the audience had also put on their best traditional costumes, so there was a wash of glorious colours across the hall. Great music and a great atmosphere - especially down in the mosh pit.

Joburg Art Deco

2009-11-25T11:13:00.000-08:00

Last night at eleven o'clock I was wandering around Johannesburg's notorious CBD - Central Business District - on foot - an area that most of Joburg's northern suburban population would never dream of entering even in broad daylight (and some areas of which even the police don't go into at night). I felt perfectly safe, though - partly because I was in a group of about eighty people, partly because we had security guards escorting us, and partly because the city centre was absolutely deserted - we saw perhaps half a dozen other pedestrians, a handful of cars (the drivers slowing down to take a look at us) and a couple of rubbish trucks.

The occasion was a workshop for architects that I'm slightly involved in - the French Institute organised a bus tour of the CBD for the workshop participants and any interested members of the public; it was then decided that getting on and off the buses was too complicated, so we ended up taking a ninety-minute walking tour. I've driven through the CBD a number of times during rush hour, which in itself is quite an experience - the roads are snarling gridlock and there are people everywhere - so the night-time tour was an astonishing contrast - I was able to walk down the middle of a major four-lane artery without a vehicle in sight, just a long panorama of traffic lights quietly changing colour to themselves in both directions (and no cars parked in the streets, either - cars are generally not left outside overnight in Joburg...)

We saw a lot of wonderful buildings, some sadly derelict and fenced off behind sheets of corrugated metal, others very well maintained with neat golf-course lawns in front of them (vandalism seems to be nearly unknown here; even tagging, that bane of European cities, is pretty rare). I learned that Johannesburg has the third highest number of Art Deco buildings in the world (after, I think, New York and Miami) - although these buildings are "derivative", mere adaptations of American and European models rather than original - but they still look amazing. All the more extraordinary that most people don't know they're there (I'd never heard anyone talking about CBD architecture before and it's not mentioned in any tourist guide that I've seen) and most people probably wouldn't risk getting out of their cars to take a proper look at them even if they knew. I thoroughly recommend checking them out late at night, just take along a group of 79 friends if you can.

I forgot to take my camera, so to get an idea of what I'm talking about check here to see Lucille Davie's photos (mouse over the thumbnails to see the images). My pathetic mobile phone image is above, over a few Google findings.

Swazi flora

2009-11-17T09:02:00.000-08:00

Personally, I find photographs of flowers boring - and not much of a challenge for the photographer either, the subject is hardly going to run away or object to having its image stolen. On the other hand, the vegetation generally in southern Africa (as I think I've said before) is spectacular - so I can't resist...

(I have no idea what any of these are called - my interest in flowers doesn't run as far as asking about names - the weird tree however was thoughtfully labeled "knobwood" although I think this raises more questions than answers.)

Swaziland fauna

2009-11-16T09:32:00.000-08:00

Swaziland was a British protectorate from 1906 to 1968 and so, like Lesotho, was never part of the mad South African experiment in social engineering. Swaziland is an absolute monarchy, and the tourist posters and souvenir shops make much of the Umhlanga festival, when twenty thousand young women parade in front of King Mswati III so he can pick one of them out as new wife - to be fair, Mswati doesn't always insist on this perk, and has only chosen thirteen wives so far. His predecessor got to seventy. I noticed in the literature that King Mswati III was educated at Sherbourne College in Dorset, UK, just down the road from where I went to school - I have to wonder what his fellow schoolboys thought of his amorous future.

The north-west part of Swaziland, where we went, is over 1,200 metres. On Saturday the temperature was 25 degrees and extremely humid - walking was a sweaty effort - but when we woke up on Sunday morning it was 12 degrees and very misty - so misty in fact that the staff at Malolotja Nature Reserve, which we were planning to visit, advised us not to bother. Driving down from the hills in the fog, with ranks of fir trees barely visible along the side of the road, felt more like coming away from a European ski resort than leaving an African kingdom in the summer (the only difference was the stray cows in the middle of the road). Is Africa hot? Well southern Africa, at least, is nothing like Calabria in the middle of August, in my experience.

Above: orange millipede; zebra millipede; UFO spider (I'm making these names up - a cousin of this UFO spider hitched a ride on the back of my car all the way to Joburg - he's still there, spinning webs around the rear number plate); large moth (four inches across); female Cape Weaver busy destroying a nest just patiently built by a male (this is part of the mating process - males build nests, a female comes along and rips up the ones she doesn't like and accepts the male who built a good nest in which she'll feel confident about laying her eggs. This seems wasteful, but on the other hand you don't want your eggs falling out when there's a bit of wind); and few feathers on a good old classic peacock - yes there are African peacocks too.

Phophonyane

2009-11-15T10:13:00.000-08:00

I went to Swaziland for the weekend (I'm amazed that I can say this). The Swazi border is about four hours' drive from Joburg on the usual excellent roads - but the border crossing took far longer than it should, partly because there are NO signs to explain the process, so you have to ask random people to find out that you need to park first, go here, go there, get a piece of paper, get it stamped somewhere else, hand it to an immigration officer who crumples it up without looking at it and throws it in a bin, etc (then start again at the Swazi border which was frankly better organised).

However we got to our destination in the end - the Phophonyane Falls "Ecolodge and Nature Reserve" in the northwest corner of the country - a mountainous, heavily forested logging area. The lodge is a few kilometres down a dirt track in an already remote area - and it's a fantastic place; the various cottages and tents (I stayed in a tent) are dotted around in lush sub-tropical vegetation and are connected by paths and footbridges which cross streams of red-brown water heading down to the Phophonyane river - my tent was so close to this river that I slept wonderfully, all background noise (insects, birds, rain) drowned out by the roar of the water. This isn't a game reserve as such (no hungry lions, myopic rhino, etc) so it's safe to walk around - there are well-marked paths that take you over the river, up to viewpoints of the falls, through the trees and back again, with lots of millipedes, spiders, giant snails, flowers, exotic plants and the occasional spider monkey troupe to look at.

(Above: my tent; the path from my tent back up the hill; a black'n'red millipede about five inches long; the biggest snail I've ever seen in my life - about four inches long; a mummy monkey; the falls.)

Wild dogs

2009-11-08T07:36:00.000-08:00

I didn't realise, back in January, how lucky we were to see a pack of wild dogs in the Kruger Park. I've since met South Africans who've been going to game parks all their lives and have never seen a wild dog. They're an endangered species, with less than six thousand estimated to still be alive in the wild - they need to hunt over large territories, because they catch their prey by chasing them to exhaustion - so small parks can't sustain them, and farmers have poisoned most of the packs attempting to live outside of conservation areas.

Are wild dogs (also known as Painted Dogs) attractive or ugly? I thought at first they were a bit repulsive, with their big heavy heads (they have the fiercest bite of any carnivore, related to body size) - but the more I see of them the more I like them - there are a couple in Joburg zoo - and now I think that their markings are wonderful, really very much like various cans of paint have been thrown at them. My friend Rod Burn was showing me some of his excellent wildlife photos today and gave me permission to post some of his pix of wild dogs in the wild - they're much better than the blurry ones I took.

Psychic with an international reputation

2009-10-31T23:56:00.000-07:00

The main intersections in Johannseburg are nodes of commercial enterprise - people walk up and down the lines of waiting traffic collecting for charities (which may or may not exist), selling a wide variety of goods - phone chargers, soft drinks, fruit, mirrors, paintings, toys, footballs - and handing out flyers for any number of services. Yesterday I was given a flyer - purple and green text on a blue background - which extolled the gifts of PROF. LUMUMBA AND .ALI (sic), "psychic with an international reputation" who can, apparently by checking through water and a mirror, tell you all your problems before you mention them. Their specialities include:

bring back your lover even if you broke up long ago
remove the bad spell from your life which keeps taking money away from you
ensure that a single person gets a perfect partner in a shortest time
attract customers into your business and turn your trade into a favourite among clients
Masai root joice for weight loss
Masai remedy xtra for enlarging the breasts to size "D" naturally
Masai remedy for tightening the breasts making them smaller and firm to the size of your choice permanently
remove witchcraft, curse or haunting and send them back to your enemy
make you see your enemies in the mirror and make demands on them
recover stolen property
bring super natural luck into your life to win chance games like lotto, casino, dice, black jack machines, etc
Masai gel for men, mainly intended to enlarge the penis both in girth and length naturally making it big to the size of your choice and strong
and many more."

An initial consultation costs a mere 100 rand - about nine euros. This is certainly fantastic value, but I have to confess that the sheer range of expertise on offer makes me a mite skeptical; but perhaps that's just my cynical side coming out.

The colour jacaranda

2009-10-24T11:15:00.001-07:00

In Johannesburg the jacaranda trees are in bloom again - which means I've been in SA for nearly a year, the seasons will start to repeat themselves from now on (though it still seems very strange for the weather to be getting hotter as we head towards Christmas - today I heard a Christmas carol in a shop; surreal.)

I'd never really thought about exactly what colour Jacaranda flowers are - but a poet said to me the other day in passing, "I'm still trying to work out what colour jacaranda is..." (this was Francesca Beard, who was here for work, check out her website - there's an MP3 archive of her performing her poems) - and this made me look more closely - and the answer is: it depends. Yesterday on the way back from work I drove through a storm along an avenue of jacaranda trees and they looked grey against a slate sky. With the sun behind them they're pale blue. In the morning light they're violet. They change all the time. But whatever the real colour is, they're wonderful, and they add an extra dimension to spring in South Africa.

(Above: taken from my balcony: electrical storm; the jacaranda at the end of my balcony, morning and evening.)

Plunder

2009-10-24T10:53:00.000-07:00

The wonder and excitement of my Namibian holiday have begun to fade, distanced by two weeks back at work... all I have left are the memories, the photos and the objects I picked up along the way.

Above: vertebra from an unknown animal found on the Skeleton Coast (any suggestions?); carved Makalani palm seed; decorated snuff box (snuff is still popular in Namibia, apparently); wooden tortoise; rock from the Namib desert, split by heat (the pieces still fit together perfectly if you line them up); bead lizard.

Skeleton Coast

2009-10-20T09:50:00.000-07:00

Namibia's coastline is known as the Skeleton Coast, according to some accounts because of the large number of shipwrecks that have happened there, over 500 of them over the centuries (ships get lost in the morning fogs, a feature of the area, and heavy surf and strong tides wash them up on the beach); according to another version the name arose because it's such an inhospitable part of the world that most humans who venture into it, shipwrecked or not, end up dead.

North of Swakop is the Skeleton Coast Park. We didn't drive very far into it because the distances are again huge, so we stopped at the first ship wreck we saw - a fairly recent one, by the looks of it - it still had its paint and didn't seem broken up (it's called the Ze'la - I couldn't find any reference to it on the internet so if anyone knows how to find some information let me know). I would've loved to get on board and see what was left on the ship, but caution easily won the day - this is not a good beach for swimming.

Above the tideline the sand was littered with... bones. Mostly animal bones, one presumes and hopes - I saw an identifiable carcass of a jackal, and we found an enormous vertebra which must have come from a whale - this was half buried in the sand so perhaps the rest of the skeleton was beneath our feet - it's hard to imagine bones that size being scattered around very easily or carted off by scavengers.

Why so many animal bones? Well amazingly enough the area does support quite a lot of wildlife - the plants survive on the sea fogs, herbivores graze the plants (including, apparently, elephants, giraffes and rhinos in some areas), there are a few lions to help natural selection along, and jackals, hyenas and crabs keep the beach clean. Leaving the bones. Skeleton Coast indeed.

Quad bikes

2009-10-20T09:38:00.000-07:00

Another false consciousness uncovered: am I worried about the environment and global warming? Yes I am. Do I think that pristine areas of the globe should be protected from commercial touristic ventures? Yes I do. Did I quad bike on the Namibian sand dunes? Yes I did. And it was one of most exciting things I've ever done.

It's actually a great way to see the dunes - you're not going to get very far walking, so on a quad bike you see a hell of a lot more. And you can't really disturb anyone with the noise of the engines - there's no-one there. And there isn't much impact on the environment either - the sands are constantly shifting in the wind anyway. And quad biking's only allowed on a few square kilometres of a very very large area - so the purists can just go a bit further down the coast if they want to (in their four by fours) and take a look at a few thousand unspoilt dunes. And quad biking supports the local economy! Conscience appeased.

Himba

2009-10-18T08:52:00.000-07:00

The Himba are a nomadic tribe who live in the north of Namibia. There aren't many of them left - less than 50,000 - so they're outnumbered by the inhabitants of little Walvis Bay - and their traditional lifestyle is apparently under threat, partly because their already fragile economy was disrupted by the war with Angola, and partly because their traditions don't really fit in the modern world - the Namibian government, for example, would like Himba children to go to school, which is a laudable aim but doesn't really combine well with the parents needing to constantly move their small herds of cows and goats from water hole to water hole in inaccessible rural areas.

Another problem is that the Himba have realised that tourists will give them lots of money for animal hair bracelets and other crafts, and will even pay just to take their photographs (ten Namibian dollars per person - about a euro) - and this is presumably a much better return on time and effort than pastoralism in an arid country. The Himba women I saw in Walvis Bay and Windhoek were in fact selling souvenirs and had presumably travelled there specifically to do so. Himba women cover themselves with butterfat mixed with ochre - their plaits are almost rigid with fat as well. Their hairstyles are magnificent.

There's probably a whole dissertation to write here about the ethics of tourism, and about the preservation of traditions vs access to the benefits of the modern world (medicine! irrigation!) - but I suppose this isn't the place, and I'm not the one to do it. I'm just one of the tourists with a camera.

Walvis Bay

2009-10-17T13:49:00.000-07:00

As one would expect, the desert and the dunes around Swakopmund don't support much animal life. All the more amazing, then, that just down the road Walvis Bay (the only natural harbour on the entire Namibian coast) is teeming with life - seals, dolphins, pelicans, seagulls, cormorants and other bird species I didn't recognise; there are also whales in the right season. These animals live on an abundant diet of fish - and so do the human inhabitants - nearly everyone there (60,000 people) lives off the fishing industry. The fish, in turn, live on an unusually high density of plankton - the water is opaque because of this, a dense shiny grey like mercury.

Tourists can take boat trips around the bay - the friendlier seals are encouraged to come on board the boats, rewarded with fish - at your own risk you're allowed to touch them; this is certainly the closest I've ever been to a seal - the hard outer fur is cold and wet but if you stroke against the grain there's a layer of softer fur underneath which is dry. One seal - Sally the Surfer - has learned to swim up to twin outboards when they're running at full throttle and sit on the cushion of water between them, begging for food.

Pelicans and seagulls fly after the boat, waiting for the occasional fish tossed up in the air; dolphins swim around and underneath, but they're impossible to photograph, I discovered, because they're very fast and they appear above the water for a split second - in groups of three or four - before they dive again, often going under the boat to appear on the other side. Overall, the contrast with the dunes just the other side of Walvis Bay town is absolute - arid lifeless sand on the shore, with not even a blade of grass or an insect to be seen; intense organic activity in and around the water; geobiology illustrated in its extremes.

The dunes

2009-10-16T10:22:00.000-07:00

Namibia is famous for its sand dunes - the biggest in the world, up to 300 metres high. I didn't see the biggest, but the ones near Swakop are impressive enough - and easy to get to (once you're in the area), they line the road between Swakop and Walvis Bay - there are designated areas where you can pull off the road, park, and walk; within a couple of minutes you're looking out across a vast expanse of rolling browns, yellows and ochres cut with razor-sharp shadows, a spectacular sight - and this meganormous beach extends all the way down the coast to South Africa. The dunes are constantly shaped by the wind, and so in constant movement - like a very slow replication of the waves pounding the shore just the other side of the road.

I also went to Dune Seven (giving creative names to things seems to be a problem around here), which is reputed to be the tallest in the area, but is a mere fifty metres tall. However Dune Seven is still very challenging to climb; for one thing it's unexpectedly steep - you can only go up it using your hands - and it's also, indeed, made of sand - and very fine sand at that - so at every step your foot sinks in about six inches and you slide back half the distance you thought you were covering. Many who start the climb give up, but I'm proud to say I made it to the top, puffing and wheezing and reflecting that it wasn't a particularly good place to have a heart attack, especially if I fell down the other side - and my calf muscles are still hurting now. But coming down is great fun, you can launch yourself and jump/slide and tumble and merrily undo the work of half an hour in ten seconds.

Swakopmund

2009-10-15T09:40:00.000-07:00

Swakopmund is an odd place - it was the harbour for the short-lived colony catchily known as German South West Africa, for a mere thirty years - and was then British and then South African for the next seventy-five years, until it became Namibian in 1990. What's odd is that it still looks and feels very German - the architecture is "colonial German" (including some distinctly Alpine-looking chalets), and German is one of the main languages spoken, along with Afrikaans - English (the official language of Namibia) runs a distant third. The population is less than thirty thousand most of the time, with a massive influx of tourists in December - summer holidays for rich Namibians and South Africans. What do the permanent residents live on? Tourism mostly, and just down the road happens to be one of the largest uranium mines in the world - which offers guided tours should you wish.

The name of the town means "mouth of the Swakop", the Swakop river being an occasional source of water - Swakop comes from an indigenous name for the river and apparently means "opening for excrement", which was probably not the brand image that the early European settlers were aiming for - or perhaps they just didn't imagine a future tourist trade at the time. However, Swakop's image was given a boost recently with the birth of a new Namibian citizen, Shiloh Jolie-Pitt. I went past the hospital and have to say that a visit from Brad and Angelina must have been one of the most incongruous things ever seen in this already very unusual place.

Namib Desert

2009-10-15T08:53:00.000-07:00

I had to go to Namibia for work again and took the opportunity to get out of Windhoek this time and go to Swakopmund on the coast. The shortest way - if not necessarily the fastest - is a dirt road which is almost a straight line between the two places - it takes four hours to cover the 300 kilometres and you can only do it in a four wheel drive - and you need a certain amount of courage, because there is NOTHING on the way except scrub, rock, dust, and the occasional group of ostriches - no petrol stations, no human constructions, no humans, nothing except the road itself and the occasional signpost (not that you need road signs as such - there's only one turn off along the entire route). We saw five other vehicles - four coming towards us and one we had to overtake. Each vehicle raises a vast plume of dust, so it's actually better not to encounter anyone else.

The landscape is beautiful, though of course bleak and at times literally featureless - a flat grey-white plain and a heat-hazed blue horizon. I'm still getting used to how enormous the distances are in Africa - Namibia is well over three times the size of the UK, but with a population of only two million - and most of them clustered in the north of the country. It's humbling and slightly scarey to drive for four hours through a vast area of the world where human beings have made no impact whatsoever - and where no-one in their right mind would want to live anyway.

(As a footnote, when you finally come off the dirt track near Swakopmund, the road is actually made of salt, rather than tarmac - salt after all is plentiful near the sea - there are natural salt pans - and it works fine, the road surface is hard and smooth to drive on. The only drawback, apparently, is when it rains - then the roads become extremely slippery, like wet ice. But then again it hardly ever rains, so not a large problem.)

Zoo(m)

2009-09-27T08:58:00.000-07:00

I've got a new camera - this won't make much difference to the quality of the blog pix, because I have to resize them down - so several extra millions of pixels won't translate into much, given that I don't print photos either and I only ever look at them on a tiny laptop... But the new camera has a much better zoom, which certainly does make a difference.

Thanks to bro Garry for the acquisition consultancy.

Above: invasive snooping at the zoo.

Polygamy

2009-09-27T07:35:00.000-07:00

A rather large cultural difference in SA is that polygamy is legal - it's considered to be a part of traditional African culture. President Jacob Zuma famously has three wives, which gave rise to considerable speculation about how he'd deal with the "first lady" issue when elected - he solves this problem neatly, in SA at least, by arranging for them all to appear with him at public events (generating a whole new genre of gossip columnage along the lines of "which wife was best dressed/ had the best seat/ got the most attention/ was most gracious to the hoi polloi?" etc.) Zuma also has an unknown number of children - up to eighteen according to the papers - from at least five different women (he had two other wives, one dead, one divorced).

In the SA Sunday Times today there's an article on a Mr. Milton Mbhele who took the notion a step further by marrying four wives on the same day - there's a nice photo of them in nearly-matching white dresses. Milton met these ladies at various times and has built separate houses for them - and fathered seven children with them (along with another three from other relationships). He frankly admits that having a single mass wedding was partly for economic reasons - it was cheaper than having four separate events (which presumably would have included a lot of the same guests, at least on the groom's side). Mr. Mbhele is a bank manager and can presumably afford to maintain four wives, even if four weddings would have been a stretch. The article mentions that Mbhele paid the traditional bridal price - lebolo - for each of his ladies: ten cows, eight cows, seven cows and seven cows respectively.

Mbhele is quoted as saying that he loves his wives equally and that there's "good competition" among them - "But it is healthy competition. From cleaning the home to respecting me, they are all so well behaved." Only one of the wives is quoted, the new Mrs. Zenele Mbhele, who said of the arrangement "We get along well. We visit each other often." The Sunday Times reports this item with no hint of criticism - in fact, it's only news because the four weddings took place at the same time - but it seems to me that, legal or not, there's something fundamentally very wrong about this whole concept, just because it's so unequal. It's impossible to imagine a female bank manager saying of her four new husbands (who she paid 32 sheep for) that they compete healthily in cleaning their homes and in respecting her - and the four men being perfectly happy with this - and with the bed-time rota. The tradition of polygamy here always seems to mean that men can have multiple wives and not vice-versa - so there's a rather massive sexist double standard built in.

(I should mention that on the same page of the Sunday Times there's an item saying that prisoners in Verne Prison in Dorset, UK, managed to get drunk and start a fight by consuming a hand gel intended to stop the spread of swine flu - the gel happened to contain alcohol - so I suppose every culture has its traditions that are resistant to change....)

Nambiti

2009-09-19T21:48:00.000-07:00

After Cathedral Peak, I went to a game reserve - my fourth in nine months, which is right on the edge of being too many, but I won two free nights at the excellent Nambiti Plains Lodge in a prize draw, so I could hardly say no. The game-viewing routine was the standard offer: up at dawn, off on an open land rover for three hours or more, then breakfast - then nothing to do for six hours except eat lunch (or swim in the pool if you can stand the temperature - nights here are still cool even though the days are hot, so unheated pools stay cold; you're not allowed to walk anywhere, for obvious reasons, and this lodge didn't offer bush walks because they're still waiting for their rifle licence) - then back on the land rover at four o'clock for another three or four hours of bouncing around on bad roads (why, I wonder, is the suspension on land rovers so awful? I know they're heavy-duty vehicles but you would've thought a tourist-friendly version would exist by now... or perhaps risking back injury is part of the authenticity of the experience); stop for a sundowner, back to the lodge in the dark, then dinner, then sleep.

I still enjoyed much of this, and we saw quite a lot of animals; but I shared the land rover with a British family who were on their first visit to a reserve, and their enthusiasm ("WOW, a giraffe!! Isn't it HUGE!!!") made me realise how quickly I've got used to seeing wildlife in its "natural" habitat - and that I'm starting to understand the extent to which the game reserve experience is carefully managed. Nambiti has only been a game reserve for four years - it was farmland before and it's still littered with abandoned buildings - and it's still being stocked with wildlife to get it up to its "carrying capacity" - the ranger showed us the "release platform" where dozens of impala and wildebeest are trucked in and unloaded on a regular basis - "lunches for lions".

We didn't manage to see the lions, because they'd made a kill the day before so they were digesting slothfully somewhere - and our rangers couldn't get off the vehicle and track them... because they didn't have a rifle. But we did see three cheetahs, twice, and we noticed that they had plastic collars around their necks. The ranger was a bit unclear about why this was - "the ecologists are tracking them, studying movements and things"... but then I thought... hang on a second... if somebody knows where the cheetahs are, all the time, why don't they just tell us (over the standard land rover radio) rather than make us bounce around on these rocky tracks for seven hours a day? Why not tag the lions, too, before they're shoved off the release platform, so we can find them when they hide? In fact, why not tag everything and visit them in ascending order of interest, so that the guests have a truly satisfying bush experience?

I joke, cynically, but a wildlife enthusiast friend of mine says that a popular lodge in the Kruger has been caught engaging in exactly this sort of malpractice - to their immense shame they were found with tracking and GPS devices on board the land rovers. But this seems to me to reveal an odd sort of paradox - if we have the technology to locate these animals, why not use it? What's the fine moral or aesthetic line between actively managing the "stock" in a game reserve and being able to find it when you want to? There's a tacit consensus that the tourist expects the drama of having to hunt for a lion and perhaps not finding it - and any intervention which alters the odds is somehow cheating - in fact the experience becomes or stays a lot more like gambling. It also perhaps means (taking my cynicism up a notch) that the tourist is more likely to come back and try again to see that elusive lion, or leopard - as in any reward system, a certain level of failure increases motivation.

Having said all of that, I should also say that I still got a thrill out of seeing eland galloping past the collared cheetahs (too big for them, said the guide, but they jumped up and seemed to consider giving chase for a moment - and I'd love to see a cheetah take off from a standing start... so I'll undoubtedly be going back to a game reserve, gambling on seeing something really exciting, managed or not) - and the lodge itself was excellent - great food, sumptuous accomodation (with the biggest mosquito net around the bed I've ever seen - a tented room within the room) and perfectly pitched attention and friendliness from the staff and managers - and this is perhaps one of the best reasons for going to a game reserve: the game drives are often uncomfortable and sometimes frustrating, but for the rest of the time you feel relaxed, well-fed and pampered - and that you fully deserve this indulgence.

Cathedral Peak

2009-09-17T04:18:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I discovered a very positive new aspect of SA - walking in the mountains. I stayed at the wonderful Cathedral Peak hotel in the Central Drakensberg, a four hour drive from Joburg. The hotel has a large number of rooms but is very well organised - first thing in the morning guides take small groups of guests on walks of various lengths and difficulty, and you can also ask for printed instructions and go off on your own - though you're asked to sign a register saying where you're going in case you don't come back. This seems to be safe, as long as you don't break a leg or step on a snake - the hotel is inside the fenced and guarded Kwazulu Natal Wildlife Protected Area, and apparently the only people you're likely to meet on the mountain paths apart from other hikers are marijuana smugglers coming over the border from Lesotho - you're advised to ignore them, and then they'll ignore you.

Grass (or "veld") fires seem to be a feature of the landscape all around SA at this time of year - I saw a live one from the motorway - a thin line of fire, not very high, which leaves most of the trees unaffected but scorches the ground. Apparently for many plant types this is a requirement of their life cycle - Protea seeds, for example, are only released with the heat of the fire, and then grow easily in the carbonised soil. On my first walk last weekend we spent quite a lot of time crossing a zone that had had a fire a couple of weeks ago - leaving an other-worldly landscape of black earth, blackened plants, and bright green shoots of new growth. Against the backdrop of the magnificent mountains, this was an extra dimension of wonder.

Spring

2009-09-11T13:16:00.000-07:00

After a very mild winter (by my standards - no snow at all and endless days of blue skies and sun; South Africans however complained constantly of how cold it was), spring has arrived - you can tell because the temperatures have gone up to the high twenties during the day, plants are bursting into leaf and flower, and a few clouds have started appearing now and then, working towards an eventual storm or two and some actual rain - summer weather. The first of September is in fact the official first day of spring, marked in my office by gifts of fruit.

Last weekend I went to the wonderful Walter Sisulu Botanical Gardens, which was packed out with well-equipped picnickers setting up tents and cracking out cans of beer from coolers. If you walk away from the main lawns, however, you find yourself in various wonderlands of cacti, tropical vegetation (product of an aerial irrigation system), miniature forest, and even a path up the side of a steep rocky hill to get a closer view of the nests of some black eagles; the eagles themselves seem to spend all their time floating effortlessly above, coasting the thermals.

On the way out out the gardens you can even take a few plants with you, as long as you buy them from the shop rather than dig them up. The plant life in SA really is extraordinary. A new discovery for me is the "common" coral tree, which is a type of flame tree - the flowers appear first, before any leaves, bright red against the bark. Spectacular.

Above: coral tree flower; unknown tree; big leaf; unknown red cactus; scarlet ibis; flamingo having a bath.

Plastic arts

2009-08-13T14:49:00.000-07:00

Recent acquisitions - the chicken is made out of plastic bags. Which reminds me of some art works I saw at the Joburg Art Fair a few months back - collages/paintings/bas reliefs made entirely out of melted plastic - apparently the artist, Mbongeni Richman-Buthelezi, couldn't afford paint when he started to create art, so instead he collected discarded plastic bags and melted them with a cigarette lighter - see his web site at http://www.plastic-arts.net/ to get a sense of how surprisingly effective this is - though you have to see the originals up close to understand how difficult it must be to work with this medium.

The elephant isn't South African - it is of course a model of Elmer the Patchwork Elephant invented by David McKee, found oddly enough in a souvenir shop in Brittany.

Cape Town demographics

2009-08-09T02:43:00.000-07:00

Cape Town and the surrounding areas don't feel very African - a black colleague of mine said it was the only place in South Africa where she felt like a member of a minority when she visited - which is in fact the case, as a recent census put the black population in Western Cape province at 27%, with the white population at 18% (9% in the country as a whole) and the amorphous "coloured" population at 54%.

Cape Town under apartheid was strictly segregated - after 1948 the National Party introduced legislation to favour coloured people over black people for jobs in the city, and black men were only allowed to enter the city if they had jobs (black women weren't allowed in at all). Non-whites weren't allowed to own property in the white areas - which were of course the most desirable areas of town. In 1966 the government went a step further by redesignating a neglected suburb called District Six as a whites-only area and forcibly relocating 60,000 residents to a desolate area 25 kilometres away called Cape Flats.

Fifteen years after the fall of apartheid, the city doesn't feel very different - there are shanty towns (or "informal settlements" as they're politely called) lining the road to the airport, whereas in CT itself the housing provision is of a massively higher standard - and the divisions are still largely racial - a home in the previously-white suburb of Rondebosch which cost seven thousand pounds in the 1970s is now worth more like two hundred thousand (while the value of property in formerly black areas has fallen) - so the barriers to integration are now economic rather than legislative. (And the economic divide in the country is still enormous - for example, black ownership of listings on the Johannesburg Securities Exchange was a mere 6% in 2006 - nevertheless an improvement from pre-1994 when it was zero.)

In a restaurant in Hermanus, some sixty kilometres east of Cape Town, we noticed for the first time ever in SA that all of the waiters were white. In Joburg I've always felt very uncomfortable that the patrons of restaurants in the northern suburbs are often mostly white, while waiters and waitresses are nearly always black - and yet in Hermanus it somehow felt worse that black people weren't performing service jobs, as if they were being denied access to even these job opportunities - and we saw a township near the port, so it certainly wasn't a question of there not being a black population in the town. (But is a township always populated by black people? Apparently so - when I asked about white people living in Soweto I was told that there were a few, out of at least a million, and they were there because they were married to black people). We also noticed in Hermanus that most of the villas lining the coast were shut up - presumably because they're second homes belonging to rich folk who only go there in the summer. I don't know what the demographics of holiday home ownership are in SA, but whatever they are, the injustice of people living in corrugated-iron shacks a couple of miles from luxury houses standing empty most of the time is striking.

I don't know how to sum this up - I suppose in the end the inequalities in the Western Cape are similar to the pattern across the country - and are just another example of the consequences of SA's long divisive history under colonialism and then apartheid. Visitors like me have to go on reminding themselves that the changes only began very recently; it's obvious that there's still a very long way to go.

(Some of the statistics above come from an excellent book by Mamphela Ramphele, Laying Ghosts to Rest - which investigates the challenges of post-apartheid SA.)

Cape fauna

2009-08-08T06:18:00.000-07:00

As always in Africa, it seems, wildlife is never very far away - it was winter in the Cape (but very mild - although two weeks ago it was snowing and there were nine-METRE waves, so we were just lucky) - it was the wrong season for insects or reptiles, but we did see some wonderful birds (one that I didn't manage to photograph was irridescent blue and green with a bright red band across its throat) - including the penguins at Boulders Beach, one of the only two places in the world, apparently, where you can see penguin colonies on the mainland (the other place is just along the coast at Betty's Bay) - usually they gather on islands - in fact they avoided the mainland in the past largely to stay out of the way of predators such as leopards, which are now pretty rare in the area. However the Boulders penguins have recently been put behind a fence, partly to protect them from dogs and pet-hunters ( it would certainly be easy enough to grab one, they have no fear of humans - but you're warned not to touch them as they have razor-sharp bills and can peck something cruel), and partly to protect the surrounding properties - residents were complaining that the penguins were digging up their gardens and also creating a stink - in fact you can tell from some distance away that you're in the presence of something with a fishy diet. These are African penguins which are quite tiny, no more than two feet tall - they used to be called jackass penguins because they make a sound like a donkey when they feel like it (with their noses pointing straight up in the air) - but then someone pointed out that South American penguins make exactly the same noise, so the jackass penguins became African to avoid (human) confusion.

Another denizen of the area is the "rock rabbit" (first photo above) which isn't a rabbit at all but a hyrax, and known locally as a "dassie"; this looks something like a giant guinea pig, although just to confuse things even further it isn't classified as a rodent at all, but is apparently related to the elephant. These creatures are also relatively relaxed about humans approaching them and you can get within a few feet before one of the group will let out a piercing whistle - then they all disappear in a flash. Amazingly, dassie urine is used to make perfumes - the pee crystalises and can be scraped up - so take a close look at the labels of any perfumes you own and if you see the ingredient "hyraceum" you'll know you've been dabbing on the wee of these little critters.

Cape Town has a very wonderful aquarium which has some of the biggest fish tanks I've ever seen - including one where several white sharks cohabit with other fish species and with giant turtles - for a fee you can put on scuba gear and get in with them; we didn't do this. I didn't take the boat tour out to see the whales, either (I can get sea sick in a bath tub if there's too much movement), but my daughters did - thanks to Lisa for the pix above. You can see the whales from the coast east out of Cape Town - this is very exciting, you spot them when they start spouting and then they loll around on the surface for a while, occasionally sticking a fin or tail out of the water. In a boat you can get very close to them - as the whaleboat man said "they watch us just as much as we watch them" - which makes you wonder about all the Moby Dick stuff and the glorification of the whaling industry - apparently you can just motor up to a trusting whale and stick a harpoon in at arm's length should you want to (well at least if it's a southern right whale, which is what these are).

In the "fynbos", which is the Afrikaans name for the heathland found along the southern coast (which boasts a greater biodiversity than tropical rainforests) you also see tortoises - and sometimes you hear them before you see them, because they crash around in the dry undergrowth, presumably not too bothered about non-human predators - although undoubtedly a few have been mystified to find themselves in suburban gardens a short time later, possibly next to a penguin sitting in a water feature.

All of this is wonderful - the cumulative effect of seeing all these beautiful animals, mostly in their natural environment, is to restore some sense of mankind's real or at least original place in the world - just one species of ape in the midst of an incredible variety of lifeforms.

Cape Town

2009-08-07T23:13:00.000-07:00

Cape Town made me think about cities and what can make them special - what can cause the casual visitor to say within the first few hours, "wow, it'd be amazing to live here". I've been lucky enough to see some of the great cities of the world, and I think what makes them stand out is usually a combination of the natural setting (so no credit to anyone except the founders) and a less easily defined human contribution - the architecture, the services, the level of courtesy towards strangers, the options for entertainment, culture and other activities, etc. Not all great cities have all of these (think of Manhattan - the architecture compensates for the rudeness; and in London the human/cultural contribution offsets a dull location) but the overall mix has to be right.

So - I'm hardly the first to say it, but Cape Town is one of the great cities of the world, above all for the setting. We all know about Table Mountain, which is certainly very striking, but what I didn't know was that the entire coastline is spectacular, and that the mountains are an integral part of the city itself - Signal Hill and Lion's Head virtually cut the city in half. Just south of Cape Town (which oddly enough faces north to the sea) is the wonderful and enormous Table Mountain National Park which extends some forty kilometres down to Cape Point. We went into the Cape of Good Hope section, which has miraculously been kept in a near-pristine state - there are no buildings except at Cape Point (which discreetly includes a funicular to get the lazy or less ambulatory to the top to see the views from the lighthouse) and as you drive around on the empty roads you see antelope grazing and groups of baboons wandering around (the baboons are in fact a menace - signs warn you not to bring out any food or you'll get a baboon mugging - and outside the Cape Point tourist shop we saw people being adroitly relieved of sandwiches and chocolate bars that they'd just bought; we hid ours under our coats and fled back to the car). In the park and in fact all around the Cape there are dozens of coves and beaches which are completely deserted in the winter - they probably get busy in the summer, but what was striking was that construction has been kept firmly under control in the small beach communities - we didn't see any high-rise apartment blocks or hypermarkets; it felt more like being in Norfolk or Brittany, rather than a few minutes drive from a metropolis of three million people.

Cape Town then scores big for managing to have fitted in to its glorious natural setting without spoiling it too much (though there are a few logo-emblazoned skyscrapers right in the centre - FNB and Absa, shame on you). My colleagues who live and work in CT say that it's also more of a cultural centre than Johannesburg, and it has a very good range of restaurants - so it has some of the advantages of a big city as well. It's also reputed to be - and feels - much safer than Johannesburg. In fact, it's better not to make comparisons, because Johannesburg comes out badly on any level, in my view. Cape Town is a beautiful city; Joburg only exists at all because of a seam of a certain type of metal ore underground, which hardly seems a good enough reason. I know where I'd rather live.

Madikwe

2009-07-29T00:24:00.000-07:00

One of the great pleasures of being in South Africa is going off to a game reserve for a few days - last weekend I went to Madikwe national park with my daughters and my brother and family. Madikwe is in the North-West province, up against the Botswana border - in fact for the last half of the journey you follow signposts to Gabarone, the Botswanan capital, although the road is practically deserted. Madikwe is actually land reclaimed from mostly abandoned farms and repopulated with animal life since 1991 - so there isn't the density of wildlife that we saw in the Kruger, but on the other hand we saw the "Big Five" in a mere four game drives: a leopard happily chewing its way through a kudu, fifteen rhino including a baby (we counted), dozens of elephants, a herd of fifty buffalo at a water hole, and several lions (we nearly ran into a couple crossing the track; there was a Mexican standoff for a while as they debated whether to go round or over us; in the end they went round). The game rangers have set themselves something of a challenge by hyping up the Big Five, raising the expectations of their customers that they'll always see these animals - but when they're roaming around in 75,000 hectares they're not necessarily easy to find.

To be honest, I'm finding that the novelty of driving up to wild animals and taking photos of them is wearing off a little - the first time a lion looks at you from a few metres away with no barriers between you it's certainly chilling, but after a while you realise that there's no danger (or not much; lions are generally too intelligent to attack jeeps) - and after half an hour or so of watching a leopard having his dinner I start to think that the experience is not really all that different from watching your domestic tabby picking through a few chicken bones. (Although some people get lucky and see REALLY exciting things - for example see this battle in the Kruger park - do watch all of this, it's extraordinary.)

On the other hand it's a constant delight just to be out in the bush, driving around, seeing the landscape and the wonderful sunrises and sunsets, with no responsibilities (not even looking out for animals - the rangers are much better at that than us tourists will ever be) and a sense of achievement when you do actually come across a fellow mammal or two. A great experience.

Above: shadow of the intrepid explorers; an elephant; the deck of the my room (animals just below - I saw impala, zebra, an elephant and dozens of birds - and you're instructed to keep your windows closed when you're out otherwise the baboons come in and steal stuff); a sunset.

Mopane worms

2009-07-28T23:52:00.000-07:00

On holiday again, so I'll have a few things to blog about.

I've occasionally seen Mopane worms on menus here - but didn't have the courage to order them. (On the other hand I've had crocodile a couple of times, which is pleasant enough - a bit like slightly fishy chicken.) A few days ago I was offered a dried Mopane worm to eat and seized the moment before instinctive revulsion could take over - a dried "worm" (really a caterpillar) looks much like a large bird dropping so the instinct not to put it in your mouth is quite strong. The initial impression is nothing much except crunchy dust, but then a beefy taste builds up which is not bad at all. However I admit I spat out the still crunchy pulp that I ended up with. I'd be up for a Mopane worm stew now, though. I think.

This opens up a whole discussion about how foodstuffs are very much culturally defined - there's no particular objective reason why we shouldn't eat anything that gives us some sort of nutrition. In northern Italy one of the best things you can give growing children is horse steak - I used to live next to a butcher that sold only "carne equina". And no-one in the world outside of the UK seems to be able to stand Marmite.... (although you can buy it in SA - but that presumably is an unfathomable remnant of colonialism....)

Above: the half of the worm I didn't eat.

English summer

2009-06-28T02:05:00.000-07:00

I haven't had much to say about SA recently - partly because I haven't been out of Joburg, or indeed anywhere much except at home and in the office - and in the UK for two weeks, my first visit since I got here. In England I was struck again by the luxury of being able to walk just anywhere - in Norfolk I took a walk on my own across the fields for a couple of hours (impossible or at least very unadvisable in SA) - and didn't see anyone except a lone woman walking her dog - and the dog was very small, not a mastiff serving as bodyguard. We should appreciate the freedoms we're able to take for granted, where we can.

How poor is Africa?

2009-05-18T09:27:00.000-07:00

I've just finished reading Martin Meredith's "The State of Africa" - an excellent summary of African history since the 1950s - and very dismal reading: a litany of the abuse of power of dictators, generals and politicians, their extraordinary greed (Kenya's Daniel arap Moi was estimated to have looted $3 billion during his 24 years in power), and their cynical exploitation of tribal loyalties to unleash violence whenever they thought it suited them. What comes across very clearly is that the disasters that hit the headlines of the western media, in which place names come to stand for extremes of human misery - Biafra, Rwanda, Darfur - are always caused by or exacerbated by factional politics. In many countries governments have purposefully eliminated entire groups of their own people rather than put up with opposition - and withholding food has often been used as a weapon and a campaign tactic (Abednico Ncube, Zimbabwe's Deputy Minister for Social Welfare, addressed a village in 2002 saying "You have to vote for Zanu-PF candidates before the government starts rethinking your entitlement to this food aid").

Meredith's conclusion doesn't offer much hope for improvement. Africa was already the world's poorest region fifty years ago, and it's only fallen further behind - average income is a third lower than the next poorest region (South Asia). Most Africans are poorer now than they were thirty years ago - half of the people in Africa life on less than one dollar a day. Africa's entire economic output is 1.3% of world GDP - less than Mexico's. Half of all African women are illiterate. Life expectancy is falling - especially because of AIDS, which was only addressed very late by most African countries - in Botswana 37% of the population is HIV-positive (and in SA Mbeki's government perversely denied any connections between HIV and AIDS - it was considered to be a plot against Africans, and AIDS was jokingly refered to as "Afrikaaner Invention to Deprive us of Sex").

Meredith concludes that Africa needs Western help and better government - but the two need to go together: Western donor fatigue has set in because $300 billion of Western aid seems to have made little difference - aid has been falling since the 1990s; the US spends .01% of its budget on aid to sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time Western governments stop many African products from competing on world markets by subsidising their own agricultural sectors - the US and the EU subsidise their cotton farmers to a value which is higher than the value of the crop itself - allowing them to take a third of the world market - the lower world price represents a cost to Burkina Faso (as an example) of 12% of its entire exports - a similar story can be told about sugar, rice, tomatoes and onions. So - the West isn't helping.

But Meredith's main conclusion is that, apart from in SA and Botswana, Africa's politicians have to take most of the blame for the state of Africa: "After decades of mismanagement and corruption, most African states have become hollowed out. They are no long instruments capable of serving the public good."

Isicathamiya and Oswenka

2009-05-08T22:10:00.000-07:00

Last night I saw a wonderful performance by Mtuba Thulisa Brothers, an Isicathamiya group - this is the style of Zulu music and dance developed by migrant mine workers and made famous by Ladysmith Black Mambazo. It's extremely impressive and very moving done live - impeccably choreographed, and the harmonies are stunning.

There was also an Oswenka competition - this too is a tradition developed by mine workers for their Saturday night self-entertainment - they often couldn't afford or weren't allowed to go off the compound: between Isicathamiya performances individuals put on their best suits and "swanked", with audience reaction being taken into consideration by a judge when awarding the prizes. The swankers pose, take off their jackets to show off their shirts, lift their trouser legs to display matching socks, etc. - all done with much irony - to a storm of hoots, whistles and applause from the audience. Great fun.

More Art-efacts

2009-05-01T06:17:00.000-07:00

More plunder from my travels - the first one might need some explanation, it's a hollow gourd about 18" high into which tiny drawers have been fitted - and the blob on the top is a stylised head; the base is half a coconut. Surreal. Then: a mask; a carved and painted wooden plate; and a painted wooden fish. My flat is already starting to look a bit overcrowded with "objets", but I find this sort of shopping irresistible. They're wonderful things and I'm rubbish at bargaining (the sellers always look very happy with the final price, so from their point of view I'm a patsy) - so I can tell myself I'm helping the local economies.

More Mozambique

2009-05-01T05:59:00.000-07:00

Macaneta

2009-04-30T22:22:00.000-07:00

On my Sunday in Mozambique we went to a beach south of Maputo, a trip involving avoidance of potholes on the main road, a river crossing on an aging ferry, half an hour on a badly rutted dirt and mud track (4x4s coming into their own), and young boys hitching rides on the backs of the vehicles without permission (stopping and telling them that this is dangerous has no effect; they get off but then jump back on as soon as the doors close; but then we were moving pretty slowly anyway so perhaps it wasn't all that dangerous). Then we got to a beautiful white-sand semi-deserted beach with the breakers of the Indian Ocean rolling in and depositing large crabs on the beach - which then immediately dashed back in to the water. Apparently the likes of Sting go to high-class resorts on Mozambique's offshore islands - and as mentioned earlier the country has a thousand kilometres of white sand beach to choose from.

I paddled but didn't swim, mostly because the water was cold (it's autumn here, after all) - my friends who live in Mozambique were tougher and went swimming. Later it occurred to me to ask them about sharks. "No, no sharks here," they said. "Or only small ones, anyway, they wouldn't attack you." (pause) "On the other hand they have sharks in Durban and that's just a couple of hundred kilometres away." (pause) "Well we haven't heard of anyone being killed yet."

Above: the ferry; Macaneta's main road; the beach; fruit salesmen (inedible fruit, in reality; the sales pitch was that we should buy these objects "por effetta" - decoration only); persistent hitchhiker; road crab (not a sea crab); the river at sunset.

Maputo

2009-04-29T10:05:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I went to Maputo, the capital of Mozambique - a one hour flight from Joburg - and a different world. It reminded me of.... Rio de Janeiro, where I lived as a teenager. This shouldn't have surprised me, as Rio and Maputo have a similar colonial background, share a language, have a similar racial and cultural mix (although Maputo is clearly more African in some ways) and are both on the sea. It was weird for me, though, because I haven't been back to Brazil since I left at the age of sixteen (a number of years ago...) and the recognitions hit me on a semi-forgotten emotional level.

It's an attractive city, with tree-lined streets, crumbling Portuguese colonial architecture, and a long straight beach either side of the estuary that runs into the city's port - the beach to the north runs for more than a thousand kilometres until it hits Tanzania. The feel of the city is relaxed - it's okay for tourists to wander around, even on their own while carrying a camera, during the day in the main streets at least, and the hassle level is low; muggings are not unknown but without the disproportionate levels of violence that sometimes occur in Joburg. So, a good place for me to use my legs for once and generally decompress.

It's not so rosy in Mozambique for the residents, however - it's still a post-conflict country with a struggling economy, and the infant mortality and life expectancy rates are among the lowest in the world; GDP per capita is a mere $465, compared to $5,700 for South Africans and a whopping $43,800 for Brits. Education is also a struggle - the school buildings are enormous but not big enough - there are three shifts a day to get the kids in. A million school-age kids still don't go to school at all, and half the teachers in Mozambique have no teaching qualification. This is 16 years after the end of a civil war which lasted fifteen years - a sad reminder that it takes many years, if not generations, for a country to recover from war.

Above: wedding party in a park; mouth of the estuary; a wicker furniture shop spreads out near the beach; batiks for sale.

Sperlonga (not in SA)

2009-04-19T04:46:00.000-07:00

This blog has become something of an occasional endeavour - apologies to anyone who takes the trouble to check it regularly (hi Mum andDad!). The past couple of weeks I was in Italy - so couldn't post on SA (good excuse). Now I'm back to pre-election SA - there's a big rally in Johannesburg today but it's easier to see the highlights on TV than to actually attempt to get there through the vast crowds - I feel a bit guilty about not seeing Nelson Mandela live on the podium, but on the other hand he's too old and weak now to actually make a speech (a pre-recorded contribution was broadcast at the rally) - he just sits quietly in an armchair, smiling and waving his hand to the music occasionally. His presence alone however is a good boost for the ANC - Jacob Zuma, whose corruption charges were dropped by the prosecutor's office two weeks ago, looks very happy to have Madiba (as Nelson Mandela's called here) give him this very visible endorsement. In fact Zuma seems to be in victory mode already - there's no question that the ANC will win the elections, and as a newly elected President he'll presumably be in an even stronger political position than he already was. BBC World has been showing interviews with people who intend to vote for parties other than the ANC - they all know they can't win, but they all hope to reduce the ANC's "arrogance" and make the point that SA isn't a one-party state, even if it seems that way sometimes.

Other thoughts on returning to Joburg after Europe: well I have to get used to not walking anywhere again; that's a freedom that can be taken for granted in Italy, at least in the places I go to. The weather was good in Italy and it's also wonderful here, very similar in fact, the storms have stopped as we enter the dry "winter" season - so blue skies every day and temperatures of 23 degrees or so during the day. My sense of the seasons is completely confused - at this point I've had a full year of early/mid/and late summer; the cold weather, when it comes, will be a shock.

Above: Sperlonga beach

Other moments

2009-04-06T03:28:00.000-07:00

Above: zebras usually run away, it isn't easy to get close to them. In this case - in the Lion and Rhino park near Joburg - this mother and child were standing next to the road and continued to stand there when I stopped next to them. Leaving the park I went round a corner and nearly drove into two rhinos crossing the road. The white stripes are bird poo - egrets like to stand on rhinos' backs, presumably because they can pick up loads of insects when their hosts root around in the ground. Game drives are at dawn and dusk - which means you see stupendous sunrises and sunsets, one of the great aesthetic pleasures of SA.

Hippo attack

2009-04-06T02:58:00.000-07:00

At Monate lodge we also had an exciting encounter with a couple of hippos. The hippos live in a pond with a levee around it, so the (constantly death-defying) ranger got off the jeep and climbed the levee to see where they were. They were on the far side of the pond, so the ranger allowed us to climb up next to him. The hippos started swimming towards us, which I thought was friendly of them - we probably should have brought buns, or something. Half-way across the pond the big male stopped to yawn, massively.

"He's displaying," the ranger said. "Back on the jeep, everyone." I thought this was a suggestion rather than an order, so I lingered, hoping to get a better photo when the hippos came closer (it was sunset, the light was poor, and I was getting shakey photos). "We have to go," said the ranger. "If he comes out of the water he'll come up this bank very fast." I looked around and saw that my fellow guests had disappeared. Oddly enough I still felt reluctant to go - can such a big animal really heave itself out of the water and run up a slope at speed? Surely we'd have plenty of time to wander back to the jeep? The ranger was half-way back to the vehicle, abandoning me to my fate (this, presumably, is why you always have to sign a waiver of indemnity form in these places - if you get squashed by a hippo it's nobody's fault but your own). Wimps, I thought - but then I suddenly felt very lonely and vulnerable. I turned and ran.

Cheetah release

2009-04-06T02:17:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I went to a game lodge north of Pretoria where I saw the usual range of animals (rhino, zebra, hippos, giraffes, warthogs, ten types of antelope, etc) - which begins to seem normal after a while. The most exciting moment was when the guests were invited to watch a cheetah release - these smaller lodges have to actively manage the balance of wildlife to make sure any particular species doesn't get out of hand - in this case they had too many wildebeest so needed a new predator- and they do a good deed by rehabilitating a large cat that's been injured, or raising a young one that's been abandoned by its mother (this is what they tell the guests, anyway; there's a suspiciously large number of these abandoned cats around; they probably kidnap them in Zimbabwe).

This cheetah had been living in a relatively small pen, being fed by the rangers - and it was now time to release her into the "wild" - where she would have to hunt for herself. She hadn't been fed for three days, so in theory should have been keen to get out into the reserve and bag an antelope steak or two. The only problem was that she didn't want to come through the gate, which was a sort of chain fence corridor - she was wary of human constructions, probably very wisely. The ranger's solution to this was to run in front of her dragging his coat along the ground, encouraging her to chase it, which she did several times, stopping at the gate. Each time the ranger approached her she'd snarl and spit and slap the ground and make feints at him - a terrifying sight even from the jeep ten metres away. In the end she came out of the pen - and then watched with interest as the ranger turned his back on her and fastened the gate. Us guests had our cameras ready, still expecting to see the cheetah having ranger burger for lunch - but in the end she wandered away (monitored closely by some nearby giraffes), sniffing the ground, locating, presumably, a supernumerary wildebeest.

Spinning

2009-03-20T23:17:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-14T07:36:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-13T09:37:00.000-07:00

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.

More souvenir/art

2009-02-27T21:48:00.000-08:00

Not much to write about... I need to get out more, work has taken over again. In the meantime, some photos of the souvenirs I picked up in Namibia - hand made, individual: art objects, as far as I'm concerned, even though they're mixed in with postcards and guide books and sell for a few euros. I'm starting to wish now that I'd moved into a bigger flat, just so I had space for more THINGS.

In Windhoek I went to the most amazing shop I think I've ever been in - the Bushman Art Gallery (click on "catalogue" and explore...) - where in fact the blurring of the boundary between souvenir and art is official - it calls itself an art gallery but nearly everything is for sale; there were some incredible artefacts which I immediately craved (many objects similar to those in the wonderful African art gallery in the British Museum), but space and weight limitations stopped me - this time.

(Above - tin can warthog; witchdoctor doll; Himba waterpot)

Namibia (2)

2009-02-16T09:52:00.001-08:00

Some more photos... the daily commute; view from the farmhouse terrace; cat in a tree; ornaments; a cactus in the rain (Namibia is one of the sunniest countries in the world - more than 300 days of sunshine a year... pity it rained most of the time I was there.)

Namibia

2009-02-15T11:26:00.000-08:00

Most of last week I was in Windhoek working, but I stayed for the weekend and saw a bit of the country near the city. Namibia is the second least-densely populated country in the world (after Mongolia) - two million people in an area six times the size of England. The capital, at 300k inhabitants, is spacious and laid back (and there are low levels of violence; you can actually walk around in the streets without getting mugged), and if you drive twenty minutes in any direction you see.... nobody; and nothing - except trees and bushes. I didn't see any of the famous sand-dunes, as you have to drive a couple of hours west to enter the desert area - so I'll need to go back, as the desert sounds like it's well worth seeing - some dunes are nine storeys high. However I did see a Himba woman, in the centre of Windhoek, which was an unexpected pleasure.

Yesterday my colleague took me to an old German farmhouse an hour out of Windhoek which now caters for tourists; the place was built in 1910 - there's a large community of Germans in Namibia, some of whom, apparently, have a certain, er, nostalgia for a certain period in the past... swastikas are not unknown. To get to this farm you turn off the well-tarmacked highway onto a dirt track, drive for half an hour, ford a small river, then give up at a large river - you then phone the farmhouse to come and get you in a Land Rover, which then takes you through this river - and another one - with water at bonnet level. We were served Oryx steak and then taken out to feed the farm's collection of leopards and the cheetahs, which are kept in very large enclosures - however they're not difficult to see as they hear the Land Rover and come running for their meat. Feeding five cheetahs is spectacular - and more than slightly scarey - as they jump around very close to the vehicle, trying to catch the chunks of meat as the driver throws them - and squabbles break out, with some very loud feline roars and screams. The Land Rover is completely open, so there's nothing to stop these cats actually jumping up and into the vehicle to take a closer look at the buckets of flesh - or the tourists - if they feel like it. (The purists in Timbavati would frown on all of this, of course - this place is a zoo, not a properly run eco-park; so I should probably feel guilty for having been there - but to be honest it didn't cross my mind until now.)

Above: a Himba woman and baby (courtesy of National Geographic, I didn't take a photo of the lady I saw; when I go back I'll go north, where these people live); a young eagle near the farm; a German dining room c. 1910; a leopard; a cheetah waiting to be fed; jumping for dinner; and a weaver bird nest (I learned that there are 18 species of weaver birds in Southern Africa; distinguishing the nests is an advanced form of bird watching....).

Magaliesberg

2009-02-09T09:50:00.000-08:00

Magaliesberg is rapidly becoming my favourite part of Joburg - i.e., not Joburg. It's a beautiful area north-west of the city, about an hour's drive to get into the mountains - which are apparently some of the oldest mountains in the world. There are fun things to do in this area - see previous posts for caves, ballooning, canopy touring, meeting elephants etc. Saturday I was there for work (oddly enough) and fitted in, along with a visit to some baby elephants, two completely new activities for me: 1) climbing a mountain in a Unimog - which is, in a word, an off-road TRUCK with enormous wheels and incredible torque and suspension - the driver enjoyed terrifying us by launching this thing off impossible slopes and attacking metre-high rockfalls, etc - a bit like going on an improvised rollercoaster; and 2) quad-biking, which I wasn't sure I'd like, but it turned out to be amazing, largely because the track was through forest and a quarry and a number of mud puddles. Great fun.

A weird moment came when the Unimog driver parked at the top of the mountain and pointed out, in the distance, Pelindaba, SA's nuclear research facility - and until 1994 home to three atomic bombs which the apartheid government had developed secretly. The bombs are now decommissioned. "Who was the enemy?" I asked the driver - SA clearly didn't have any military opponents nearby at any time in the second half of the 20th century. The driver didn't know - probably the opponents of apartheid, at the height of sanctions etc. - e.g. the likes of Western Europe and the USA, both of which, one would think, are well beyond the range of any nuclear missile based in South Africa. It's impossible to think of any circumstances in which SA might have used these weapons - another indication of the regime's fundamental derangement.

Oh, and I saw the set of "Wild at Heart" - a BBC series, apparently, which I've never seen, and which is nominally set in central Africa but is actually filmed in Magaliesberg.

(Above: elephant stars of Wild at Heart - the mum didn't mind the baby being petted; the Unimog before it hit the mud; and part of the set for Wild at Heart.)

Sterkfontein

2009-02-03T09:53:00.000-08:00

Close to Johannesburg is the "Cradle of Humankind", a World Heritage site - an area laced with underground caverns where thousands of fossil fragments of our earliest ancestors are still being dug up. Sterkfontein is one of the caves open to visitors, and the home of Little Foot, who fell down a hole into the cave while being pursued by a leopard - 3.3 million years ago (we know, or surmise, that he was being pursued by a leopard because the leopard's skeleton is right next to him - they both broke their necks in the fall). Little Foot was discovered in 1997 and the site is still being excavated. Little Foot is an australopithecene early hominin - one of a large number of "missing links" which branched off from the ponginae (today's orangutans) and the apes (today's gorillas and chimps) some six million years ago.

The Sterkfontein cave is nothing special in terms of stalacmites and tites - a lot of these were destroyed by lime miners during the gold rush days - but the whole area is very suggestive, and the museum attached to the cave is excellent - the clearest explanation of our evolutionary history that I've ever seen. What comes across very clearly is that human beings (or homo sapiens sapiens) is just one remaining branch of a fairly wide tree of hominid/human variations - all of our closest cousins are now extinct (including robustus, who had massive jaws to work through a heavy diet of vegetation - just think, if robustus had won the evolutionary race we'd all now be natural vegetarians with no conception at all of steak or hamburgers). Modern humans coexisted with some of these cousins - at some point about 200,000 years ago an ancestor identical to ourselves might have bumped into Neanderthal man, or homo heidelburgensis - but wouldn't have met Little Foot, who'd become extinct some two million years earlier. The timescales are incredible - the civilisations that we know about only go back some 9,000 years - what were human beings DOING for the other 191,000 years? Well, like Little Foot, they were probably mostly running away from leopards etc. Palaeontologist Bob Brain is very clear on this: "far from being mighty hunters, the early hominids formed an insignificant part of the fauna of the time and the were certainly subservient to carnivores such as leopards and sabre-tooth cats. They were the hunted, rather than the hunters".

All of this is a pretty strong argument against any anthropomorphic or creationist view of the world; God's image clearly has nothing to do with it, we're a lucky survivor from a very wide range of evolutionary experiments. If Little Foot had been able to run a bit faster, we could well all now be about three feet tall with a thick coat of fur.

A footnote: incredibly, research in the Sterkfontein area came to a halt under apartheid - the Nationalist government was extremely religious, and of course firmly believed in white supremacy, and so a line of enquiry which had begun to locate a common ancestor for all humankind in South Africa (and pretty certainly black, to boot, or at least not palely "European") was discouraged - all government funding was stopped.

How poor is South Africa?

2009-01-31T08:51:00.000-08:00

First, apologies for the absence - caused largely by work - I was in Pretoria for a few days - and also by the arrival of my "heavy baggage" (the stuff that came by sea - it took three months) which meant that my flat was practically inaccessible until I unpacked the boxes; this job isn't finished yet - the spare bedroom is still a warehouse of cardboard - but at least I can move around again. And I got my guitar back - the only thing I own, I find, that I actually missed.

I was in Pretoria to start work on a new project with UNICEF as a partner. This was a very interesting experience, partly because UNICEF have very different working processes and culture, and partly because they are, of course, entirely focused on development issues. Talking to my new colleagues resolved the issue for me about where South Africa falls on the first-to-third-world spectrum; a senior UNICEF person was very clear: "South Africa is a third-world country with small pockets of wealth". The statistics are stark: 12.3 million children - 68% of the total - are classed as impoverished; they live in families (if they have families - AIDS has taken a massive toll) with an income of less than 1,200 rand per month - that's about 80 pounds sterling. 13 million people in South Africa are recipients of welfare benefits; the amounts are very low - the allocation for each child who qualifies is seven rand a day - fifty pence. Access to education is of course an issue, and access to quality education is part of the problem - most of the schools that used to be for white children now charge fees which are beyond the reach of poor families - so the best schools continue to be excellent (there was an newspaper article the other day which noted that rich British families are now sending their kids to boarding schools in SA because it's cheaper than in the UK) but the poor schools continue to be very badly resourced (as an example, there's a charity drive here to collect money for every school in the country to have A FOOTBALL - many of them can't afford any sports equipment at all, while millions are being spent on stadiums, preparing for the World Cup).

UNICEF is working with the 585 most problematic schools in the country - the project I'm helping with will select thirty of them to be hubs for models of activity around the theme of sport (training, games, competitions, physical exercise, sports festivals etc. being a recognised way to distract children from what a UNICEF leader called "unproductive activities" - i.e. gang violence, drugs, teenage pregnancies, absenteeism, dropping out, etc.) - and this will be part, believe it or not, in an admittedly indirect way, of Britain's 2012 Olympic legacy. Let's hope we can do something to help.

(And I do notice the disconnect between my own lifestyle and the facts listed above - how much did it cost to ship my boxes of semi-superfluous stuff half way around the world? The first world /third world gap is a very real one, but here you inevitably live it more personally.)

Art and artefacts

2009-01-17T05:02:00.000-08:00

Work has kicked back in with a vengeance, so posts will be less frequent than in the holidays; sometimes I think I'd be quite happy to be on permanent holiday... In the meantime, some photos of objects I've picked up over the past few weeks (tourist shops and stalls tend to undermine any sense of uniqueness of the artefacts they're selling by having hundreds of the same item, even when they're made by hand - but I like some of them anyway; and who says a work of art needs to be unique?) and some of art work at the Constitutional Court - see if you can tell which are which.

Constitution Hill

2009-01-15T08:54:00.000-08:00

Constitution Hill is very close to where I work - it used to be the site of the city's most notorious prisons for men and for women, and taxis will still take you to "Number Four" if you ask (the number of the men's prison there) while they probably won't know where the constitutional court is. Under apartheid (I'm told) if a black man disappeared his family would ask for him at the hospitals, the morgues, and Number Four - you could be arrested, among many other things, for being out five minutes after evening curfew. Conditions were... as you can imagine. Overcrowding was normal, physical punishment and abuse were rife, and solitary confinement in a tiny cell a metre wide by two metres long was common.... sometimes for up to a year.

After liberation in the early nineties these prisons were closed down and the new government decided to construct a building for the new Constitutional Court on the site. An international competition was run and was rather luckily won by SA architects, with a modern design which included African elements and lots of space and light - celebrating the transparency of the new order. Now you can visit the old prisons, which are a museum of racism and oppression, and you can also visit the Constitutional Court building and see "the best collection of South African art in the world" which decorates the walls, ceilings and spaces. Yesterday I was lucky enough to be in a group which had Constitutional Court Justice Albie Sachs as its guide to the building - I posted about Albie back in November. Albie was given overall supervision of the art in the building back in 1994 when he began his mandate - he's about to retire, as ConCourt judges only sit for a maximum of 15 years - and in that time he's dedicated a great deal of his free time to developing the collection. He obviously takes an enormous pride in the building, the art work, and its history - so much so that he's happy to spend part of his holidays (the court is still in recess) showing visitors around. The building is indeed very impressive, very attractive, and nothing like what you'd expect from any building used in a justice system; the juxtaposition with the old prison next door illustrates profoundly how much SA has changed - and Albie has I think every right to be proud of his achievement, as a judge, as an art collector, and as a survivor of the violence of the old regime .

Township life

2009-01-12T09:41:00.000-08:00

I was wondering, during the visit to Kliptown, what it must be like to live without running water and electricity - or with poor "service delivery" as it's described by the media. Yesterday the SA Sunday Times carried a story about Nothemba Fazzie, 81 years old, who lives in "informal housing" in Duncan Village, East London - a collection of some 10,000 shacks and 120,000 people - who has been waiting for twelve years to be relocated to government-supplied housing with proper services. "Mama Fazzie" lives on her pension of seventy pounds a month; she has to walk an hour to get to the settlement's only female toilet block - only women bother to use these facilities, apparently, most men just do what they have to do in the stream that runs through the township - this stream floods Mama Fazzie's shack if there's too much rain. The residents of Duncan Village who are lucky enough to have their own "long-drop" toilet (you can imagine what this is) rent this facility out at two pounds a month per person. Fazzie also has a daily slog to collect water from a standpipe and carry it home in buckets.

The article points out that the particular irony of Mama Fazzie's predicament is that she lost two sons during the struggle against apartheid, sons who worked for the liberation movement - she has plaques on her wall from the ANC to commemorate her sacrifice. Is she disappointed in progress over the past 14 years? Yes she is. She says: "The ANC has given us only pride, but I cannot live only on pride. I need a house."

In the meantime, a group of five supreme court judges today gave the go-ahead for Jacob Zuma, the ANC's candidate for the next President of the country, to be tried for corruption; he's alleged to have taken massive bribes in an arms deal involving a French company. It's pretty unlikely that Zuma has had to carry any water in buckets recently.

Soweto 2

2009-01-08T20:48:00.000-08:00

I made a brief visit to Soweto back in November. Yesterday I went again with L and E, to be shown around by Booysie, who has always lived in Soweto and now runs a car hire and tour company. Booysie says that in some ways Soweto is improving - an increasing number of people have the money to improve their accomodation or build new houses, and there doesn't seem to be any problem with these new structures being adjacent to shacks or the old basic two-room houses built to house the service class for Joburg. There's also more community spirit and pride in the area. On the other hand, there are still parts of Soweto - for example Kliptown, which we visited - where there's no running water or electricity, and thousands of people live in corrugated iron shacks, in conditions which must be appalling. Schooling is still inadequate, with the richer Sowetans bussing their kids to the fee-paying schools in the ex-white areas, while the poorer families make do with what's available locally. I asked if there were any white people living in Soweto and Booysie said yes, a few, but only those in mixed-race marriages; there were no white families that he knew of.

We visited SKY, the Soweto Kliptown Youth centre, where 22 orphans live - the community was founded by Bob Nameng, who was orphaned himself at six years old and lived on the streets for two years. The community is supported by the American National Basketball Association (which is rather surreal, as apparently there are only four basketball courts in the whole of Soweto - a town of four million people; the community itself doesn't have one) and other donors, while the kids are also taught arts and crafts in an attempt to make the endeavour more self-sustaining. Another of the leaders there was very critical of the SA government and the local administration for failing to support efforts like theirs - nearly all the support comes from abroad - and when you look at the housing and services in Kliptown you can understand that there must be a very high level of disappointment and frustration that so little has changed since 1994. The government believes in market-led solutions to poverty and lack of opportunity, but there's no evidence that this is working in Kliptown.

Above: a nice new house in Soweto; a standard two-room house (many courtyards are filled with one-room huts to accomodate a growing family or to rent out); a corrugated iron shack (hot in summer, cold in winter); "hostel" housing originally built to accomodate men only, usually mine workers; one of the disused Soweto power station cooling towers - a rare structure above two storeys, now used for bungee jumping - the art work is attractive but paid for by a bank - the other tower is unfortunately a giant advert. Booysie pointed out that all the pylons lead in the direction of Joburg - when the power station was still functioning, Soweto had no electricity at all. He also said that under apartheid the housing immediately around the towers was for white workers at the power station only - while he was growing up he wouldn't have been allowed into the compound, and so he didn't see the towers up close until after 1992.

Flora

2009-01-08T11:43:00.000-08:00

Before Timbavati stops resonating in my mind quite so much, a final post on the plants - the summer in SA is also the rainy season, so the reserve was very green, with an amazing richness and variety of plant life which sometimes changed radically from one kilometre to the next, depending on soil type, proximity to water, dominant undergrowth etc. In fact, the density of vegetation made it difficult to spot the animals - apparently in winter it's much easier, and the animals are allso more active during the day as it's cooler and they're hungrier - and winter is the dry season so the smaller watering holes dry up and you can stake out a pond at dusk and watch all the animals coming to drink (so it's well worth visiting at any time of the year, friends and relatives!).

I was expecting more open space - and in fact other areas of the Kruger apparently have more savannah (and vast herds of ruminants), while Timbavati has lots of trees. Walking through the bush can be painful - many of these plants have very sharp thorns. Many trees are in flower, and if you look closely at the ground there are hundreds of species of small plants also in flower, some of them with spectacular colours, in miniature. I asked the ranger if he ever had botanists visiting the lodge - anyone who was more interested in the flora than the fauna - he said yes, once, he'd had a couple who only wanted to look at plants - and he "learned an awful lot from them"; but most people just want drive around until they see all the Big Five (elephant, rhino, leopard, buffalo, lion) - and miss the more rooted stuff all around them.

A few examples of plants above.

Up close

2009-01-07T21:13:00.000-08:00

Apart from seeing herbivores and their predators, one of the great aspects of being in Timbavati was to get a close view of insects, reptiles etc. We were encouraged to pick these up when safe to do so (I learned for the first time that chameleons can bite, if they're in the mood - and they lock their jaws and hang on for grim death when they do so - local lore says that a chameleon bite bleeds forever, so the trackers refuse to touch them). Above: elegant grasshopper (that's its name; although it's gaudy or harlequin-like rather than elegant); chameleon (this one was nonchalantly crossing the road); Golden Orb spider (if you look closely you can see the multiple strands of web it puts out); millipede; tiger snake - and that same snake trying to eat a bird: it was hiding in the roof of the lodge next to a hanging nest (hundreds of these) and zapped the poor owner - in the photo you can see the bird's head in its mouth, the body dangling. The snake dropped the bird after a while, perhaps because we were distracting it from swallowing its dinner - then the ranger grabbed it. "Is it poisonous?" we asked. "Yes, but only species specific, if it bites me I'll only be ill for a few days. Who wants to touch it?" Oddly enough we all touched it....

Timbavati

2009-01-07T08:33:00.000-08:00

L, E and I spent four days in the very wonderful Timbavati reserve - part of Kruger National Park - and had a superlatively great time. The formula for staying in a game lodge is very simple and very effective - a ranger wakes you up at five a.m. every day and you spend four hours cruising around the park (which is huge - over 400 kilometres north-south) on an open high-backed Land Rover looking for animals; the ranger (driving) and the tracker (scanning) can read tracks and spot things that us ordinary urban mortals would never notice (the tracker actually saw a well-camouflaged chameleon in a tree AT NIGHT from a moving jeep - very impressive). Part of the fun is that the guests are encouraged to look for animals too, and sometimes we spot them when the professionals don't (or at least they let us think so). Sometimes you drive for half an hour without seeing anything at all, then you round a corner and find a group of zebra, giraffe and impala all grazing together. Few of these animals run away - there's been no hunting in this reserve for decades and they've got used to these strange animals with ten heads on four wheels which don't do any harm except occasionally use a flash on the camera.

You go back to the lodge for breakfast at 9.30, then if conditions are right (i.e. the wind steady in one direction - to be able to anticipate which direction predators could come from) you go out for a "bush walk" with the ranger carrying a rifle and warning you not to lag behind (lions prefer stragglers). Then you get a bit of time to yourself (swimming pool available though sometimes you have to throw some frogs out) until lunch at two thirty - then it's back on the vehicle for another three or four hours driving around, stopping for a sundowner at sunset, then another hour in the dark heading back to camp. Dinner is at eight thirty and then you go to bed, knackered. There's no mobile phone coverage or telephone TV or internet or newspapers in the lodge (the only communication is by radio) - and there's nowhere else to go (the last twenty kilometres to get to the lodge are inside the park, half of them on a dirt road), so there are no distractions.

I'll probably come back to our wilderness experience, and I'll try not to post too many amateur photos of animals, but just to give you an idea of how amazing the Kruger is, in four days we saw: kudu, impala, elephants, giraffes (including two having a fight, swinging their heads at each other like conkers), leopards (including a female stalking some impala), scorpions, dung beetles, buffalo, eagles, kingfishers, warthogs, giant millipedes (which curl up when touched into a shiny coil much like a dog turd), lions, stag beetles, steenbok, giant spiders (and football sized nests holding a thousand spiders), hippos, zebras, mongeese, jackals, vultures, civets, hyenas, water buck, tortoises, baboons, wildebeest, gnu, hares, various snakes (including the deadly black mamba, the fastest snake on land - we chased it in the land rover), and the rare and endangered wild dog... and dozens of birds whose names I couldn't keep track of... and hundreds of flowers whose names I didn't bother to ask about. You get very close to all of these things - the ranger parked virtually in the path of the leopard that was hunting and it walked right past us, ignoring us after the first glance - and a leopard's glance, when you're twenty feet away in an open jeep, is electrifying - and during many of these experiences you realise how our deep instincts are still geared for reacting to and surviving in this environment; you catch your breath, you're totally focused on the moment; sometimes you fight your fear. I don't think the hair has stood up on the back of my neck so many times ever before in my life. The four days were wonderful, exciting, totally engrossing, thrilling. I want to go back and do it again soon.