Cape Town and the Western Cape of South Africa

We arrived in Cape Town and stayed with Tamara Ridley and her boyfriend JP for almost a week of a luxuriously comfortable bed, a fully functional kitchen and way too much alcohol.  Tam is a family friend, her father and my father went to University together.  I had last seen her in 1996 when she came out to visit my family in Australia with her father.  Honestly I was a little worried about staying with someone for that length of time when I hadn’t seen them in almost 15 years.  Fortunately both Tamara and JP (both featured in photo's below) were lovely and we had an amazing time staying with them.

I think, if we were to live anywhere in Southern Africa, I’d pick Cape Town.  Firstly cities situated on the West Coast are always cooler (think Vancouver, think Perth, think Lisbon).  There are vineyards within and 30 minutes from the city centre, some amazing diving, Table mountain to hike, and a very unique food culture with seafood galore and a great nightlife, as well as seal and penguin colonies and hiking on the Cape of Good Hope. 

We managed to do almost everything above, except for the kelp forest diving.  Mark had been given for his 30 birthday money towards this from friends in London; unfortunately the weather wasn’t amazing while we were there, so he couldn’t.  Don’t worry, I’ll make sure he spends it on something cool.  J

From Cape Town we hired a car and headed to Stellenbosch for three days of wine tasting and amazing food.  We also caught up with Rob Brown, a gentleman we had meet in Kariba Zimbabwe.  We left Stellenbosch with lighter purses, clinking bottles of wine in the boot of the car, and a few extra pounds in weight from the food.  Lovely!

Right now we are in Prince Albert and have managed to really fall on our feet.  Yesterday it was Sunday and with everything closed except the local bakery/ cafe we spoke to the owners who have rented us out an entire amazing old colonial three bed house for £16.50 (less than the price of a camp site in Namibia). 

From here we hit the Garden route, followed by the Wild Coast and then Lesoto

Namibia

I think I’m not going to write so exactly sequentially for Namibia. Why? because Mark was in charge of the planning so we did A LOT.  I’ll try to restrict myself to the highlights, but firstly about Namibia.  Starting with the negatives because then you finish reading on a happy note.  It was EXPENSIVE.  Accommodation was more expensive that most European capital cities, camping pricier, and the food hurt the budget, this was something we heard a lot of people bemoaning.  Not great for travellers, but can you imagine what it’s like for a local.  Also, and this was more based on the time of year of our visit, but wow it was hot.  42 degrees, and we had no air-con in the car.  Which leads my nicely to my next point, very poor transport system, you have to hire a car to get around, get on board a overland truck or sell a kidney to pay for the very expensive in country tours, we were told that even hitch hikers were expected to pay a huge fee to get picked up.  And finally, it is basically all dust!

What was interesting was how usual the country was.  The cleanest cities in Africa, with German architecture (Namibia was Germany’s only colony) in a very dusty dry country.  Also, the landscape; or as one fellow traveller told us when we first arrived, ‘you’ve never seen so many different types of nothing’.  The supermarkets stocked with German produce like sauerkraut and rye bread and then typical African dishes like pap and biltong.  Massive, modern cattle farms in most of the country contrasted with the northern small rural tribal farms with foot and mouth and anthrax troubles.

So what did we do in Namibia?  We headed north first to Etosha national park for some desert game viewing.  What makes Etosha so amazing is the quantity of game, but also the environment.  Flat landscape with not much in the way of trees to block your view of huge herds of game wondering the plains, and a desert with just a couple of waterholes with guaranteed amazing game viewing.  Mark picked a great rest camp with a waterhole that with flood lamps lit overnight.  Mark got up at about 3.30 each morning to watch leopards, lions, elephant, hyena, rhino’s and more buck that you could braai* in a life time come to drink the water.  Hopefully he’ll be able to post his photo’s of this soon.

I also feel in love with Spitzkoppe, where we camped on a giant kopje (a hill or rocky outcrop set in an otherwise flat plain) in an area with no light pollution and watch the stars while toasting marshmallows and cuddling around the fire.  Again, once he’s edited them, Mark will post (what I think) his amazing photo’s from the evening.  We climbed the world’s biggest sand dunes by Swakopmund and explored a dead lake complete with dead trees.  We hiked to 3000 year old SAN bushman paintings.  Helped fellow travellers whose campervan had a flat tire (the whole time feeling incredibly happy that it wasn’t us this time) and then fixed our own flat tire the following day, thinking we shouldn’t have been so happy the day before.  We went wine tasting in Namibia’s only winery.  And finally I really enjoyed watching just how extraordinarily excited Mark was about the different varieties of barren nothingness that passed us by in the window.

We spent ten days in Namibia in all and while it is beautiful I’d suggest to all travellers to not go in the Southern Hemisphere’s summer, pack a warm sleeping bag and only hire a car with aircon.  Also a stuffed wallet would help.

We left Windhoek, the capital on an overnight bus for Cape Town on one of the most comfortable buses I’ve ever taken, the InterCape.  Tragically they too make us watch terrible terrible movies played so loud my ipod set at full volume wouldn’t drown out the sound.  Sigh.

 

*Southern African for bbq

Botswana

We didn’t have a lot of time for Bostwana, and hiring a car wasn’t cheap, so we limited our stay to visiting the absolute highlights, Chobe National Park, and the Okavango Delta.  While both were amazing, perhaps most memorable will be how we got from Chobe to Maun in the Okavango, but I’m getting ahead of myself; I’m trying to be sequential here.  

We crossed the boarder with a minimum of fuss, and arrived in the small town outside of Chobe National Park to stay the night.  Chobe proved to be the quickest tour for a national park, but also one of the most impressive.  We booked ourselves onto a sunset boat cruise which covered a tiny area of the park, but the boat allowed us to get the closest to game and see more than anywhere else.

Without a hire car, to move from Chobe to Maun consisted of two very squishy local buses (fortunately with no movies).  However all was not lost because two very nice French Canadian’s happend to be going the same way as us, so we had someone else to talk to, always nice.  Even better, while waiting for the second bus, three crazy Russians approached us, said they felt sorry for us, and offered us a lift.  Yes the car was a seven seater so technically we would all fit, but we were all travelling, so you need to account for bags.  Mark’s backpack is 90 litres.  He can fit a small couch into it.  His ‘day bag’ is the size of most people’s backpacks.  While I have a small backpack, and a medium sized day back, together they take up more room than we do.  We ended up with bags at our feet, sitting on bags, bags on our laps, bags on those bags and a tiny air circle.  Our driver also had a lead foot, so we tended to move at about 180km/hr.  It was uncomfortable!  It was also the best road trip I’ve been on in ages as we attempted conversation with various English levels, and various abilities to breathe.  That evening in Maun proved to be equally entertaining; Russians can party.

Feeling slightly worse for wear, the next morning with Geneviève and Kevin (the French Canadian couple) we set off on a Mokoro trip into the Okavango.  A Mokoro is a canoe like boat that was used to get around the Okavango Delta, a swamp in the northern part of Botswana.  We piled our bags, camping gear, cooking equipment and enough food to last us three nights and set off. 

What to say about the Mokoro trip.  Well it was HOT in the Okavango.  This meant we basically found whatever shady spot we could, and lay in it between 10am and 4pm.  Also we were really roughing it, so no showers and a proper camp toilet consisting of a hole in the ground.  Also because it was so hot, we were drinking about 5 litres of water a piece.  That wasn’t something we’d catered for, so we ended up having to boil swamp water (ok the swamp water was pretty clean, but there were still bits in it). 

Having said all of that, it was a great deal of fun.  We’d go fishing in the evenings; we’d laze in the water during the day (hoping no croc passed looking for a tasty morsel); we ate some pretty amazing meals, including the fish Mark managed to catch; we’d go on game walks in the mornings and evenings spotting herds of zebra’s, elephant, buffalo, warthog, baboons and millions of birds. 

We discovered new and wonderful uses for dried elephant poo as well.  Too many mozzies at night?  Burn elephant poo and smoke them away.  Monkeys try to steal food from your camp?  Throw elephant poo at them (burning poo optional).  Herd of elephants walk through your camp over night and worried about getting squished?  Throw aforementioned smoking poo at them.  Husband needs to be put into place?  Elephant poo fight!

While I think all four of us enjoyed the Delta, the feeling of opening the eskie (cooler box) of the boat taking us back to Maun and finding ice cold bottles of water, beer and soft drinks was pretty euphoric.  So was stepping into the shower and washing that swampy water, smokey-elephant smell from my hair!!!

From Maun we went to Windhoek in Namibia with another lead foot 180km/hr driver.  Yes Mum we wore seatbelts!

Zimbabwe (Harare to Vic Falls)

Since I’m not re-reading the last blog for fear of dying of shame I’ll assume I left off in Harare where we stayed with the lovely Smits and went to watch my uncle perform in a stage version of ‘Ello ‘Ello which featured a painting of the Fallen Madonna with the big boobies...

We caught a bus from Harare to Bulawayo which was actually remarkably comfortable if you could excuse the incredibly bad, incredibly loud movies played for the entire trip.  I couldn’t.  I think Mark struggled to get past my incredibly loud and incredibly constant complaining.

We stayed with Caroline and Jeff Fenwick, Caroline is the sister of some family friends of mine from Perth, her brother Leo actually drove me to our wedding, so while I’d never meet the Fenwick’s, I know Caroline’s brother and grew up with her nieces and nephew.  However meeting and receiving amazing hospitality and care from people who’s relationship to you is tenuous at best seems to be par for the course in Zim as well as the rest of Southern Africa.  Their son, Justin took Mark and I on a tour of the Matopos Hills which were pretty amazing.  They also gave us contact details for John in Vic Falls which was where we headed next... on the same bus company we used to get to Bulawayo.

Fortunately the bus turned out to be a lot smaller, so there wasn’t a tv screen, instead we read and listen happily to our own music while watching the world go by – how civilised!

Vic Falls in Zimbabwe’s premier tourist spot and in many respects it shows.  While in the rest of Zim there are rolling blackouts (be it to electricity for three days of the week, or electricity for half of the day) it’s very rare for Vic Falls to have a black out.  And roaming Vic Falls where a lot of tourist police, whose jobs were financed by local hotels and task was to protect tourist from some fairly aggressive touts.  Mark and I being jaded, backpackers we are seem to have gotten much better and politely getting rid of aggressive touts quickly (and politely mum), but I did watch a lot of people really struggle, so this was a great initiative that I hadn’t really seen elsewhere. 

About the Falls.  Well they are beautiful.  Simple as that.  They’ve been listed as one of the 7 natural wonders of the world, and while I don’t always agree with these lists (the Colloseum as one of the 7 modern wonders of world???  Where’s Ankor Wat??) Vic Falls should definitely be there.  We also spent a day white water rafting which was AWESOME!!!  To say I was petrified about doing this does not cover how scared I was.  I didn’t sleep the whole night before, waking poor Mark up at 3 in the morning telling him I couldn’t do it.  Fortunately I did, because it will probably go down as one of the best experiences of the whole trip.  That night we were treated by the Smits in Harare to a dinner at what is considered one of Zimbabwe’s premier restaurants, the Boma, which serves game (think Warthog, Kudu, Ostrich or even Croc) and includes drummers, dancers, fortune tellers, and face painting.  What a day!

Following the advice of John (a friend of the Fenwick’s) we decided against spending extreme amounts of money trying to leave Vic Falls, and hitched our way to Botswana...

Zim was always going to be pretty amazing for me.  It’s the second time I’ve visited since I emigrated to Australia with my parents in 1983 and the first time visiting without them to guide the way.  What I found was a beautiful country that is recovering from a difficult few years, populated with a very kind and generous people.  I would warn however, that if you don’t have your own transport, maybe wait a year or two to visit.  The transport infrastructure isn’t so great.

Story since Harare

Ahhh, I’m having serious writers bloc.  I have many tales to tell, but seem to have a complete inability to write it down.  Yuck. Also I’ve been a bit slack, but then I’m never sure who reads this apart from Mum and Joel.  Actually I finally worked out how to look at reader’s stats and apparently more people read this blog in Canada than anywhere else, but then that probably isn’t interesting to many people beyond myself.  Blogging is a selfish pursuit isn’t it?

So since the last blog (which was posted while drunk, so I dare not go back and reread) we’ve finished up in Zimbabwe, and then went on to Botswana, Namibia and are now in South Africa.  I’m going to try and break things up by country and post a blog for each