There be Dragons...

Hello again!

Picking up the thread from my last posting, we rejoin Grant and me on a Sunday morning in Durban, waiting around for the Baz Bus. Yes, I was back on the Baz again. Mostly because the day's destination, the Amphitheatre Backpackers, is up in the Northern Drakensberg, a fair old drive from the nearest town, but is a designated Baz stop. It's a quirky little place, and one with which I was already familiar, having stayed there on my previous visit to South Africa, and done the magnificent Tugela Falls walk (well, at times it was more of a climb...).

One aspect of the Baz which I can't fault is the ease of meeting those who are likely to be your companions for the next few days. In this case, Grant and I were joined by Kulraj, a British guy who (slightly similar to my original plans) was on unpaid leave from his company and off seeing the world, and an American lass from Minnesota, who went by the unlikely name of Betta. Turns out, as I should have guessed, this was just another of the many quirky ways of abbreviating Elizabeth (it's at least as logical a contraction as Libby, put it that way). She did provide endless amusement for the next few days, though, as Kulraj would wind her up by continually responding to things "yeah, you betcha!" - this is apparently something of a Minnesota thing. At any rate, she took it all in good spirit.

Arriving at the Backpackers mid-afternoon, it was obviously too late to get anything significant done that day, so we ended up just sitting around chatting, exchanging travellers' tales, for a while. In the evening, it was over to the restaurant/bar area, which is in what is effectively a vey big rondavel (the thatched round houses favoured by many of the tribes in South Africa) for dinner and a few drinks, as well as discussions on what to do the next day. There were a couple of other English couples there as well, whose names I have to admit I've forgotten now, all bar the fact that one of the girls was called George. The general consensus, unfortunately for me, was that almost everyone wanted to do the Tugela Falls walk. Which was understandable, as it is an amazing day-trip. I had been hoping to do the trip up to Lesotho which they also run, and had to make do with the prospect of going the following day, the Tuesday, which would unfortunately cut somewhat into my planned time in Jo'burg and Pretoria.

As it was, though, I got up around the same time as the others on the Monday morning (which can be nigh-on unavoidable when everybody else in your dorm is getting up), and was mooching around when the news came through: there was too much cloud over the section of the Amphitheatre where the Falls walk goes, and they had to cancel for that day. So, suddenly, the Lesotho trip was back on, and I was haring around like a decapitated chook trying to get my stuff together. Having dug out my camera, fleece, water bottle etc, Grant, Betta and I, along with the non-George English couple and a French couple who were also at the hostel, piled into the 4WD with our driver, whose name I now scandalously cannot remember, and we were off.

Our journey took us over the Provincial border between KwaZulu-Natal and Free State, as the crossing into Lesotho (pronounced Le-SOO-too) was somewhat further around the border. This might seem strange, given that Lesotho lay just the other side of the the Drakensberg range, which is visible from the hostel. However, you have to bear in mind that at this point it is an escarpment - effectively a long series of cliffs rather than a gentle set of foothills leading up into peaks - and there are very few crossings along the southern and eastern borders of Lesotho. The famous Sani Pass, further south down the Drakensberg, is one of the few which is passable to vehicle traffic. We were headed for another, which is actually on the north-eastern border of Lesotho, near to the vast community of QwaQwa.

No, I'm not making that name up. QwaQwa (pronounced Kwah-Kwah, but with one of the distinctive glottal "clicks" of the isiZulu and isiXhosa languages on the "K") is a real place, and it's a real big place. In fact, it's the largest settlement in Free State and quite a bit bigger than Bloemfontein, the provincial capital and 3rd national capital. Yes, they officially have a Legislative Capital (Cape Town, where the Parliament sits), an Executive Capital (Pretoria, where the Civil Service is based) and a Judicial Capital (Bloemfontein, where the Supreme Court sits). It's one of those lovely compromises South Africa just seems to work with, which anywhere else would be a recipe for chaos. Despite being the largest and richest city, Johannesburg is not, and never has been, a capital of South Africa. At any rate, QwaQwa, which grew out of yet another of the apartheid government's attempts to create black "homelands" and dump those not needed for industry there, is apparently now the 5th most populous urban area in the country (behind Jo'burg, Cape Town, Durbs and PE), but you're hard-pressed even to find it mentioned in any guidebook. Effectively, it's a giant township, but without the usual White South African city that generally provides the focus (and much of the employment) for the occupants. And, up on the cliffs above the southern end of this vast sprawl, at the end of an "unsealed road" (i.e. a track) which skirts up the side of the mountain with little or nothing in the way of safety barriers between vehicles and a vertiginous drop, lies probably South Africa's smallest border crossing.

After approaching up the afore-mentioned track, the prospective visitor to Lesotho passes through a wire-link fence and stops next to a small building containing a couple of officials from the Immigration department. I think they did have a computer up there, but it wasn't working that day, so our exit formalities were processed manually and, for the first time in about a month, I was headed into a new African country. As we passed through the wire-link fence on the other side of the South African border compound, I was expecting to find a Lesotho counterpart, but the track just headed down a valley and up the other side. When I asked him, our driver responded that the Lesotho post was a bit farther down the road.

Which it was, kind of. You see, the Lesotho border post consisted of a couple of caravans at the side of the road, one for immigration and one for customs. Both were empty. Apparently Lesotho wasn't bothering with its borders along this way at the moment, and was happy to leave it in the hands of the South Africans. In fact, the Customs caravan looked on the verge of collapse. It was an interesting welcome to Africa's highest country. A country that was also in the interesting (some would say damned uncomfortable) position of being, for many years, a Black African state completely enclosed by the apartheid Republic of South Africa.

The reasons for its independence basically go back (again) to the times of the British Empire, and the fact that the lands of the Sotho (or Basotho) people, under their King, submitted to the British separately from the Boers and were not engulfed in the manner of the Xhosa and the Zulu - unlike the latter two, the British never made any real attempts at colonising the areas the Sotho called home, and the majority of the conflicts they had had were with the Boers. Hence, like the Tswana people who lived in what was known as Bechuanaland (and became Botswana) and the Swazis, they stayed under direct British rule rather than become part of the Union of South Africa which was formed in the early 20th century. This also meant that they got their independence back as part of the steady implosion of the Empire after World War Two, and were not left totally at the mercy of the National Party. However, like all of the so-called Frontline States of the apartheid years, they were forced to be pragmatic to a certain extent, as South Africa controlled all land and air routes into and out of the country.

At any rate, though spared the iniquities of apartheid, Lesotho remained (and to a large extent still remains) a poor, predominantly agricultural country. There are differences between Lesotho and the majority-Black areas of rural South Africa, but they're not terribly pronounced. Like the Namibian dollar, the Lesotho currency is pegged 1-to-1 to the Rand, and their economy depends almost entirely on their large neighbour. At one point in the day, we saw an army barracks further over in a valley - the fact that Lesotho has an army at all is faintly ridiculous, as the only country they would ever practically be engaged in a struggle with is SA, and the SA Defence Force would swat the Lesotho Defence Force without breaking up a sweat. Cynics would suggest the soldiers are only there for the ego of the government, and as a more heavily-armed alternative to the police in case of civil disorder. And they'd probably be right...

Our agenda for the day featured walking up some hills ("No" proclaimed my knees, still sore from Zululand) to go and see some Bushman (Khoi-Khoi or Khoi-San, if you're being particular) rock art; going and seeing around a local school (to which a donation is made as part of each trip cost); seeing a sangoma (how original...); trying the local food and beer; and generally being gob-smacked by the stark mountain countryside.

The hill-climbing wasn't as bad as I'd feared, and it was, as ever, interesting to see a few more examples of rock art, in this case getting that slightly naughty warm and fuzzy feeling that very few tourists of any stripe had been up here (as far as I know, Amphitheatre runs the only tours up into this part of the country). I know that probably sounds contradictory, given my rant in previous postings about travellers obsessed with getting "off the beaten track", and, if I'm honest, it probably is. I guess I can be as competitive as the next person about what I have or haven't seen on my travels. At any rate, the exercise will have done me good. Which is what I always seem to end up saying when I have to exert myself remotely. 3 years driving a desk obviously made me even lazier than I thought.

After our little climb, it was back down to see around the school, shown around by the headmistess (an ex-pupil). Again, this gave the kind of perspective that middle-class white kids really do need hammered into them sometimes. Just seeing the facilities (or lack thereof) makes you realise, once again, everything we take for granted. The kids were happy to have the chance to be at school. The behaviour puts a lot of the spoilt litte hellions back in the UK utterly to shame. They were both grateful and proud to show off the desks that the visits from backpackers at Amphitheatre down the years had paid for. And they showed us the original school building, which, like several of the others, the pupils at the time had helped to build. Simultaneously heart-warming and heart-breaking.

After that, the sangoma was predictable and just a little bit boring. Having heard variations on the theme from both the Xhosa and the Zulu, I came perilously close to following my old practice from Uni and dozing off in lectures. The food was also predictable, being chunks of mielie with spinach. I've never been that fond of spinach, and eating it repeatedly with mielie certainly hasn't made me any more receptive to its dubious charms. And the beer was something of an experience. You see, this isn't like the ubiquitous Castle lager or anything, this is old-fashioned sorghum stuff. Fermented and served in what looked suspiciously like an old paint tin. The taste was, well, interesting. Comparing it to common or pub-variety beer is a bit like comparing half-fermented scrumpy to modern draught cider, only that helf-fermented beer doesn't have the saving grace of being produced from fruit. I did end up having a second swig as the communal pot went around, though. Just to be sure, you know...?

After that, it was getting on through the afternoon, so we headed back up through the non-existent border post (I was faintly annoyed at that, as I'd have liked to add another stamp to my passport), down through QwaQwa and back over to the backpacker lodge, where we had quite a nice dinner, accompanied by a "Bob Marley" cocktail, and then proceeded to liberally sample some local beer they had on draught (and rather a nice Porter it was, too). And then it was off to bed, as the next day it was time to head north again.

But that can wait for the next posting. Until then, fare well.

Pat

Zulu!

G'day again.

Well, for those who prior to this mammoth publication were largely unfamiliar with South Africa, this is the entry where I finally encounter probably South Africa's most famous denizens: the Zulu. However, I must caution you beforehand that this does not involve any "Don't throw those bloody spears at me!" moments (sorry, Owen...) - their warrior past notwithstanding, the Zulus are now citizens of South Africa like any other, and those of you addicted to the spectacle of Rorke's Drift and Isandhlwana would probably find them a little bit of an anti-climax.

This all comes about as a result of the Friday trip that I made with Grant, still travelling along the same way despite Mark's departure, from Durban to the Valley of a Thousand Hills. Now, for the more pedantic amongst you (stand up, Al), I have no idea if there actually were 1,000 hills along the valley, nor did I (or do I) particularly care. Suffice to say, the valley in question is indeed bracketed along its length by a great many hills. It's also home to a large Zulu community.

Big surprise, you may say, seeing as how it's in a province called KwaZulu-Natal, in which the Zulus are the majority population. And you'd have a point. The difference is more about the fact that the valley is more of a traditional Zulu setup than the townships around Durban - though obviously, traditional is very much a relative concept.

The endless fetishising by many travellers, especially the more militant of the backpacking community, of seeing things that are "traditional" or "original" or (here's the key one) "untouched" can get ridiculous. Specifically, anybody taking an organised tour to go and see something, rather than finding their own way there, cannot really be surprised if what they see can feel a trifle staged. Certainly, I have no patience for anybody who then proceeds to complain that the tour guide only takes them to see people who dress up for the tourists - although this didn't happen on this trip, I have seen Westerners getting quite irate because they don't think a guide is taking them somewhere "authentic" enough or (this makes me cringe) "off the beaten track". I have every respect for the guys who really do go out and find things on their own, but I make no pretensions at the fact that I will happily take tours to go and see things, preferably with a local doing the guiding, and that I can handle it if these can feel like I'm being spoonfed a particular view.

So, our trip to the Valley was as authentic as I personally feel the need for: the guide who drove us for about an hour up from Durban was a Zulu; the lass who showed us around the area was a Zulu; the sangoma was a Zulu; the local ladies who brought us lunch were Zulu; the little kids who came and sang and danced for us were Zulu. The village was a working community, and there was a minimum of staging stuff. We weren't prevailed upon at every single stage to buy things.

Although I knew the Zulu and the Xhosa were distant cousins (both are members of the Nguni group that migrated down from East Africa), sitting through the presentation by the sangoma made me realise their traditional beliefs are near-identical, and the food and language are pretty similar too. The little kids from the local school did some fairly energetic dancing, largely involving high-kicking and clapping. They then insisted that we try it, too, which provoked a fair bit of amusement (my attempts at high-kicking were notably hilarious). Overall, though, it was far less disturbing than the experience we'd had in Coffee Bay, where the local girls' dance group came and did some traditional dancing at the Coffee Shack hostel, which basically involved them singing and jumping around energetically while wearing just a skirt and necklaces - a bunch of girls in their early teens doing this is not a comfortable thing if you've been brought up with Western taboos about public nudity...

The food was similar to what we'd had in Transkei, with the main staple being mielie (maize), which is ground down and then cooked either as kind of equivalent of rice or cous-cous or something, or laid out as a kind of bread-like cake. Both those descriptions ascribe far too much elegance and taste to it, though - mielie is incredibly bland. It's then generally accompanied by spinach, and sometimes squash/pumpkin. If you're really lucky, you might get some chaka-laka, which is a kind of spicy tomato salsa. Carnivores, I'm afraid, would be disappointed, as meat only tends to be eaten as part of celebrations, not from day to day. It's also mostly eaten with the fingers, by balling up some mielie and using it to scoop up bits of the accompaniments, which is refreshingly messy when you get used to it, but again is a slight challenge to any Westerners wedded to the concept of cutlery!

We also went down to by the river, and had what was probably the most fascinating part of the tour, as our guide regaled us with an explanation of traditional Zulu courtship practices, which are fairly circumspect, and revolve around the girl telling the guy frequently to go away, before finally signalling acceptance with a woven-grass bracelet. Obviously, we all got to make our efforts at making these bracelets (even we menfolk, in the spirit of equal opportunities), which ranged from the good, though the passable (probably where I'd rate my final effort) to the utterly pitiful (where my first effort would lie...).

The other thing we did a fair bit of, unsurprisingly given the name of the place, was climb hills. Which just reminded me how much I hate hills. Ah well. It almost certainly did me some good, and doesn't seem so dreadful from the point of view of an office job, where the most strenuous thing to do is go upstairs to the canteen (and then go and sit out on the huge balcony in the sunshine, looking back west towards the Melbourne CBD in the distance...). It was quite knackering at the time, though. Which made it all the more surprising that I was in the mood for going out that night.

In fact, I reckon what drove me on was going for a curry with Grant. I hadn't had a really good, proper Indian curry since Stellenbosch (and that one got buried under somewhat of a session), and it had been even longer than that for Grant, so we went the whole hog, poppadums, naans, a full blow-out curry. Absolutely blissful. And a lot more elegant than Durban's own unique contribution to the world of rapid cuisine, namely the Bunny Chow. This delightfully-named treat consists of half a loaf of white bread (unsliced), with the innards scooped out, a heap of curry ladled in, and then the removed bread back on top. I've only had one once, last year when I first went to SA, but I quite liked it. Then again, it had curry in, so I was pretty much always going to.

After this, we headed back to the hostel for a couple of beers, after which Grant crashed out, claiming exhaustion and incipient bankruptcy. I ended up sitting around chatting with some other lads at the bar, one of whom, I realised after a while, I had actually also talked to at the same hostel bar some 18 months previously, when I stayed there for a night in my previous time in Durban. English ex-pat, ex-Army, that particular kind of Home Counties accent that sounds a bit like a horse - nice enough bloke, though. I also got chatting to two lasses from Kent, who were (to be honest) both rather stunning and had half the guys in the place in a lather. Which turned out to be handy, as one of the guys was the owner of the bar we'd been at the previous night, and made sure we got in for free, despite it being a Friday night. I then got to spend an hour or so chatting away with the girls whilst watching every single shark in the place come and try his luck (and crash and burn), which, when I know I haven't got a chance of getting anywhere myself, I always find really quite funny. They only stayed around for that hour or so, though, as they were leaving the next morning. I then ended up having a few more drinks with Zuzka, the Czech receptionist, and her Aussie room-mate, Peta, discussing the state of the world, the joys of travelling, Aussie bands, and all those other kind of things one does when moderately drunk and not remotely interested in the music being played. And then, on the walk home, Peta and I got the amusement value of watching Zuzka dancing down the middle of the street. A quirky, but quality, evening/night.

The Saturday was thus, by necessity, a somewhat less busy day. Nice little lie-in, then up to watch the sport - I believe it was the Wallabies vs All Blacks game from the Tri-Nations, though that's largely on the basis of working out where I was for the other games rather than from any particular certainty. I remember it was a pretty decent match, though. After that, I met up with Grant and we popped down the road to a pub to watch the first games of the English Premiership season - unfortunately, the game we both desperately wanted to see (West Ham vs Blackburn) was apparently the lowest priority match (it was due to be shown as a delayed broadcast at 1am, and hence they didn't even tell us the score!), but we got a couple of games to watch. Basically, it was as much about just re-affirming that the annual club football famine of the summer was properly over. And having a few beers. Despite starting the drinking in the afternoon, though, it was a relatively quiet evening, spent at the hostel bar chatting with Grant, Zuzka, Peta and a few other random fellow drinkers. Neither Grant nor I was in the mood for a heavy one, as the next day we were due to be off bright and early (again), heading northwards to the Drakensberg mountains. But that'll have to wait until next time. Until then, remember: I am the Weakest Link. Goodbye!

On The Buses

[Remembering back to the last Blog, I believe I left it after much screaming of Buffalo and wandering round surrounded by more tin-foil than a garlic bread convention, as the Space Party at the Coffee Shack hostel wound down to a close. Looking back through my diary (one of the only things I haven't managed to lose...), that was the night of Tuesday 9th August. This was actually written on Monday 28th November. So that's something like 15 or 16 weeks behind. Ah well.]

The morning of Wednesday 10th dawned, but I wasn't around to see it. That Wednesday was a very lazy day - I slept in, and then mooched around the hostel, writing up a fair bit of this very Blog, copying some music from Mark's MP3 player and generally doing nothing much. In the evening, a bunch of us climbed up the hill behind the hostel to sit on the cliffs and watch the sunset. Except it was quite overcast, so we didn't really see much fun. It was still probably good for me to get the exercise, though I somewhat spoiled the effect by following it up with a couple of beers. Had a few more beers back at the hostel, but was somewhat more subdued (though there was still a fair bit of BUFFALO going on) - main thing I remember is talking with this South African lad who was actually an ex-driver for Acacia (having just recently quit), and watching him try to chat up a Quebecoise lass who was there with her boyfriend. Unsurprisingly, he got absolutely nowhere.

The next day it was time to leave Coffee Bay but, since it was a rather nicer, sunnier affair, I went for a wander along the beach, which is really beautiful For me, though, there wasn't enough to really keep me amused in Coffee Bay, so I wasn't particularly sad to be moving on. So, we piled back into the minibus, Mark, Grant, Hannah, Beth, Warren and me, and took the long drive back up to Umtata (thankfully this time without the driving rain which haunted us on the way down, so we could enjoy the view).

The others were all rejoining the Baz, headed in one direction or the other, but I was continuing my stubborn attempts to travel independently, and was booked on SA Roadlink, a new company on the main scene since my previous time in SA, for the trip through to Durban. And I can generally recommend them, as the coach was comfy enough and was much cheaper than most of the other options (I think it was about 100 Rand, which is about 9 quid). They had a video system onboard but, as this was used to display a BeeGees concert, then The Pacifier (Vin Diesel doing a comedy with kids, somewhat a la Kindergarten Cop), then a Simon & Garfunkel concert, you could argue that it might not have been to everyone's taste. See below, though, for why I don't give them a totally ringing endorsement:

You see, the really memorable thing about that trip was that we ended up making somewhat of a detour due to accidentally leaving a passenger behind at one point...
This may have been partly due to me, as the hostel hadn't actually booked me on the bus (as they'd claimed) so I bought a walk-up ticket and hence wasn't on the manifest. So, when the hostess counted people back onto the bus after one 10-minute rest stop, she thought we were all on but one guy demonstrably wasn't. However, we only found this out at least half an hour down the road, when the driver got rung up by the office to say he had to go back and fetch this guy!! Unsurprisingly, he was not at all impressed, and was quite loud about this for an extended period of time. He was apparently going to try and sue them, and one of the staff actually asked me if I would be willing to be a witness that they didn't just drive off after a couple of minutes leaving him there - I was quite glad to be able to say that I was only in the country for another week or so, and thus couldn't...

Anyways, that somewhat unintentionally livened up the trip, but did mean we were somewhat later into Durban, aka Durbs, than we were meant to be. With all the kerfuffle, I decided costs be buggered, I was going to get a cab from the bus station up to the hostel, and hence it must have been about 10:30 at night by the time I staggered in the door of Tekweni Backpackers. Amusingly, though, despite all this I was still in Durbs before the Baz Bussers - because they divert to a few places away from the highway, it actually takes them longer than the coaches (even if said coaches have an unplanned detour). Eventually, though, Mark and Grant turned up, along with Warren, the Aussie lad we'd been hanging around with at Coffee Shack. Our original plan had been to try and go for a curry when we met up (Durban is home to the largest Indian population in South Africa, and is justifiably famous for its curries), but, in a surprising inversion from back home, it was a bit too late for a curry place to be open, so we ended up going for Italian at a place called Spiga D'Oro.

After food, Grant was feeling knackered and headed back to the hostel, but Mark and Warren were both up for a couple of beers, as this was their only night in town before heading onwards, so we went up the road to the Zeta Bar, which was your fairly typical slightly trendy South African bar - and hence, a bit of a shock to the system after a couple of weeks on the Wild Coast and Garden Route. Lots of the "beautiful people" sitting around listening to R'n'B or writhing on the dance floor, paying stupid prices for drinks (at least for SA - still cheaper than a Student Union back home!) and generally looking quite pretentious. Could almost have been back home, except that the crowd would have been more ethnically mixed in Britain. After a couple of beers, none of us was really in the mood, so we headed back to the hostel, and I bid my farewells to the lads. I was quite sad to be saying goodbye to Mark, in particular, as we'd been travelling along together for over a week now, which sounds like nothing, but feels like eternity when you're backpacking! He was a good lad, even though he did support Man U (and those who know me will know that's quite a hurdle to overcome with me...).

Anyways, that gets us into Durban, and I reckon that's enough for one posting - next one will take in Grant and I heading out to the Valley of a Thousand Hills to meet some Zulus, the start of the Premier League season, and the trip back up to the Amphitheatre, in the Drakensberg mountains...

For now, that's all folks!

Pat