South Africa, Part II

Ship Time: 0144
Home Time: ?

So, the safari was next, yes?

[Oh, and by the way, I know none of my pictures on the last post worked. I knew it as soon as I posted, but I didn't have time to fix it. My buddy Shaun from work put a link to my flickr page in the comment section, where you can view all of my pictures, but because that page is so disorganized and has pictures from all sorts of things not related to SAS I'm not going to link you to it. Instead, I'll probably have time in Mauritius to fix those and post many more. But, if you want to follow Shaun's link, you're more than welcome to.]

I don't know what you think of when you hear the word, "safari", but the experiences had by SAS students through various companies and various nature reserves seem to indicate that there is no clear definition of what a "safari" actually is, except that most of the time it isn't what you expect. At least it isn't what I expected, but let's start with the airport, my mother will appreciate that.

Because Rick and I didn't actually know who was going to be coming on the safari with us, we didn't have a chance to book flights until about a week before we needed them, which meant that there weren't many flights to choose from anymore (which was surprising, because we were only flying from Cape Town to Johannesburg, and there are tons of flights that make tat route every day). So we ended up paying about twice as much as we should have (should have been less than $100, was over $200), and we got a flight that arrived in Joburg (as it's usually called) at 8:45am.

The issue here, is that the tour company was going to pick us up from the airport in a van between 9:00 and 9:15am. Disallowing ourselves any clearance there is the part my mother would appreciate, because I know she would have freaking out the entire time (admittedly, so was I), so I was glad she was at home, not knowing that I was running around airports. And I say airports, with an "S", because the return trip was far more interesting. But, we made it there okay. It was a 2-hour flight, followed by a 4-and-a-half-hour van ride. Much of South Africa doesn't look terribly different from much of Wisconsin, actually.

The airline we took was slightly questionable. 1Time Air? And always spelled with a "1". 1Time. It struck me as a terrible name for an airline, and the first parts of the flight were filled with many 1Time jokes, like how after somebody's armrest fell off their seats I remarked that the planes are only used 1Time. It reminded of something that my brother Scott would have found hilarious, and I feel like he would have had a lot of good bad jokes to tell that would make him laugh incessantly, if no one else.

The safari itself, as I said, was not what I'd expected, but nor was it a disappointment. After we got to the tourist office, it was yet another hour's drive into Kruger National Park, an extremely large wildlife reserve on the border of South Africa and Mozambique, but I don't think we were anywhere near Mozambique. We weren't actually that far into the park at all.

Again I digress. On the tour it was Rick and I, along with two girls from the ship; Kelsey and Grace. Also on our tour were representatives of such strange lands as Argentina, Belgium, France, Ireland, and Alabama. One from each, for at least one of the two nights (it was a 3-day safari), with the exception of Alabama, from whence came a very kind middle-aged couple. They were all extremely interesting people too. The guy from France and the guy from Ireland were roommates. The woman from Argentina was visiting friends she had all over Africa (how one acquires friends all over Africa I never found out), the Alabamians were there for a religious convention, and the woman from Belgium was vacationing from her work for Doctors Without Borders in the Congo, where she had to leave because it was too dangerous. She had some very interesting things to say. Even our guides were extraordinarily interesting people, and very fun too.

Accodomations were tends, which we chose because they were cheaper, and they sounded more adventurous than they actually were. They were pitched just next to the lodges we could have rented (so I'm glad we didn't), as opposed to out in the wilderness like we'd expected. The entire camp area was surrounded by an electric fence. I guess that makes sense, with all sorts of creatures that can easily kill people running amok, but it wasn't what I'd wanted. Oh well. But other than the tents, we were far from "roughing it". Along with us were some staff who cooked every meal we needed, most of which was very good. They even sang for us one night. It was a very beautiful song about rice paddies. Or something. I forget. I don't even remember what language it was in.

South Africa has 11 national languages, you see. English is the most widely spoken. (European settlement and influence, lest you think South Africa is like the rest of Africa, because it isn't. The woman who was working in the Congo even stated very clearly: "This is not Africa. This is South Africa.") Anyway, Afrikaans is the second most spoken language, followed by Xhosa (the "xh" is actually more of a click than whatever sound you might imagine an X and an H to make if you put them together), and the rest of tribal dialects.

Languages, like race in South Africa, are hard to distinguish for foreigners. In America you can very easily identify white from black, Indian from Mexican, etc. In South Africa, people are generally referred to as "black", "white", or "colored", with "colored" being an actual term, and not a slur as it is typically seen in America. I guess "colored" just covers everything between black and white, which, I think, includes most people. South Africans don't like to talk too much about color, which obviously has to do with apartheid. And apartheid they simply don't talk about, at least not as "apartheid". They tend to say things like "before '94" or "before the elections", but never "during apartheid". Considering that apartheid ended during my lifetime, I would say the United States could learn a thing or two from South Africa about the notion of "forgive and forget", which, if you know anything about Archbishop Desmond Tutu, is a very real and realistic practice in South Africa, incredibly.

Here I prattle on, trying to talk about a safari, and I've yet to say anything about animals. Yes, I did see creatures. Many. The thing with safaris is that everybody concerns themselves with The Big Five, which are arbitrarily elephants, lions, leopards, rhinos, and buffalo (not American buffalo). We only saw 3. I'm sorry to say that lions are not as abundant nor as easy to spot as you may think, and evidently leopards are quite scarce indeed.

But I didn't really care. I wanted to see elephants and giraffes the most anyway. I did see plenty of elephants, and was in fact uncomfortably close to a few. It's very exciting, being close enough to an elephant so that you could spit on him, if you wanted, but elephants do have a tendency to stampede large objects that make them uncomfortable, such as a 9-passenger jeep, like the one I was sitting in. And elephants, you know, are unreasonably large themselves. Of course we weren't charged by any elephants, though we did have to drive away from one or two. A small part of me did hope that elephant would come after us, just for the story, but oh well.

There was one rhino that had our guide a little nervous. We couldn't go around it, as it was practically in the middle of the street. It stamped its foot and snorted at us, and our guide looked back at us and said, "He wants to charge us." He didn't, but we were in edge for a few minutes. We also almost witnessed two rhinos get in a fight, but one just made a very pathetic squeal and backed off.

Elephants and rhinos were what we saw the most of, besides an incredible abundance of impalas and kudu antelope, which were so plentiful that by the second day we never stopped to look at them. I bought some Namibian Kudu jerky from the store at the camp, so I can now say that I've eaten antelope, but that's the end of the story, as it tasted just like regular jerky.

Other animals of merit include: buffalo, warthogs, baboons, dwarf mongooses (very cute), little tortoises, and a single hyena, which did not sound at all like Whoopi Goldberg.

Everything we saw was right on or near the road upon which we were driving, and that was the most disappointing part of the safari. Roads. Roads? I didn't want paved roads! I wanted dirt trails and offroading!

The last day was very tense indeed, because we were told that we would be dropped off at the Joburg airport at approximately 5:00pm. Accordingly, we had a flight that left at 6:30pm. For reasons beyond our control, and despite the four of us repeatedly telling various guides and such that, "We need to go," we arrived at the airport at 5:57pm, and again I thought of my mother. We (very briskly) walked to the check-in counter and the woman working there looked at us blankly for a second.

"Are you flying with us?"

"Yes."

"Why? We are closing in two to three minutes. Give me your IDs. All your IDs. Quickly. Give me them."

As I said it was about 5:57pm, and the gates for the planes close twenty minutes before the plane leaves, at 6:10pm, because you have to take a shuttle out to the plane in the middle of the runway. That gave us 13 minutes to check in and get to the gate.

I've never had to run through an airport before, much less in an airport I've never before seen the inside of. But, you know, it's considerably more exciting than arriving six hours early, as my mother prefers. But then airport security in South Africa is a little bit different. It was a lot like airport security in the United States used to be. The point is that it took no time at all to go through (and would you believe that I didn't even think the plane was going to explode from somebody's bomb the entire flight?) So we ran, and we laughed, and we made the flight.



The next morning we toured Robben Island at 8:00am. Robben Island is the island and jail facility in which Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison. To be honest, the tour was terrible, and I feel awful saying that, considering all of the tour guides spent some time in prison there. It was just boring, and I don't feel like I learned anything. Still, I'm glad I went. And we saw a few penguins, which are very common in the southern areas of South Africa. It's a strange thing, watching penguins waddle along the side of the road, in the sun and sand, paying you no mind.

And on the note of sea creatures, the waters of the area are infested with sharks (great for tourist cage diving, which I didn't have a chance to do, but many did), and sea lions, which were all over the docks by the ship.

After Robben Island Jess, James, Mark, Rick, and I hiked Table Mountain. I couldn't believe it when Alex didn't know what Table Mountain is when I told him about it, so if you really don't know, I encourage you to do a Google image search of "Cape Town", and it will be quite clear which mountain is Table Mountain. That would be the one we hiked. It's 1000 meters high, which in feet, is considerably high.

We got in a cab and said, "Table Mountain," not entirely sure which of the dozens of paths he'd drop us off at. I think we specified a fast one. The hike was actually less than two hours, with a considerably long picture break in the middle. The trail itself was not at all a trail, but rather some sort of path/stairway thing that was made entirely of stones. At times it very closely resembled the stairs that lead to Shelob's lair, if you're a Lord of the Rings fan. The hike was very hot, rather strenuous, and extremely fun. We had a blast. I kept thinking that my father would like the views, but I'm not sure how much he'd like walking up stairs for so long. The view from the top was incredible, of course, and we took a cable car back to the bottom, because we wanted to squeeze in some shopping and other formalities before getting back to the ship. But there wasn't much time to do so.

And again, I've written so much that I've exhausted myself, and I can't properly summarize how I feel about the city of Cape Town and the country of South Africa. I can just say that I loved it, and I have every intention of returning. Eventually.

Since then everything has fallen back into routine on the ship, although we didn't have classes yesterday. No reason, just a day without classes. It was very nice, except that we were sailing around the Cape, which, perhaps you've heard, features rather violent seas. Rick and I have a cabin very near the front of the ship, which always feels the worst in waves. Sleeping was difficult, sleeping in impossible. It felt like my bed was on a hellish carousel. Up and down. And every time the bow would hit the water again after going over a particularly large wave, the entire room would shake. It was like trying to sleep through a series of small-but-endless earthquakes. I had to brace myself with a foot on either side of the shower to prevent falling out onto the bathroom floor. I rather enjoyed that day.