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Published: December 14th 2007
Ice creams at Sea Point
These are some of my good mates from back home. This was not posed at all, it was completely spur of the moment...or maybe too much sugar in the icecream.The thing about this Travel blog of ours is it has the uncanny ability of becoming outdated! I think the last blog recording was when we were at my Aunt Franya's house in Mozambique, damn time flies when you're having fun!
We are now with my mom, Linda, and stepfather, Peter, in the Eastern Cape in a small seaside village called Port Alfred which is also where my family and I lived when I was about 4 and since then we always come here for our holidays. For those who don't know the Eastern Cape, it is a province in South Africa and is also where Mandela was born.
Since coming to SA from Mozambique w e have been living the high life again, SA tends to be a lot more 1 st world than its 3rd world neighbors although it is still "Africa" at the end of the day.
Mozambique was absolutely beautiful but in some ways we were quite relieved when we rode into SA. I think in some ways it becomes stressful when traveling at grass roots level in an extremely poor country. The weight of poverty the people live under, the backward laws (at
shelter from the african sun
The cederberg gets really hot in the sun and theres no shade so we thought we would be really clever and build our own. this pic was taken seconds before the whole thing blew away least to us they seem backward), corruption, the guilt we felt at being so much more privileged, they are all factors that can get you down. The corruption in Mozambique is quite astounding, it is evident wherever you go, it affects everyone, even the tourists. The police are the worst. It is illegal to walk around Mozambique without some form of identification like a passport. If caught without one, you are sent off to jail or you have to pay a hefty bribe. If you do have a passport on you and you hand it to the official, you will likely have to pay a bribe to get it back from him so never let go of it while you are presenting it to them! But even though these issues did start getting us down, it has been good for us to see this first hand, and the amazing thing that we both experienced is that even though the people live under such hardship, they are some of the most happiest, friendliest people we have met.
It was also a struggle with language as Mozambique is a Portuguese speaking country and there are very few English-speaking people. We've realized
The Wolfberg cracks
These rock formations make for some seriously cool posing shots. how important it is to speak the language of the place you travel otherwise you really can battle and miss out on adventure opportunities.
The little Spanish we do know was actually quite a help with the Portuguese and this was encouraging but most of the time we were left to the good old use of widely gesturing hand signals while slowly repeating the word in English over and over again! Still, Alex did come in handy when it came to getting us a lift on some the trucks - God knows where she gets that talent from!
We spent a good 6 days or so lounging on the paradisiacal beach of Tofu eating seafood samosas. I managed to get a few surfs in and we also started running in the mornings. We saved up for an amazing seafood platter that only cost us 8 pound each. The highlight was definitely swimming alongside an 8-meter whale shark (some of them can get up to 20-meters!). It is completely docile and it is not phased by a bunch of humans swimming around it so it's a very chilled experience. Alex and I managed to keep up with it for
Another Wolfberg crack
This pic is great, Alex had to get down onto her stomach and then twist up to crawl behind this big bolder. Charles is on the other side but it looks like it could be his bum sticking out...if he had a really long body. what seemed like ages - it was just amazing being so close to such a huge fish.
We left Tofu reluctantly as we knew we had to get back into the crammed, smelly hot and bothered lifestyle of the "backpacker in Africa". The bus ride from Maputo (Mozambique's capital) to Joberg was utter hell. We had splashed out on tickets for an Intercape bus, which was supposedly a "luxury cruiser". That trip easily outranked all our other horror transport trips (except for the night spent freezing cold on a 10 hour boat ride sitting on crates of coke across Lake Malawi). The bus being a luxury cruiser had no openable windows because usually there would be air conditioning. But the air conditioning was of course broken and so the whole bus was subjected to temperatures in excess of 40 degrees. The bus had only one working gear which meant a max speed of 40km per hour so the trip took double the time and then there was the case of the passenger who projectile vomited over some poor kid and stank out the bus in the process, nice!
All of these terrible life scarring factors came together on
Sheer madness
This was the big jump that we both did together, I am slightly higher up than alex but from up there its all the same. Its a great action shot if you can actually find us somewhere way up there in mid air. this one trip from hell and climaxed in a quite a mammoth thunderstorm. It was quite beautiful really - we had full 360 panoramic views as we were sitting on the top deck of the bus. The tempest hit as we were entering Joberg, the lightening was crazy, and easily the most intense thunderstorm we'd ever seen.
Joberg was its usual scary bustling hive of crime and commerce, quite a contrast to the quiet villages we had become so used to. We only spent one night in Joberg and then flew down to Cape Town.
It was great to be back home again, Cape Town is still my favorite city, and it was good to be able to show Alex all my old haunts. That first weekend we got out of the city though and went camping with my good friends, Charles, Yameng and Sean to the Cederberg for a camping weekend.
I hadn't seen my friends in just less than 2 years so we had lots of catching up to do and where better to do it around a fire in the middle of nature.
The Cederberg is one of my favorite mountain ranges in
Prince Albert Hamlet
This pic is taken from my Nan's small little house on the side of the hill overlooking the quaint little Karoo Dorpie. SA. The rock formations are beautiful, there are loads of icy rock pools to jump into and white beaches to lie on, even though there is no sea in sight.
We did a great walk up to the Wolfberg Cracks, an exquisite rock formation of caves and crevices that you have to squeeze through in parts and then all of a sudden you are in this huge cavern that makes you feel so insignificant. Alex and I did a massive jump, about 4 times the height of the mermaids in Scotland. I was very impressed with Alex doing it because it's quite a serious jump and to stand up there and look down takes some balls let alone stepping off that rock into fresh air.
We drove to the Karoo to see my Dad and Lisa on the second weekend in SA. My sister, Sarah and Warren came too so it was great to have the family together again, Lisa runs an awesome guesthouse in Prince Albert so whenever we go to stay with them we are treated like Kings with full on English breakfasts, lots of drinking and days spent exploring the Karoo (which is desert) in
Lets get primitive!
This is Alex in a brave show of her primitive side. My sister is in the background, we spent the day wallowing in the mud at a dam in the karoo. their 4x4. There's been a massive drought in the area, what was a massive damn in the area where we could swim, was now just a muddy pond. We made the most of the cooling mud though and covered ourselves from head to toe and then lay in the sun literally baking ourselves.
We spent one last week in Cape Town before returning to the Karoo. I was so lucky on the last night in Cape Town my friend Paul's band 'Lark' was playing at a friends theatre and his girlfriend, Bronwyn also a special friend of mine, was having her birthday drinks there too so we were all invited and it was the perfect evening for Alex to meet all my friends as they all came out of the woodwork; like the good old days again.
We drove back up to the Karoo & shortly after whisked my dad away for a long weekend of adventure. Unfortunately Lisa couldn't come, as she had to look after Onse Rus, the guesthouse & my Nan couldn't come either as she said she was too old to go camping, but it was good to have some time with Dad. We
The lounge at Onse Rus Guesthouse
This pic just shows off Lisa's beautiful interior decor at the guest house. drove to the Garden Route spending a night on the beach. The weather wasn't great so we headed inland again to escape the weather. We ended up camping in a Game Reserve called Timbila Lodge, it has loads of game to see and a watering hole for Alex and I to swim in. We went on a night drive and saw a Giraffe right up close. We got stuck in the 4x4 and between my dad's driving and mine we managed to almost roll the 4x4 off a tricky ledge but thanks to my technical clutch control and well guided hand movements on the steering wheel, we were saved from the wrath of Lisa at returning her 4x4 in a crumpled state!
Lisa took us into "Die Hel" a remote village in the Swartberg Mountains only reachable along a 90km 4x4 track. It's no wonder that this place is called "the Hell"- there are some queer folk still living there and some of them look like they just stepped out of a scene of "deliverance". If I'd heard a banjo playing somewhere I would have run that 90kms back no probs.
The rest of our time in Prince
My dad the horse whisperer
We had to wake up at 6 to get to see my father in action with his hoses. He asked Alex which horse was her favourite and then specifically chose that horse to work for her that morning. This was Celestino and my dad playing there dancing game in the lunge ring. Albert was spent helping out at the Guesthouse, Alex did this especially well, ushering guests to their rooms and making sure their dinner appointments were booked. I spent a lot of time in my father's workshop playing with his power tools and doing various handy work chores for my Nan and for the guesthouse. My Nan writes a list of all the chores she needs done over the 2 years I have been away and then she hits me with it when I see her again!
We left Prince Albert in style in my Nan's big new Toyota. We drove her down to Port Elizabeth where she was going to spend Christmas with her sister and my Mom and Peter came and picked us up to take us to Port Alfred, which is where we are today. It's great to be hanging out with them again. They are both serious fitness freaks so if we aren't up at 6:30 in the morning to go and swim laps we are running along the beach. Our evenings are spent around the scrabble board (Alex and I are getting sadly good these days) and days are spent on the beach. The waves
Some tricky off road fun
The road had been washed away at this particular part of the track so we had to rebuild the drop with large rocks so that the Landrover could get down the steep drop. It was some serious team work, alex nearly lost a finger in the process and we almost had to give up and turn back had it not been for the challenge of adventure and problem solving. have been pretty good so I've been surfing a lot and Alex is ploughing through some fat books as usual. There is no traveling here, it is all just chilling. Travel is presently on hold but that's cool too.
If you have got to this paragraph in our blog then thank you for your dedication and I hope it hasn't been too much of a strain! I hope that this ever-growing blog of ours continues to wow!
Miss you all.
Dan and Alex
Ps. for those of you who didnt get the picasa link to some of our photos from Africa, the links are
http://picasaweb.google.com/mermaid81/Malawi?authkey=etiW0sNzC0M
http://picasaweb.google.com/mermaid81/Mozambique?authkey=O0-ruOITvXQ
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