Little Swiss Dragons After my Soweto Burger with Hiro and a beer with Swedish surfer-lad Lars, it was time to hit the road! I hopped on the Baz Bus, heading to Durban (where I saw the mosque that Gandhi helped get the paperwork for, when he was a lawyer there), a sort of Little India on the coast going through the Drakenberg region. Drakenberg means Dragon Mountain and the Afrikaners apparently travelled over them on foot from Cape Town, escaping from the English. The mountains reminded me of somewhere I have spent a lot of time. That was when I [View Full Entry]

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Bye Bye Bela I was enjoying the long, interesting ride back from Bela Bela, on back roads, seeing less clean and organised areas, getting information from Johannes about the differences since the end of Apartheid and how there is still quite a ways to go. Near Pretoria, back on to the Highway, four lanes in each direction at high speeds, we saw a man lying on the road with a car signalling for help...he had just been hit trying to cross eight lanes of fast traffic!!! Unexplainable! "This is Africa." The explanation for anything out of [View Full Entry]

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Airport Pal Continuing with my sinchronicity adventures, on the shuttle to the bed and breakfast, I met a young Canadian of Pakistani descent who was working in Dubai and was on a quick, get-away week in Johannesburg. We got along marvellously and ended up going out for pool and beers. The next morning, he asked if I would join him in Sun City, about two hours away and where there was supposed to be more happening. I agreed on the name alone! He said he had booked a big place and a bunch of his friends were going to be [View Full Entry]

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Tana Banana After freezing in London, it was quite a blast to get out of the airport in Antananarivo after 23 hours of travel time, out into 25 degrees... or so it felt! Tana. What most people seem to call this bustling city of rolling hills covered in houses and people. The ride in was a lot of green to me...green rice paddies, green trucks carrying green bananas, but not a very green country environmentally...or higienically! Bel Zebu, Bub Well done, please. It is actually the local buffalo, served everywhere, often cheaper than pork! Zebu steak, delicious! In so [View Full Entry]

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Paintball! What a great way to say goodbye to my friends on Ibiza before embarking on my round-the-world trip! My ibicencan and multiple-nationality friends agreed to have it out in the paintball battle-trenches near San Antonio! We all got bruised and had sore muscles from getting hit, running, crouching and carrying the weapon in the air. It was a thrill to hit our opponents, fun to try and avoid those whizzing, stinging, dastardly little balls, not so much fun feeling their bite and see the paint-splash! All in all, we had a great laugh and made some interesting disc [View Full Entry]

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Sant Joan, Ibiza, Spain Almost winter in the village! The birthday boys (all foreigners in their 50's) just came back from the famous Benirras beach, having enjoyed the sun and a few beers, happy to be alone in paradise...not at all like the almost 3000 (!!!) on a certain drumming Sunday in August!! Winter indeed! there is hardly any parking and the sun is shining, while some of us are sitting in the Vista Alegre, connected to the world with Wifi and good conversation! The tea and the excellent café con leche cost 1,20 euro's and the chickpea soup (filled to [View Full Entry]

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