Blogs from Gauteng, South Africa, Africa - page 12

Accomodation Vortrekker Monument Cullinan Mine... read more

The last few days of my stay in Kenya I spent in Niarobi. The first day I visited kibera which is a slum just on the outskirts of Nirobi town. I could only view it from a distance because I'm told it's not advisable to enter without a guide and I hadn't got time to arrange one. The sites of the slums even from a distance were a shock. Their homes, the overcrowding, the rubbish and the smell was discussing. Really hard to imagine living in such squalor. The following day, I've visited an elephant sanctuary set within Niarobi national park. I managed to find a motorbike taxi who took me. Asking each rider for a price to take me ranged from Sh5000 £35 to my eventual acceptance of Sh500 £3.50. It's approximately 20 mins from ... read more

Had an extremely interesting conversation with some local girls I made friends with a few nights ago. We spent the evening discussing a form of medicine which I thought was no longer practiced on Earth - how wrong of me! According to google and it's reliable Wikipedia, witchcraft is the use of magical faculties and has been around since the earliest human cultures. Witchcraft is taken very seriously here. I was told that an educated, western doctor will step aside in the corridor of a hospital if a witch-doctor was to pass. According to locals here, if you truly want to harm someone or bring bad luck to someone, you must approach a witchdoctor and request a spell or potion to do so. Stemming from the devil and his power, witches are wives of Satan and ... read more

On Friday, February 17thwe began our adventure and before I had even left Gothenburg, the first hiccup of the trip had manifested. My itinerary would had me flying from Gothenburg to Stockholm with Norwegian Air and then meeting Phil at the airport in Stockholm and connecting to an Ethiopian Airlines flight to Addis Ababa and subsequently Johannesburg. However, on the morning of our departure, an Ethiopian Airlines from Addis Ababa to Rome was hijacked by the flight’s co-pilot, who locked the pilot out of the cockpit when he left to go to the bathroom and then took the plane to Geneva where he climbed out of the cockpit window and surrendered himself to authorities in hopes of claiming asylum. This sequence of events meant that there were disrupted Ethiopian Airlines passengers to accommodate and so our ... read more

We were going to leave on Monday morning but we had something to check on the car and it was pouring with rain. On the way to taking the car we were slowed down by really bad traffic hold ups and naturally thought it was an accident in the rain. Eventually we came across the cause of the delays and the many police cars that had been rushing past us with their sirens wailing. The taxis had decided to go on strike because of the new tolls imposed on Johannesburg's roads. They had parked their vehicles right across he carriageway blocking all traffic - fortunately for us on the other side. There were also taxis being stopped and their customers being forced off them and other taxis with their windows smashed in, presumably because they had ... read more