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Published: February 20th 2006
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Salsa Sarah in the Sand
She's at it again in Cape St. Francis. We have been in South Africa for almost a week now. In Johannesburg we stayed at a hostel right around the corner from the airport, so we didn't actually see too much of that city....which is alright, seeing as how it's plagued by rampant crime and car-jackings (at least that's what the news focuses on). We decided not to take the hop-on, hop-off bus option (Baz Bus) this time, and instead opted for more freedom with a car rental.
Interesting -- on the "car safety" pamphlet they gave us there are specific precautions to avoid car-jacking. This is too bad, because hitchhiking seems to be one of the main modes of transport for much of the country. People stand by the side of the road and wait for either a minibus taxi or another car to pick them up.
Nick is sooo excited because he gets to drive his "attainable dream car", a Volkswagen Golf (also called a "Chico" here). In honour of the Afrikaans language which so often baffles us here, we've named the car "Kaar Foerdrijvinan De Roode"...or K. F. De Roode.
What a difference having your own car makes! We would advise anyone who's coming
Sarah and Kaar
They're still building these 80's body-style Golfs here! here to do the rental option. It wasn't much more expensive than the Baz Bus, and we have found it gives us infinite freedom to explore all the back country roads (well, the tarred ones anyways). The only problem for us, coming from Canada, is that this is yet another country that drives on the "wrong side" of the road.....and the steering wheel is on the "wrong side" of the car. You get used to it after a few hours, but boy are those first few hours tense and confusing! Especially navigating your way through a bigger city like Jo'burg.
Driving from Jo'burg, our first stop was Sterkfontein, or "The Cradle of Mankind". It's basically a large cavern in which many fossils and ancient human remains have been found...including "Mrs. Ples", a member of the Australopithecus Africanus club. If you don't know of this club, it's about 2 million years older than our Homo Sapiens club. It was an awesome tour with a great museum display in the waiting area....and they've even left some bone fragments intact in the cave so we can see where they were found.
Our next target was to get over to the Maloti
Primitive Man
On the right, A. africanus was short, hairy and liked to bash things. On the left...hey, wait a minute! Route, otherwise known as the Highlands Route -- in the Drakensberg foothills, along the northern border of Lesotho. After a nights stop in Bloemfontein, we made it to Clarens, a nice, sleepy little town that is full of art shops trying to ensnare tourists....well, richer tourists than us. The towns all throughout South Africa feel extremely strange. The first thing you see as you enter any of these little towns is that there are in fact two towns --- one black "township" and one bigger town with a commercial centre. The whole town is so quiet when you drive through you'd think that you're missing some big event that everyone must be attending. At the end of the highlands route (one of the better, more scenic trips we've done on our trip) we managed to stay at a little farm B&B that was wonderfully relaxing and offered the BEST breakfast we've had in a long while.
From there we high-tailed it to Graaff-Reinet, an old Boer frontier-style town with an amazing Gothic church as its centre. The architecture is distinctly Boer South African, which means "Cape Dutch" --- whitewashed walls and arches. A nice little town with older (1800's)
buildings that are still in use. The area immediately outside the town is the beginning of Karoo National Park, which includes a place called the Valley of Desolation. Well worth the visit, even in the rain, just for the 45-minute hike around the top rim of the valley and the view of Graaff-Reinet from way up above.
Now we've made it to the coast and have enjoyed seeing the ocean again (well, it's the Indian Ocean so it's for the first time really) and walking along the beach. Cape St. Francis is an amazingly quiet little place that fringes a beautiful beach with a lighthouse at one end. We got up early this morning to take some photos in sunrise light and although the lighthouse wasn't lit up as we would have liked, we got some sweet shots of the morning surf. (Did we mention that this is a great place to surf?)
We are now in "The Garden Route" and travelling west towards Cape Town, and we should be there in about a week. So far this country has at times reminded us of the prairies, with windmills towering above acres of corn and wheat (or sunflower)
fields, at times it looks like BC or Alberta in the foothills of the rockies. And sometimes, it's distinctly African --- you drive over a low hilly pass only to find a HUGE expanse below you stretching as far as the eye can see until it's bordered by a distant mountain range. It's easy to imagine these green valleys teeming with herds of African animals, though all we've seen so far have been some interesting birds, some ostriches and some vervet monkeys. Oh, and a roadkill jackal.
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Katie
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Saskatchewan
I object....There are way more trees in that picture than there are in Saskatchewan. I am loving reading about your adventures around the globe. I look forward to the next