Archive for December, 2009

11/25 Heeeeeere’s Zambia

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

Dave is…

In Livingstone, Zambia.

Getting up at 5am sucked but it meant I was landing in Livingstone, Zambia by noon.

Getting into the country was kind of a pain in the ass. You have to pay an entrance tax, and if you want a multiple entry visa you have to pony up $80 in US bills. I was lucky I had enough American bills.

From there I cabbed it into a hostel and then set out to explore Livingstone. The town, named after the famous explorer Dr. Livingstone exists to service Zambia’s biggest tourist attraction, and one of the world’s natural wonders, Victoria Falls.

You could actually see the falls as you flew in, or rather not the falls but the high continuous cloud of mist thrown up by the water cascading over the 100 meter cliff. Locally it’s called Mosi-o-tunya, “the smoke that thunders”.

While presumably the falls are as impressive as reputed, the town of Livingstone isn’t particularly. It’s a bizarre mix of Cape Town and Cameroon. On the edge of town is a shopping center featuring Debonair’s Pizza and a Subway. Directly across the street from the Fawlty Towers hostel (I booked here purely because of the name. I dream of having a few Zambian beers and walking around yelling “DON’T MENTION THE WAR”) is a brand new Shopright complex that is having its big grand opening tomorrow. They are currently setting up for a huge party for it.

At the same time the streets are strewn with potholes and the town in many places looks like the business areas of Kumba or Bamenda. You get off the main streets and you are right back in the kind of fly infested, rickety wooden shack filled market stalls that came straight out of Cameroon. The end result is this weird juxtaposition a very developing country feel with odd pockets of out of place seeming luxuries, tourists and adventure activities.

I know this cause about thirty seconds out of the hostel I was “befriended” by two Zambians, Chris and Duncan “like the donut”. I can only speculate that Duncan’s knowledge of the titular donut comes from a t-shirt cause this town is clothed almost entirely from the Goodwill t-shirt rack. They were trying to sell me copper. Copper is a major thing in Zambia, and I am told is renowned. I am also told wearing a copper bracelet can cure rheumatism and high blood pressure. Seeing as I don’t suffer from them, and don’t really do copper bracelets I passed but allowed myself to fall into continued conversation. Again at first it focused on the hustle, them steering me towards their adventure tour booker of choice.

When I didn’t bite on anything but remained friendly they shifted to showing me around town. This consisted mainly of showing me the in town market and the larger market on the fringes of town. Again, nothing I hadn’t seen in Cameroon but it was nice getting away from the central strip and we steered things to a bar and got some Zambian beer, a Mosi to be specific. So it was a pleasant afternoon. Though I wouldn’t recommend Mosi, terrible aftertaste. You get used to it but it’s not pleasant at first.

Even on a day that was swelteringly hot. Zambian summer way more intense than further south in Africa. It’s just brutal here.

11/24 Living in the now

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

Dave is…

In living in the now.

So I had this narrow window between Josh leaving and the Old Man arriving and I wasn’t sure what if anything I was gonna do with it. Justin is driving a motorcycle across South Africa to Joburg and then partying with Gabe and Andrew in Soweto this weekend, England is playing South Africa at Newlands Cricket Grounds on Friday, or I could try and squeeze in a lightening trip to Zambia/Zimbabwe.

Of course all of these things require some planning and preparation. Which of course isn’t my style. So it took me till Tuesday afternoon to decide on, and book a flight to Zambia. I leave in 14 hours. I suppose I should pack, but instead I went surfing.

11/23 People Leaving

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

Dave is…

At Chris and Perdi’s goodbye party.

Perdi, who was instrumental in getting me set up when I first got to Cape Town, and her boyfriend Chris are moving to Dubai. They are becoming just another in what is becoming a rush of people leaving town. The departure of the internationals makes sense, the semester is over, but even the locals are leaving.

Anyway so I was back in the northern suburbs for the second time in two days at their goodbye party. It’d been a long time since I’d seen them and even longer since I’d hung out with their friends. Most of them are Afrikaners, and most of them twenty-one/twenty-two. And I forgot just how much I can feel like a show and tell exhibit with them.

Its just hours of answering questions about being American and being asked to say certain words, cause apparently I sound like a movie. I had to say, “fuck”. A lot.

Now I like saying “fuck”, but damn is it offputting being so clearly a side-show.

11/22 The Concert Tour

Monday, December 28th, 2009

Dave is…

On a mini-concert tour.

Bok van Blerk and Goldfish in the same day? Is such nirvana possible? Only in SA.

You may remember Bok van Blerk, the spectacularly named Afrikaans singer with the sweet soul patch and the possibly, kinda quasi-offensive, Afrikaans anthem, De La Rey (and the less well known, but no less awesome drinking anthem Vodka en OJ). I discovered him my first week in the country but it’s taken until now for me to have the opportunity to see this genius live.

Finding people with the musical appreciation, sociological interest and willingness to toy with racism to attend the show with me proved surprisingly difficult. Luckily I found kindred spirits in Matt and his visiting friend Alfred, even better Alfred is a former lineman for Stanford so if things go horribly awry during our undercover observation.

Bok vB played at a wine estate in Durbanville as the kickoff to their summer Sunday afternoon concert series. We showed up right as the show started to discover that Klan rallies in Africa are surprisingly family friendly.

Kids were everywhere, playing cricket.

Parents had blankets spread out with picnic baskets,

The concession stands were selling beer and wine and most spectacularly Sauvignon blanc Slush Puppy. WHITE WINE SLUSH PUPPIES?? That could be the greatest advancement in drinking technology since Natty Light was first canned. Unfortunately they were out.

So we settled for responsibly drinking beers as we waited for the THE moment.

And soon it came, the fulfillment of a six month dream, De La Rey live. Check that off your fucking bucket list. It got his biggest response from the crowd with a number of people standing up to pump their fist and echo the chorus, but it wasn’t the rousing barn burner I expected.

Perhaps it was the early afternoon hour, the family make up of the crowd or the lack of white wine slushies in stock, but there was none of the foaming at the mouth fervor (white foam of course) we were expecting/hoping for.

In fact the other guy on the double bill, some cat named Robbie Wessel got way more of a pop when he came on than Bok vB did at any point in his set. I found that incredibly dispiriting, as was the fact Bok did not bless us with Vodka en OJ.

Really it could have been any child friendly band anywhere. Except for the fact that they were all ALL white. Even for Cape Town, even for the northern suburbs it was monochromatic.

This wasn’t at all surprising, given the artist, but was uncomfortable was seeing the group of black people lined up on the hill behind the venue listening to the show. For much of the beginning it looked like they were fairly unhappy, sort of standing their sullenly, other than the couple little kids who were dancing around. It really made for a very visual and unpleasant contrast.

So when Robbie Wessel came on we moved on. Tonight was the start of Goldfish’s three month, Sunday summer residency at La Med.

Now, again, there is the disclaimer that electronic music is not normally my forte, but Goldfish is pretty catchy. Probably dismissed as way too poppy by actual electronic fans, I find it makes the music entertaining and accessible. We saw them headline the first night of Rocking the Daisies and were pretty excited to see them in as small a venue as La Med.

There was a pretty decent opening night crowd when we got there and by the time we’d seen the sunset and had some drinks the dance floor area was packed for the band.

I think the temperature in there was twenty degrees hotter than it was outside, five feet away, and people were trampling each other but the show was great.

And the crowd was way more into it than the Bok fans.

And of course it was a lot easier to get people to this show than BvB.

Jana, Micha and Justin

And what better way to round out a racist Afrikaans/electronic double bill than downing schwarma.

Me and a scientist

And dancing in the schwarma place with scientists. In fact I danced so well some drunk ass dude insisted I take his tie-dyed live strong bracelet. Good day.

11/21 South African Thanksgiving

Monday, December 28th, 2009

Dave is…

Celebrating Thanksgiving early.

Me, Jana, and Micha

Seeing how almost all of the American contingent are off running around on Thursday Jana and Matt decided to host a little early Thanksgiving dinner to ensure we all didn’t go without our yearly dose of tryptophan.

They put on a hell of a spread. Turkey, stuffing, potatoes, veggies, mac n’ cheese, rice, cheeses, casseroles and a legion of pies.

Me and Micha

As if a morning of the Biscuit Mill and Muizenberg wasn’t food enough, we gorged ourselves while watching the highlight DVD of the Chicago Bears 2006 season (we felt it was important to emulate the true Thanksgiving experience as much as possible and since I was the only one that brought football DVD’s to Africa, it meant watching the Bears. It was sweet.)

As well as scenic dusk views of Table Mountain and Lions Head from their balcony.

And of course, pictures of people looking blasé in hipster sunglasses. (Jana)

Lots of pictures. (Katie)

11/20 Vintage Wine Country

Saturday, December 26th, 2009

Dave and Josh are…

In wine country.

It was Josh’s last day; he had to fly out on a 1am flight, so what better way to round out your time in Africa then by drinking?

So we went out to the Wine lands to do some tastings. Now, since I am wine illiterate (despite Aaron’s best efforts and endless patience) experience wine drinkers Katie and Mei Li came along to direct us. We got a late start on the day so only got to sample at a few places but the weather was beautiful and the wine tasted was good so no complaints.

Now, originally I had this great plan to go, after the tastings, see Santos play the Kaiser Chiefs in Stellenbosch, the game perfectly timed to end right when Josh needed to go to the airport, but sometime recently that game got moved, a fact that didn’t come to my attention till we were already in the wine lands.

So we had to audible it up and so we went to Moyo. Now I’d heard Moyo mentioned a lot in various conversations, usually with tourists. It’s some big restaurant at Spier Wine Estate. I’d never been but seeing as we had no other ideas we gave it a shot.

It was an interesting experience. For starters, they weren’t lying when they said it was big. The place can seat over 1300 people. Its huge; a sprawling complex of tents and canopies and tree houses all spread out over these grounds. You get a table (we opted for a table under its own canopy as opposed to one under the huge main tent) and then go to the monstrous buffet. I mean the thing had something like 15 stations. The range of food was excellent, the quality, for the most part was not bad, the price of course was brutally touristy.

But that went with the atmosphere. This is the place that after eating all the fanny packers hot off their tour bus go to the stage in the main tent and do limbos and dance contests while the faux-dreadlocked Rasta band plays bad Bob Marley covers. Shudder. Still every trip needs its horribly touristy moment.

11/19 Catch up

Saturday, December 26th, 2009

Dave is…

Trying to catch up.

Josh was off to Robben Island today so after breakfast, featuring the most intense lecture of the religion of coffee from our server, I packed him off to prison and went and tried to tie up some of the million loose ends that have been floating around. Leftover work stuff, blog stuff, job ap stuff, trip planning for the old man, etc. I didn’t get near enough done.

11/18 Mountains, mountains everywhere

Saturday, December 26th, 2009

Dave and Josh…

Are hiking at Cape Point and Lions Head.

Now that it wasn’t pouring we went out to try the Cape Point tourist route again. But while it was dry, it was windy as all hell.

This didn’t affect us much while penguin viewing

But it damn near killed us at Cape Point. We lasted approximately 1.5 minutes at the lighthouse cause the wind was threatening to blow us right over the edge.

Despite that we decided to go down to the beach anyway cause I had raved about it so much. So we grabbed some beers and made the hike.

Even that was risky though as we kept getting blown off the boardwalk. Once down on the beach the wind was slightly less savage, and although it caused an incessant whistle blowing across the mouths of our bottles it was pretty awesomely desolate.

You’d think almost getting blown off a peninsula would temper our enthusiasm for further hiking today but we went back to town in time to do the sunset hike of Lions Head.

Inexplicably, we discovered that the wind which had been battering us, even during the drive back from the Point, was completely absent from Lions Head and we had a nice easy hike up.

After celebrating our assent with some beers at the top,

Justin ordered ambitiously

We went back down to the bottom and celebrated with Josh’s third trip to the Eastern Food Bazaar. The man loves it.

But then again, who cant love a place that serves meat and sauce poured into a hollowed out loaf of bread?

The night rounded out with the late Ireland v France World Cup Playoff game. We watched it in some Greek joint with a couple people and were pulling hard for Ireland (I desperately want to see Shay Given experience some of the success he deserves.) but because we were exhausted we almost left when it went to extra time.

If we had we could’ve missed the pain of seeing Thierry Henry double tap the ball ON A PLAY THAT WAS ALREADY OFFSIDES to steal the game for Les Bleus. What a fucking rip-off. It’ll never happen, cause FIFA is terrible, but that is the most convincing argument for video replay in soccer that I have ever seen. It was egregious, it was intention – he reached out and touched the ball, not once, but TWICE, to keep it in bounds and keep the play alive. What an asshole. I fucking hate the French.

11/16 When iiiiiiiiiii was a boy, driving South Africa…

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

Dave and Josh are…

In De Hoop Nature Reserve.

Where its fucking windy.

Described as the wilderness highlight of the Western Cape (the increasingly superlative Rough Guide again) its marked by sand dunes, whale watching opportunities and untold amounts of flora and fauna that inevitably all look the same to me. It’s also full of wind. Did I mention it was windy?

I’m a huge fan of this picture.

It was also in the back of beyond. We are talking 45 minutes off the highway just to get to the turn off to the gravel road that would take us, after a further 45 minutes, to the entrance of the park at which point we would drive another 25 minutes before actually finding the coastline.

That coastline was cool enough looking no doubt, I like dunes. But with the wind just hurling across them, it felt like you were being sandblasted. Our favorite activity was spreading our arms out to see just how far we could lean over and still be supported by the wind. The answer was pretty damn far.

So that hurt our enjoyment a little bit and we ended up only walking a short section of coast as opposed to a long coastal hike, which was our reason for coming.

It was not however a loss. No, indeed, it offered us the opportunity to take advantage of my sweet vintage ride and the sepia setting on our camera. Witness the long lost, recently discovered pictures from Grampy Dave and Gramps Joshua’s trip through South Africa back in 1963. Travel sure was hard back then. They didn’t have no dad gummit internet to help us find their way, yet somehow the experience back then was more rewarding, probably because of the sweet brand new Mercedes they were driving, and the fact that silly page boy caps were actually in style.

Seriously, we stopped multiple times to get old timey photos. If we had thought of this before leaving Cape Town I 100% guarantee we would have gone out and found some sweet old clothes like vests and suspenders to do it up. We are so easily amused.

On the way back out of the park we did run into some distinctly in-the-now livestock.

Sheep and cow herds caused some minor scenic delays before we got back on the highway and into Cape Town in time for me to do a little prep and then do a Skype mock interview in preparation for tomorrows big videoconference. It also got us back in time for Josh to make his triumphant return to the Eastern Food Bazaar. I get the feeling it won’t be his last.

11/15 Might as well jump. JUMP! Go ahead, jump.

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

Dave and Josh are…

Bungee jump safari-ing.

Well, Josh isn’t bungee jumping. I am the only one who did that.

I’ve never bungee jumped before, never really felt a tremendous urge to do so. I generally wouldn’t call myself an adrenalin junkie. (Though once, a number of years ago, I tried to skydive with Sully but Pablo put an end to that real fast.)

Still, bungee jumping is a lot more attractive when it’s this cheap, and even more so when it’s the world’s highest commercial bungee jump. The drop is 216 meters off the Bloukrans River Bridge and you free-fall for six seconds.

We went first thing in the morning so I got out there pretty quick. They marked me for death,

and kitted me up (look Ma, that’s all that kept me alive!)

I was extremely dubious about the Lady Gaga.

The operation was pretty impressive, incredibly professional and efficient which was confident inspiring. They were also clearly used to people having second thoughts when faced with the precipice cause they did not give you much of a chance to dwell on what you were about to do. In fact they did everything they could to make you desperate to jump. Right as I got across the walkway that runs under the bridge to the jump point they started blasting Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face”. I asked if they had anything else and one guy said, “Yeah we have the whole album.” I wanted to elbow people out of the way to jump.

Luckily I got to go first. They strapped in my feet and helped me hop to the edge. I confess I did have one moment of fear as they helped me inch my toes over the edge, but unfortunately they didn’t let me have more than a split-second to savor that thrill of “what the fuck am I doing” before they started a loud countdown.

And then suddenly I was airborne.

and falling,

and falling.

It may have been five seconds but it went by way too fast. It was pretty sweet, the whole gorge rushing by and then feeling the cord catch, extend and snap back sending you careening again through the air.

When I finally stopped bouncing I got to hang upside down looking down the gorge towards the ocean for about a minute (you can just see me as a tiny red dot at the end of the cable)

until a guy could be lowered down to turn me right-side up and hook me to be winched back to the bridge.

Afterwards I wasn’t hopped up on adrenalin the way I assumed I’d be but it definitely beats coffee or Red Bull in the morning. Then, having gotten my activity of choice for the day done, Josh and I hit the road pretty hard to ensure we’d make the game park before the afternoon safari.

Josh, understandably, really wanted to see some wildlife while in Africa; unfortunately there aren’t any national parks with any serious wildlife (serious like Big 5) any closer to Cape Town than the elephant park at Addo. There are, however, some private game parks offering varying varieties and numbers of animals on various sized expanses. Some are closer to zoos than safari parks, but this one was supposed to be not bad, and was certainly right on our way back to Cape Town.

Driving hard we got there just in time for the 2pm safari (though not in time to eat at all. We were starving.)

The two hour safari wasn’t too bad. Loaded up in one of those open topped safari bokkies and led by a very informative Afrikaner we cruised around the small park.

We came across the rhino almost immediately. Male, female and the kid.

Turns out rhino’s have a rape problem. The female had no interest in mating with the male, who pursued her for a long time. It wasn’t until she broke her horn, and lost her means of defense, that she gave up and acquiesced to mating.

The whole Rhino Raper thing aside, these animals are pretty phenomenal. They can get to be two tons and all just from eating grass. Grass is something like 98% of their diet, the other 2% being protein, which they get by accidentally eating ants while grazing. Of course to get that size on nothing but grass they have to graze something like 16-17 hours a day.

In that same area we saw small herds of zebra, as well as impala and wildebeest.

Shortly thereafter we came across the giraffe. The thing I found funny about them is that they give birth standing up so when the baby is born it falls all the way to the ground. Nice welcome to the world.

The lions were kept in a separate enclosure, which unfortunately did feel pretty zoo like, especially because the lions were gargantuan fat. They don’t have to hunt, the game park drops off dead horses and animals periodically for them to eat, so the animals are fat, slow and unable to sustain themselves.

But going to see them required going through a double gate that got Josh humming the Jurassic Park theme song.

The park also has two elephants, these two kept in a separate enclosure which not only was unfortunate because it created more of a zoo feel but also unfortunate cause it was too near civilization. Unlike other areas of the park there were power lines and fences visible in the background. There was also the highway, which clearly causes some problems which we witnessed as cars have a tendency to slow down when they suddenly notice an elephant outside their window in the Western Cape.

The elephants, one male, one female, are both between 14-17 years of age. They spent most of the time we were around making out. The male apparently is pretty interested in advancing the relationship but he’s too young, he won’t get to full size till around age 30 and until then he won’t be big enough to be able to mount the female. Our ranger told us, that the ambitious chap tried anyway and ended up falling over onto his back. Of course the bloody female won’t help him out by kneeling or anything, no that’d make things too easy. Poor bastard. She’d rather see him with a 15 year case of blue balls.

Still, it’s nice to see something with even less game than me.

The one animal from the Big 5 that we didn’t see was the leopard, which is the one that usually gets missed. Guess it’s a lot easier to hide when you aren’t several meters tall and weigh several tons.

We moved on down the road trying to find a place that could offer food and a place to sleep that would put us in good position to jump off to De Hoop Nature Reserve, We found one in Swelledum. Quite literally one. We drove through town, and granted it was a Sunday at maybe 5pm but the entire town was shut down. We passed restaurant after restaurant without one being open. Thoroughly starving and doubling back down the town’s one main commercial avenue for about the third time we stopped at a posh looking place, purely because it appeared to be the only place open.

It was posh; it was also silent as a tomb and filled with about as many candles as you’d see in a typical crypt. The atmosphere was really bizarre. Josh and I sat there, uncomfortable and confused about this place and the town in general, until the waitress, in taking our order, told us it might be slow as with the power outage they were having to cook by candlelight.

Ahhh, one of RSA’s blackouts. All became clear. And the power returned shortly thereafter which helped reduce the cryptmosphere. And when we were leaving it was my turn to have a waitress hit on me. The lady expressed serious concern about how tired I looked and was extremely solicitous of my well being.  She made no comment on the incredibleness of my eyes though.

The hostel for the evening was a pretty small place and we were the only occupants of the dorm, which was a corrugated tin roofed shed out back. But the waitress must have been right cause despite the conditions I was passed out about as early as I have in a long time.