Busy weekend

October 01, 2006 • Blog

World » Netherlands » Delft » stadscafe De Waag

Spent the early afternoon at the first official meeting of the OBCZ, Official Bookcrossing Zone Delft. Interestingly, all, except two (three if you count Benno, who I brought along), of the participants were women. I couldn’t shake the feeling that a decade ago, these same women would have gotten together to fold origami birds and three decades ago, they would have been part of the same knitting circle.

On Saturday, Joost married Neha, in Delft, while Betsy was watching the ceremony on the webcam in Johannesburg. I had a bit of a hangover from the night before, when I cycled home at 3am, with my luggage from the flight to Amsterdam on my back.
Once again, they had misplaced my luggage. It was promised the bag would be delivered to my parents house, but in the end, it was delivered to the pub I was drinking it. As these things go.

On the trip

One more thing about the trip. Heavy security meant I was checked seven times at Jo’burg airport, before I could finally enter the air plane. My bag was inspected, three times, but at no occasion did they find the spray can of deodorant. What’s more, the steeped up security at Heathrow also didn’t discover the can.
I also ‘went off’, when walking through the scanner, but no one was at hand to do a hand scan on me. I waited a few minutes and then simply walked off. Good stuff man, those new security measures.

Spam and dance

September 26, 2006 • Blog

World » South Africa » Johannesburg » Fourways » Shingara Sands

I’m working on getting the pictures and stories from our trip to Namibia online. Patience.

Meanwhile, my spam folder on Google mail holds 3000 intercepted spam messages. It’s just not funny. Well, almost. One spam mail held sheer poetry:

We’ll hand you out to dry.
Strong as an ox.
Your ass is grass.
Sweet as apple pie.

Slow as molasses in January.
To live from hand to mouth.
Throw pearls before swine.
Speak softly and carry a big stick.

Stand your ground.
Say it with flowers.
You have to separate the chaff from the wheat.
Raking it in.

Save it for a rainy day.
Red as a beet.
Through the grapevine.
Your in hot water.

Rise and shine.

Tools of the trade.

Dance

Meanwhile, a friend sent me a link to a video of a young fellow doing a crazy freestyle on a Pump It Up machine.

more spam

And maybe Zuma isn’t all that sure about his actual innocence. Ms Zuma just sent me an email:

Dear Beloved,
I am wife of Sacked Deputy President of South
Africa, Mr. Jacob Zuma.
It is out of desperation that I am sending you this
mail. My Husband and I need your assistance in
fronting for us as owner of funds that are his which
might come under investigation soon if the fund’s
ownership is not changed soonest. As my Husband’s
finances are increasingly becoming the source of
investigation by our distractors.
The source of these fund’s which my Husband earnings
would not validate, will further sink him into the cesspool
dug by our enemies.
It is because of the dire strait we find ourselves
that we resolved to reach you and ask for your
assistance in this matter.
We are averse to letting those we know here into
this deal because we are no longer sure of who our
friends are. You will be handsomely rewarded if you
choose to help us partnerhip in this project.
I will be expecting to hear from you and will
disclose further details to you upon your response.
Do well not to disclose the contents of this mail to
anyone.
Best Regards,
Mrs.S Zuma.

One final scare

September 24, 2006 • Blog

World » Namibia » Windhoek » Hosea Kutako International Airport

After struggling to find a place to stay in an overlander-filled Windhoek, we ended up in the very decent Okarusuvo guesthouse, before heading out to see the South African folk/pop musician Luna, the night before.

In the morning, the car survived, all the way to the airport, even though two tyres were scarily empty by the time we arrived. A morning trip to Chinatown, in search of countless DVDs was fruitless as just a month before, police had raided the area, where Adibas shoes and ‘Casio’ watches were still easily available.

In the evening, we did get our final share of car trouble. Betsy’s car, who had been waiting for us at the long term parking at Johannesburg airport had a dead battery.
Hours after arriving in Jo’burg, we finally headed home.

Scammed?

September 23, 2006 • Blog

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World » Namibia » Windhoek » Okarusuvo guesthouse

Setting out for Windhoek, I'm quite sure we got scammed when filling up with gas in Swakop. One guy was filling up the car, a second was cleaning the windows and a third started to talk to me, distracting me from keeping an eye on the meter. When done, petrol came in at a very neat 200N$, but the meter only displayed the price, not the amount of petrol.
Then, another car pulled up on the other side of the pump. An attendant took out the hose and the meter reset itself, but not before showing a price slightly above 150N$ and an actual amount of liters. Right then, I realised the possibility of being scammed. I asked how many liters had actually gone in. The man hesitated for a fraction of a second, "30 litres". More or less right, but impossibly the exact amount, but, if you've every been to Africa, you know that a 'more or less correct' answer will generally be the best you'll ever get.
I paid and we left, wondering what I should have done, when it hit me. I should have simply asked for a receipt.

Luna – Four Seasons

We heard two of Luna her songs on NBC radio while driving from Walvis Bay to Swakopmund, but I first thought we were listening to some previously unknown songs by Tori Amos.

The concert, in the foyer of Bank Windhoek in Namibia's capital, Windhoek, was certainly the most intimate I ever attended with only 13 guests present and was quite good. There's a lot of feeling in Luna's voice and most of her songs, using only vocals and a piano, are very evocative.

Some of the songs are very good, 'la Luna', based on a Spanish poem, Roller coaster, and a song about her own mother ('Lady'?) being three of these. They're great because the texts themselves don't only tell a story, the music itself also does this, moving through several different patterns before reaching a conclusion.
However, because of showing what she's capable of, several of her other songs feel unfinished, they end when you think more must be coming, since the music not always evolves within these individual songs, as it does on her better compositions.

Sandboarding and 1500 year old trees

September 22, 2006 • Blog

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World » Namibia » Swakopmund » Lighthouse Pub & Cafe

Sand boarding in the morning. A good experience and actually quite a bit easier than snowboarding. The sand is much softer than ice, so when the board 'goes under', you don't actually fall over. Not to say I didn't fall, as I did have my share of the sand-wich.

In the afternoon, the Welwitschia drive & moon landscape, according to the Lonely Planet "a worthwhile excursion", but I found it only mildly interesting, even though you get to see a 1500 year old tree. And then there was the constant fear that the car would finally fall apart on the dirt roads of the route.

Dinner at The Lighthouse, where the size of the meals resembles that of a food aid shipment to some small hungry African nation. And, as size isn't everything, or so they say, it was also very tasteful. Their most extravagant dishes carry the word 'Lighthouse' in the name, including The Lighthouse Burger, which was something of a foot-high hamburger with a kebab-stick through it to keep everything together.

For our last night in Swakop, we moved to a different location, Dunes Backpackers Lodge where the slightly lower price tag of 27 euros per double per night wasn't really justified as this, really, was a backpackers, even though this meant the possibility of ogling the too-young girls with too-short skirts travelling through Africa on an overlander trip.
Dunes does have an indoor pool and bar area but on this Friday night, the bar was taken over by the owner and her friends, who were line dancing on Afrikaans sokkies (dance music). The owner, a middle-aged woman who had had a few Lighthouse burgers too many, ended up dancing on the bar before taking a fully clothed dive in the pool. All very entertaining, I'm sure, but as this happened shortly before 12 at night, I'm sure not everyone in the hostel appreciated this as much as she herself did. Shortly after, all the Afrikaans party goers had retreated to the pool and were smoking and drinking in their new wet surroundings.

Cape Cross Seal Reserve

September 21, 2006 • Blog

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World » Namibia » National West Coast RA » Cape Cross Seal Reserve

The lodge, Alternative Space, where we're staying in Swakop has transformed itself over the last few years from "the most delightfully alternative budget choice" (Lonely Planet), at a suggested 17 USD per night for a double, to a very upmarket B&B (The establishment's own flyer), at 33 euros per night for a double, including a breakfast we are truly proud of.
Although the place hasn't arrived, yet, at the standards they already claim to have (no soap in the bathroom, no daily cleaning of the rooms, to name a few), it is a nice place, and the breakfast is, in fact, quite good.

In the morning, we visited the National Marine Aquarium, with a tunnel going through the largest of their ponds, where you literally can count the teeth on the several sharks in the pond and play with the huge turtles.
In the afternoon, after deciding we would, in fact, not visit the Skeleton Coast proper, as I had wanted to do (it's just too bloody far over too bloody bad roads), we headed to the Cape Cross Seal Reserve, some 150 kilometres north of Swakopmund, driving on very decent salt roads.
The novelty of the trip, where sea literally meets desert, with a road in between, quickly wears off and I was quite happy we weren't driving any further. Most of the shipwrecks have disappeared anyway and the few that remain are extremely inaccessible.

At the seal reserve, we were first almost overcome by the stench of, what I assume were, dead fish and seals. Then we heard the loud barking and bleating of the hundreds of seals in the area. A man-made wall marks the boundary behind which you are supposed to stay to leave the seals to chill. When we noticed a few seals napping away right below the wall, I leaned on it to take a few shots, only for parts of the wall to crumble. Betsy gasped, I screamed loudly, the seal directly underneath woke up, looked up and started screaming ever more loudly, a group of seals nearby all woke up and started barking. Then a piece of rock fell on the seal directly below.
Afraid the seal was hurt, he only hobbled away a few metres, moved over to the next rock, and almost immediately fell asleep again.

With the many tourists going through Swakopmund, most of them near retirement age, travelling in a luxury 4×4 or on some extensive group tour (when I had a DVD burnt in Swakop's main internet cafe, all PCs were occupied, most of them by elderly couples, Dutch and German, the man typing away, the woman commenting on what he did) you can expect some tourist scams to operate. It wasn't too bad, the worst being drunks asking for money or some fellow offering you a 'real' amethyst.

Shipwreck, guano and beer

September 20, 2006 • Blog

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World » Namibia » Swakopmund » Alternative Space

Obviously, we survived the drive from Solitaire to, first, Walvis Bay and, then, Swakopmund. It seems that all our tyres now cause problems as we have to refill all of them every morning. The road we took is probably as much as a highway you'll get in Namibia, outside of the tarred drive from Swakopmund to Windhoek. Every ten minutes or so, and occasionally even every five, we would meet a car approaching.
The scenery, rugged hills, alternating with rolling fields covered in yellow, carpet-like grass, with the occasional springbok or ostrich is truly fascinating, but also extremely repetitive. The last stretch of the ride went through the edge of the Namib-Naukluft park, as empty, dry and brown a desert as they come. Vast emptiness, a bleeding hot sun and a dry, very hot wind.

Walvis Bay was a bit of a downer, even though it's larger than Swakopmund. It feels like a provincial capital, with the sole purpose being a minor and boring commercial centre for the surrounding area.. There's nothing much to do than check out the salt works and watch the hundreds, sometimes 1000s of flamingoes hanging around the bay.

Moving on to Swakop, we passed 'Dolphin Park', where a friendly notice said that, in fact, there are no dolphins in Dolphin park, but the place is called such because you can often see dolphins off shore.
Then there's a large wooden island where bird shit, guano, used to be collected for fertilizer purposes and, a little further on, a fresh shipwreck.

Swakop is a lively little town where you'd be excused to think you're actually in some German version of hell, even though the beach is nice, the beers cold and the food quite decent. The local Chinese restaurant is run by a gay (I think) Christian Jew from Amsterdam and also serves Indonesian dishes. He has a number of black local kids "under his wings" who he calls "sons" and the walls of the restaurant are covered with psalm-texts.

Before dinner, we had a few drinks at the Swakopmund Brauhaus, where we chatted with a German/Namibian/South African lawyer who, when the beer started flowing and his tongue started rolling, talked about everything from the Namibian bush war to the political challenges related to the desired independence of the people in the Caprivi strip (the guitar-arm like extension of Namibia towards Victoria Falls), to his frustration with unprofessional black empowered law firms he had to deal with.

Swakop, like Windhoek, has a number of century-old buildings that are as interesting as, considering you're in Africa, out of place. However, no art nouveau, as I was hoping to find.

The bloody heat

September 19, 2006 • Blog

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World » Namibia » Namib-Naukluft park » Sossusvlei

Although our dinner at the Solitaire guest lodge wasn’t all that great on our first night, we were pleasantly surprised on our second night, when a very good and very diverse buffet was laid out before us, albeit at a price. Then again, considering that literally everything has to be transported over vast distances to get here, it wasn’t all too bad.

Also, we really needed a good dinner, as we’d been out all day visiting the world famous Sossusvlei and several of the surrounding valleys.
Shortly after leaving the lodge in the morning, we were alerted to a rattling sound coming from the right back tyre. Although we discovered that this one, too, was nearly flat, topping it up with air didn’t stop the rattling. We crossed our fingers and, eventually, made it through the day. It’s only some 200 kilometres to Walvis Bay, after which it will be tarred roads all the way back to Windhoek.

More than one in two tourists, so it seems, here in Namibia, is German, but when we tried to scramble up Dune 45, the most accessible of the red Namibian dunes, 45 kilometres from Sesriem, the entrance to the national park which will lead you to Sossusvlei, a whole tour bus of Dutchies was unloaded and all of them started to climb up the sandy hill.
I had planned to reach the top but when I arrived at what I thought was the summit, I noticed a much higher top in the distance, part of the same dune. Climbing up the steep sandy slopes is extremely tough, and I gave up. Having gone up without shoes, I was first afraid the sand would be too hot on my feet, but was positively surprised when this was not the case. Until later. When I went down, the sand was actually so hot, I ended up with blisters on two of my toes before discovering the trick: With your feet slightly below the surface, more or less up to your ankles in the sand, slide down, as if you’re ice skating.

The Sossusvlei I found the least impressive of the three valleys we visited, even though there was a small salty lake, where mostly the valley is as dry as the desert surrounding it. Sossusvlei, where you can drive to by 4×4, is also the most accessible.
The two other valleys we visited, Dead Vlei and Hidden Vlei, I found more impressive, particularly Dead Vlei, with its many 500 year old dead trees sticking out of the ground and the extremely parched earth.
Confusing was the salty smell as we approached the small lake in Sossusvlei. With your eyes closed, you’d be mistaken it for a nearby sea.

And it’s hot. According to the Lonely Planet, surface temperatures can go as high as 70 degrees centigrade. Earlier on, my feet seemed to confirm this. We’re almost inside the Tropic of Capricorn, meaning that the sun, at some day during the year (almost) stands right above the earth ,creating only a shadow beneath your feet. We’re still some two months away from the longest day, but already the sun was beating, beating, beating down on our heads.
I was very happy that for the last five kilometres to Sossusvlei, which is only accessible by 4×4, a shuttle is available. I had wanted to walk the distance, but the sun was just too much.

Tyre issues

September 18, 2006 • Blog

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World » Namibia » Solitaire » Solitaire guest lodge

Leaving early for Solitaire, not too far from Namibia’s prime tourist destination, the Sossusvlei, we were unnecessarily stopped by police, just out of Windhoek, and ended up paying an unnecessary bribe. Claiming that an international driver’s license needed to be accompanied by the original license, we went in for the officer to write up a fine, when he reconsidered his options and stated that “I am also a corrupt officer”. Too good to miss, we gave him some dosh and we were off.

Before setting out, we did some shopping in Namibia’s only South African style (or should that be American style) mall, where we chatted with a sweets-shop owner who told us a story that, some two years ago, a tourist couple had been stranded in their rental car with no fuel, somewhere in the Namibian dessert. Not knowing they were only two kilometres away from the nearest settlement, they waited for help. When the rental agency didn’t get their car back on the agreed date, a search and rescue team, which included helicopters, was sent out for the missing couple, only to discover them too late; the wife sitting in the man’s lap, both dead from dehydration.

We should have headed the signs. Some 150 kilometres out of Windhoek, just when the scenery reminded me of the movie The Hills Have Eyes, where unsuspecting travellers get hacked to bits by violent degenerates in the US Midwest, we ran up a flat tyre, only to find that the spare tyre was flat to begin with, too. We tried anyway, driving to the nearest, what we thought was a, town, some 20 kilometres away.
Halfway there, the offending tyre had all but disintegrated. Luckily for us that, by then, we actually had cellphone coverage for the first time since the flat, however badly. Several interrupted calls later, a rusty bureaucratic process was set in motion which ended up with, some three hours later, some dude in a regular car driving up to us with two spare tyres in the boot.
During the hours which we waited, one car passed, as did three guys on horseback. Both asked if everything was all right. Considering the triangle Windhoek – Sossusvlei – Swakopmund is the busiest part of the country, imagine the horror of a breakdown in pre-cellphone days in a more remote area.

On to Solitaire

The village we were trying to get to before our tire completely disappeared turned out to be not much more than two farms next to each other, instead of the more common one farm. It seems that two farms close together is already enough to give the place a name and mark it on a map of the country.
Actually, all the ‘villages’ we passed were comparable to this one. Except for the settlement of Lepel, which also seemed abandoned.

Solitaire itself is one of the bigger settlements, as it has a gas station, a shop (where lodge employees go to get their own dinner), a cafe and a lodge, besides the two or three houses. Before arriving in Solitaire, shortly before sun down, several bokkies (springbok) ran alongside the car, without realising they only had to veer off to the left or right to escape us chasing them, until one of them, minutes after starting to run, finally decided to take a right turn, only to get caught up in a fence blocking his way, almost getting hopelessly stuck. Idiots.

After a mediocre dinner at the lodge in Solitaire, we went over to the shop at the gas station and talked to Moose, who, according to some, bakes ‘the best bread and apfelstruedel in Africa’. Maybe so, but coming from what might be the apple pie capital of the world, where Kobus Kuch truly makes fantastic apple pie, this is a hard thing to swallow. Then again, this is Africa, so there won’t be too many places that actually serve apple pie in the first place.
A bit of a character, I was told Moose actually hails from Rhodesia, what is now Zimbabwe, where he used to be a freedom fighter. But when asked, he actually claims he’s from Northern Rhodesia, today’s Zambia.

The tiny settlement of Solitaire was, for a while, the home of Dutch author and film maker Ton van der Lee, writer of such crappy films as Naar de klote, who also wrote the book Solitaire. It seems van der Lee was responsible for setting up the cafe with his name, right next to the gas station and putting Solitaire on the tourist map of the country. Strangely, the cafe is only open from 12 to 3 in the afternoon.

Sights, poverty and fish

September 17, 2006 • Blog

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World » Namibia » Windhoek » O Portuga

On a Sunday afternoon, there are more churches in the streets of Windhoek than there are people. However, that does make it easy to check out all the sights, as we did, except for the 'stunning views' from the hills around the city, which you can check out on the so-called 'Hofmeyr walk'.

The only way to 'do' Namibia on a tight budget is when you bring your own camping gear. There is some budget accommodation in the few, well, three, towns, but once you get out into the Wild, you're lucky if you find a room which is charged at less than 50 euros per night. In fact, accommodation in the lodges close to Sossusvlei, Namibia's prime tourist attraction, sell for 250 euros per person per night (something which I first thought was a typo in my travel guide), which is not really an exception.

But also

Two guys, today, asked me for some money, they begged. Generally, when someone asks, I have no problem handing over a few coins to the first person of the day who claims to need them. The first guy was lucky, as I gave him the only coin I had, 5 Rand, just about 50 eurocents. You can buy a McD hamburger for that money or even a whole bread.
The second guy didn't receive anything, although his story was decidedly more sad and it didn't even feel like he was pulling my leg, at least not too much.
What ticked me off, besides the inability to give anything as I didn't have any coins left and I certainly wasn't going to pull out my wallet, was that the man was clearly going for the only whities on the street. While we were admiring some 'old', that is around 100 years, building, he had been eyeing us until we started moving on, when he started walking towards us, before he went on to do his spiel.
I'm truly saddened every time I encounter poverty, but this is often followed by frustration and anger that in countries like this, it's often the white man who's expected to compensate the poor. And of course, in general, tourists make an easy target.

This ties in with the following. Most, if not all, open air parking in South Africa is free, but you almost always have some guys looking after the cars, not for a salary, but for tips. Seldom do I see black people tip these attendants, often do I see white people tip.
In the same vein, a recent local newspaper article uncovered that blacks are more racist than whites and that, by far, the most private aid towards poverty reduction in South Africa comes from foreign, mostly American, white millionaires. Also, the top five highest local contributors are white.
Then again, I think there's another parallel with the soaring sales of luxury cars, to a large extent to Black Empowered individuals. Not of the Audis or BMWs, but the Lamborghinis, Porsches, Ferraris and whatnot.

Still, nothing stopped us from having what might have been the best dinner since my arrival in Southern African some six months ago. The Angolan/Portuguese restaurant 'O Portuga' served up some really great fish and steak.

Jo Decaluwe – Vincent van Gogh

The Bank Windhoek arts festival, or is it the /AE//Gams arts festival festival (the slashes are clicks), I'm not sure what the difference is and which show belongs to which festival, clearly experiments as this show is completely in Dutch, a one man performance by Flemish actor Jo Decaluwe, a monologue as Vincent van Gogh.
The show is a portrait, like the three self-portraits the actor puts up on the easel which is the centre piece on the stage. A portrait which has been put together based on and using the many letters van Gogh sent and received during his life, in particular in conversation with his brother Theo and specifically deals with the troubled years of his life.

Decaluwe started off a little shaky, possibly because of being unsure as to the reception of his work, a Dutch piece played by a Flemish actor in Namibia. Although the Afrikaans language is widely spoken here, Afrikaans and Dutch are too far apart to understand and appreciate the subtleties of a language, if you only speak one, particularly in a stage production. However, most, if not all, of the audience appeared to be Dutch or Flemish.
Once Decaluwe got going, he put down an extremely strong performance, in part due to the language used, but also very much by using his body language in concert with his texts and facial expressions. He was living his role, painting with words, sometimes describing the paintings van Gogh had in his head and would become actual paintings, later on in his life, showing the emotional and mental torments van Gogh must have gone through during these extremely productive years.

I'm sure my knowledge of van Gogh is not detailed enough to have appreciated the more subtle references in the performance, but what I did understand already turned this one for me into an amazing, extremely moving, show.

Namibian heat

September 16, 2006 • Blog

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World » Namibia » Windhoek » The Carboard Box Backpackers

After a very busy week, where a lot of time was spent on Soweto uprisings . com, we finally head for Namibian soil. The website is still not completely finished, but that's mostly because there still is too much content missing. Most, if not all, of the functionality is there.
As a result, Ismail and I did a presentation of our work on Friday, at the offices of ASM in down town Jo'burg, Ismail's employer. It must have been quite successful, as the scheduled 15 minute presentation ended up being a 90 minute discussion. Now, it's mostly up to Ismail to get all the content in, but not before he finishes his report on the project, in time for a presentation in Cape Town, somewhere in the coming week.

On Wednesday, we visited the opening of an exhibition at The Bag Factory, where Ismail's girlfriend works. One of the two 'artists in residence' on display was Arash Hanaei, an Iranian on a three month visit to South Africa.

On Thursday, we attended yet another function. Vlisco, a Dutch garment producer, insanely popular, mostly in western Africa, presented their designer brand collection in their tiny store in the Mall of Rosebank. Not really my cup of tea, but, hey, free food and drinks.

And Friday saw us heading to Pretoria, for a dinner of Bobotie, pumpkin pancakes and mulva pudding. Bobotie, not too dissimilar to a typical American meatloaf, is very much a South African dish. In fact, it's so South African, most restaurants don't even offer it, because, hey, you can eat it at home all the time.

And now we're off to Namibia; Dessert, sea and Suessichkeiten.
Namibia was, until 1918, one of the few German colonies in Africa and the only one on which they left a mark with, supposedly, lots of art nouveau architecture, central European love for sweets and good German beer.
Namibia is also very much known for the Skeleton Coast, where many ships, overcome by the bad weather off the coast, ended up stranded. Probably Namibia's most well known tourist attraction at the impressive red dunes.

Interestingly, because Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and South Africa are part of the same customs union, you're not allowed to buy tobacco (and I'm sure alcoholic beverages too) at the tax free area of the airport in Jo'burg.
The flight itself, with budget airline Kulula wasn't all that bad. Because this connection is actually services by a BA plane, and part of the BA network, you actually do get drinks and food on board.

Windhoek

Windhoek is one of the most mellow, if not sleepy, capitals I've ever seen. At least on a Saturday afternoon. All the shops are closed and the streets are empty of cars and people. Also, people, be it black, white or coloured, appear to be friendly, helpful and open. Something that you only experience in South Africa when indoors and, generally, stick to your own side of the racial divide.
In fact, the country appears to be much more racially mixed than South Africa, although you wouldn't be able to tell this from population statistics. But, clearly, people feel much more at ease with each other, here, than they do in South Africa and this might be a result of the prominent role the Basters played, a word indeed derived from the Dutch for 'crossbreed', coloureds from the South African cape who moved up north to settle, during the German occupation of South West Africa (as Namibia was known at the time).
Interestingly, while they escaped racial profiling in the South African cape, they considered themselves more Boer, voortrekkers, than black, as can be seen on the rather awkward photographs in the Alte Feste museum in Windhoek, where, all dressed in their Sunday best, they'd not be out of place, except for their darker skin, in some rural Dutch village during the 19th century.

We arrived in Windhoek at the beginning of two concurrent arts festivals, The Bank Windhoek Arts Festival and the /AE//Gams Arts Festival. And no, the forward slashes are not the result of some obscure filing system on behalf of the organizer, they are actually clicks (letters).
Many of the performers appear to come from South Africa, although several do seem to come from Namibia. The show we're seeing tonight is very affordable. A good thing since the price, 35 Namibian Dollars, or about 3.50 euros, is probably the maximum I would ever consider paying for a showing of The Vagina Monologues.
Well, until I saw the show. It's a bore, even though the local flavour that was given to it is mildly entertaining.

It's surprising that a country significantly larger than France but with less than 2 million people can actually support two concurrent arts festivals. It makes you wonder how they can get the venues filled.

The Vagina Monologues

Sampa Kangwa Wilkie and Frieda Karipi, who seemingly also plays a part in Survivor Africa, act reasonably well and it's nice to see the show was given a local flavour, but as a whole, it's just too much of a bore. It has to be said that the Namibian, mostly white, crowd appeared ecstatic and this 'liberation of the vagina' might work in prudish societies such as the USA and, possibly, Namibia, to me it feels like we got over this by the time the 1980s showed up.

I did appreciate a recent addition to this 10(!) year old show, where the journalist (Zoe Williams) is mentioned who tries to reclaim the word 'cunt'.

Then, ignorance was showing when, twice, the war in Afghanistan was compared to the wars in the DRC and Kosovo, where the rape of women was an integral part of those wars of terror. And absurdity was thrown in the mix when it was claimed that some 100 million girls have had their genitals mutilated. Although Amnesty appears to mention that it's actually 130 million girls and women. To me, this sounds absurd, as these 'operations' are practically only done in parts of Africa. With a population of some 400 million women, this means that about 1 in 3 African women had their genitals mutilated. This simply doesn't wash if you compare the spread of FGM in Africa with the list of population sizes for African countries.

Truth in translation

September 14, 2006 • Blog

World » South Africa » Johannesburg » Market theater
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A play about the translators a the Truth and Reconciliation commission (TRC) of South Africa which started working in 1995 and presented its report in 1998. The TRC was a court-like body assembled in South Africa after the end of apartheid. Anybody who felt they had been a victim of violence could come forward and be heard at the TRC. One major objective of the court was to pardon anyone who publicly admitted to his crimes.

I didn't expect the group of ten, or so, actors to start singing after about ten minutes in to the show, but the musical excursions, of which there are about six, work surprisingly well. I suspect this is in part because the songs very strongly rely on the actors voices, using the few musical instruments as a mere backdrop and in part because there's made little use of soloists, making each of the songs a collective effort in tune with the objectives of the TRC.
The few instruments that are used, a bass guitar, a keyboard and a djembe, are used throughout the show and have the effect of a non-intrusive but pleasant soundtrack to a movie.

The play uses and mentions the atrocities of apartheid-era South Africa, without becoming melodramatic and shows how, by being part of a process of reconciliation, without the ability to step away like the general public was able to do by simply turning off their television, effected the lives of the individual translators on a very human level.

Before doing the show in Jo'burg, the actors went on a 'field-trip' to Rwanda, to understand the effects of nationwide killings on the psyche of the affected individual and a nation as a whole as most of the actors are too young to have fully grasped, first hand, the events and effects of apartheid in their own country.
For the most part, the actors were extremely convincing in their roles, acting having to witness perpetrators talking about, confessing, their atrocities during the apartheid regime in South Africa, which was similar to what the actors experienced themselves while in Rwanda.
The play was also performed in Rwanda, for the victims of the genocide, there. The tale acted out has no real story arc, which in fact suits the play very well as an imposed plot would possibly have made the show feel too contrived. The performances in Rwanda showed that, for viewers who suffered from those terrors first hand, this approach made for very believable, if not true to life, theater, as it happened that the spectators would return the next day, in the assumption they would be able to check out the next installment in a soap-like series.

Early on in the play, a rather bland joke of the type that somehow always generates buckets of laughs here in South Africa, like a fart joke, or a veiled reference to some lewd sexual act, extracted a chorus of laughter. It's the type of humour that did well in Holland in the 1970s and 1980s and at first I could only yawn.
However, I realised that, perhaps, a nation which has seen so much terror and destruction, from the hand of supposedly educated and elated individuals, maybe the only real entertainment can be relatively simple, the type everyone understands and has no real deeper meaning.
Then again, maybe it's just the British legacy at work and is Benny Hill still a major favourite over here.

One part of the play, which might have been the most crucial, I didn't understand. The ending. A coloured woman, not one of the translators, tells of an old man, talking about forgiveness and reconciliation, saying that he, the man, is too old for a grudge, but, thinking of the old trees that used to stand right in front of his house but were cut down for some unspecified reason by the apartheid regime, says he would want his trees back: "Give me back my trees". The play then ends with an almost jazzy, but mellow, song, where the group of actors go through the old man's words once more.
What are they saying? Is, in the end, apartheid only a passing faze, almost like a fad? Is it that, of all the things apartheid took away, what only mattered was what nature provided? Or is it that the common man wasn't really affected by apartheid as such? I really don't know.

We saw the show at the Market Theatre, a very attractive smallish theater smack in the middle of Johannesburg, in Newtown, a heavily secured area where you can actually sit outside, without actually being robbed, raped or shot, and enjoy a designer coffee and admire the 100 year old architecture of the old indoor market.

Old!

September 12, 2006 • Blog

World » South Africa » Johannesburg » Fourways » Shingara Sands

Browsing some job site with vacancies focused on international development aid, I found an interesting job but realised that the particular category I always browse through is only open for 25-32 year olds. D’oh.

Geotagging

On an unrelated note, I stumbled upon Geonames, where they offer a service of XML exports of location names close to geographical coordinates you pass them. Extremely useful for building cool Google Maps mashups.

Fangs

September 10, 2006 • Blog

World » South Africa » Johannesburg » Fourways » Montecasino

Billed as a rock-musical comedy, Fangs was created in the 1970s, after the success of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Fangs is a South African production which hasn’t been staged for over 20 years.

According to the press release, the production has been “adapted and rewritten by the [authors] who have totally upgraded the storyline as well as the music” and it makes you wonder what the original was like. Sure, the musical is quite a bit of fun, as I had a smile on my face during the whole show, but it’s by no means a classic. Still, particularly the second half is way above average, with some great scenes and songs, not in the least because of Bill Flynn, playing the Afrikaans cop and Tobie Cronje as the shrink.
The whole script has been set in rhyming couplets resulting in the occasional brilliant find, but deteriorating at times in too simple and banal pieces of text.
I seriously enjoyed the choreography, which was not only very diverse, but also fitted the music and the shows very well. Of course, the fact that most of the ladies were very scantily dressed and attractive helped, seemingly not having enough money to buy new stockings, judging from the many holes in them.

The story is about a ‘man’ called Suckula, “a neurotic Elvis-impersonating vampire” who accidently loses his fangs and decides to go for psychiatric counseling.

Now in it’s fourth year

September 09, 2006 • Blog

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World » South Africa » Pretoria » Former Kenyan high commissioner’s

As Joost pointed out, today marked the beginning of 30yp.com’s fourth year. And indeed, it also meant I wrapped up my 33rd. Then, as Betsy her mom pointed out, I turned 33 on the 9th of the 9th, in the 6th year of the 3rd millennium. That’s a lot of threes and multiples of threes there.

Instead of throwing a party, we went to one. The Pretoria Hash was having the AGPU (Annual General Piss Up) and it made sense to go. Marc and Angele joined us once more and, as before, Marc was negatively surprised about the small amount of alcohol consumed.
That is not to say that he and his girlfriend didn’t try. And, in fact, Angele even fell over when getting up from the chair she’d been spending most of the evening in. That, in turn, was the result of her twitching her ankle (or more accurately, a ligament) and being rushed to a nearby hospital, but only after the local Reiki master tried beaming down some positive energy in the offending foot.
Ironically, Angele didn’t twist her ankle on the run, but while sneaking away from the circle, hoping not to get noticed she’d gone for a wee, avoiding some of the semi-obligatory drinking.
(And, yes, I’m sure this doesn’t make much sense to you if you’re not a hasher.)

Earlier in the week, on Thursday, I visited Soweto, together with Ismail and Lorenzo, as part of our working on soweto uprisings . com. Stay tuned for more on that one.

And it was only this week, shortly before visiting Soweto, that I really noticed my GPS device was also taken during the break-in we had.

Soweto, Jazz and 80s rock

September 03, 2006 • Blog

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World » South Africa » Johannesburg » Zoo lake

I've started to work on a project with Ismail Farouk. I talked to the man a few weeks ago during an opening of his first exhibition, in the parking gallery in downtown Jo'burg. And yes, it's a parking garage. His one-evening only exhibition had a series of photos and a video comprised of strings of photographs in succession, some of which appeared to have been morphed from one to the next. The whole, video-clip length, creation details a trip through downtown Johannesburg.
At the time, I really enjoyed the video, but it has been in the back of my mind ever since, so I suppose I have to adjust my opinion to loving it.

Anyway, we're working together on a project which brings together all sorts of historical and geospatial information related to the Soweto uprisings, the most well known of which was the 1976 march which resulted in the shooting of Hector Pieterson.
Ismail has done most of the work in collecting and documenting, my main task is to get the information online, mixing, of course, Google Maps and Flickr. It's also the objective to include audio and video related to locations on the map. Furthermore, it's my intention to include Flickr photos using Flickr's new mapping tools.
The domain we chose for this project, which if not ground braking as such is certainly ground braking as an application for this particular purpose, is soweto uprisings . com. Ismail is presenting the results of his research in some three weeks, so I want to have something online that's actually working within that time frame too.

Meanwhile, while I went to visit the man in his Yeoville apartment, I stopped at Park station, the train station in downtown Johannesburg, to check for trains to Uppington or, preferably, Windhoek, in Namibia. Nothing as such, unfortunately, although I can take a bus, at some 800 Rand (about 90 euros) one way and enjoy a 'leisurely' 22 hours in a cramped seat. Alternatively, if there are still plain tickets available, Kulula flies there for around 1000 Rand. Hmmm. Which one should it be?

As I entered the station hall, I was overwhelmed by loud music coming from unseen speakers and a huge crowd of onlookers on the balcony surrounding the hall's first floor, looking down on the ground floor of the hall.
In one corner, near-naked girls were dancing on annoying African break beats and they would have been overrun by the male onlookers, struggling with their tongues almost under their shoes, if policemen weren't regularly swinging their batons vigorously at shin level to keep these crowds at bay.

On Sunday, we enjoyed 'Arts alive', an 'international' open air jazz festival at zoo lake, close to, you've guessed it, the zoo. The sun was hot, the beer cold and the music enjoyable. As we walked back to the car, quite a stretch as the roads around the park had been closed to traffic, we asked directions from a mother teaching her, what seemed like a, 12 year old daughter, how to drive. She then actually gave us a lift and turned out to study Dutch, because of her Dutch boyfriend Fred de Vries, a Dutch journalist writing for the Volkskrant and Vrij Nederland who recently released a book called Club Risiko on, in parts, the South African rock scene of the '80s. A few weeks ago, I read the one-page extract in the Mail & Guardian and was reasonably interested. A small world indeed.

The ostrich

August 27, 2006 • Blog

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World » South Africa » North-Western Province » De Wildt 4×4 Game Park

We went down to Hartbeespoort today and did a walking safari in the De Wildt 4×4 Game Park. Supposedly, there are only 'harmless' animals inside, so a walking safari should be quite safe. In fact, it's probably riskier just to drive around in a 4×4 as it seemed that the boys take their toys inside just to see if they can actually navigate their cars through the holes and up the steep hills, taking in inclines which occasionally appeared to be over 45 degrees.

We indeed saw some harmless wildlife although I doubt the claim the managers of the park make that you see more wildlife here in 30 minutes than you see in Kruger in a whole week holds water. Still, we had a lot of fun with a rather daft ostrich which kept following us around and seemingly just wanted to hang out with us.
Walking around with Mark and Angele, they were actually slightly scared of the extremely tall animal, which resulted in one lovely scene. Mark was standing behind a bush to avoid having to watch the ostrich in the face and risking, I suppose, being pecked at. Slowly slowly, the ostrich then started to make its way around the bush to meet Mark, as if saying "Don't mind me… tumdedum… I'm harmless, really… dumdedumdum… don't be afraid" and Mark again avoiding the sweet animal.

Earlier, we had kroketten, Douwe Egberts coffee and Grolsch at a nearby restaurant dressed up like a windmill. Not us, the restaurant.

Quote

In today's Sunday Times, there was a commentary on South Africa's government's zeal to rename Boer place names. In itself, this is not totally unfair, although it would make more sense not to rename the Boer place names but start with the imperial British ones. Anyway, the white South Africans apparently don't seem to care too much and take it in their stride. The quote: "the local Dutchman is evolving in the same direction as his forefathers in Holland, where people are so meek, tolerant and open-minded that their brains are in danger of falling out."

Watch out for your brains.

Pat on the back

August 24, 2006 • Blog

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World » South Africa » Johannesburg » Fourways » Shingara Sands

You might have gathered I've been spending some time on mastering Farsi (Persian) recently. It's a bit of a struggle, even though the language isn't too hard in itself as its an Indo-European language, which means it's rather similar to European languages in general, as opposed to, say, Arabic or Turkish.

However, even though I've been working on the language for a while now, it can still be a challenge to actually read anything. Several children's books I've got, you know the type, one large picture per page with one or two sentences underneath, are still too hard to understand. Very frustrating.

But then, today, I was browsing around some websites aimed at the Persian-speaking populace on the internets and I was actually able to read (and understand, that's the bit that matters, dunnit) a piece of text. Ha!

Grease is the word

August 20, 2006 • Blog

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World » South Africa » Pretoria » Menlyn park

After getting a new laptop, I went ahead and got another one. Within a week, the DVD player broke down and I managed to get a replacement. With the replacement, I also acquired a faulty-priced (to my advantage) wireless LAN adapter. Of course, there's one built into the laptop, but the signal I use is too weak for the laptop to pick it up inside the house and I don't always want to sit on the porch when using the net. Particularly at night, when it's still friggin' cold.
Meanwhile, my Sony photo camera might also need to be replaced. The lens protector isn't really opening and closing the way it should.
So you see, I'm having a great time down here.

We had a locksmith stop by this week to put an extra lock on the back door, the one the burglars forced to get in. The guy, early 20s, had a few interesting things to tell, one of which was that when the security guards go on strike, which they do quite regularly, actually, they, the locksmiths, have no work. Then, as soon as the guards start working again, the locksmiths can get back to work too. Of course, the implication is that break-ins are initiated 'from the inside'.
Also, the guy persistently called the burglars 'blackies'. Not politically correct by a long shot, but probably correct anyway.

On Saturday, we had the first official, informal DDR ZA meet, in Menlyn Park in Pretoria. Not that we had too big of a turnout, with only three guys, but still, it's a start.

Betsy and I went back to Menlyn Park on Sunday, today, for a showing of Grease, the musical. Nice, but not great. A mix of the movie and the original theatre production, we saw this show at the Barnyard theatre in Menlyn park, a large mall in Pretoria, or Tshwane, as it more often is called.

It's a nice show, of course, and the theatre was quite small, so there was a nice cosy feeling to it. However, the sound quality wasn't all too good, the actors not too easy to understand. And no, it wasn't in Afrikaans.
Also, I had the feeling that most actors were relying too much on routine, not giving their best performance, except maybe for the guy playing Vince Fontaine.

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