Did almost nothing of interest today, which included drinking cocktails on the terrace of Dino’s, a small bar right on the beach and playing backgammon with bottle tops and 500MT coins. The playing field was etched in one of the bar’s tables. One of the other visitors was an Indian dressed as a rasta and acoustic Bob Marley covers were generating a mellow feeling, or was it the three half liter cocktails that did that?
On the bus from Maputo to Inhambane, we decided not to stay at Fatima’s nest, the sister hostel to Fatima’s in Maputo. Already, we had been unpleasantly surprised several times with the lack of service at Fatima’s but after they misinformed us significantly about the taxi fare from the hostel to the bus station and about the bus fare to Inhambane, I had gotten too fed up with them and didn’t want to poor any more money into their coffers.
No less then 9 travelers were moving from Fatima’s in Maputo to Fatima’s in Inhambane. Four of us decided to head out to Bamboozi lodge, close to our original destination.
When you’re going to Inhambane, mostly, you’re not actually going to Inhambane, but to one of the nearby beaches. We ended up on Tofo beach, a beautiful stretch of coastline. Mozambique is well known for its exceptional beaches and here we could see why: Wide white and nearly empty beaches, we felt like being in some commercial.
Bamboozi also had a very good restaurant and bar, on top of the dunes, overlooking the Indian ocean, where most of the glasses are actually sewn off bottles. Truly magnificent.
After South Africa, we finally were starting to wind down, taking it really easy, lounging on the beach, eating and drinking. So, not much happened here, really. Our adventures were starting to get limited to events like remarking that the salt shaker had an image of a boy running after a chicken, under which a line of text read ‘see how they run’.
Old
Sitting in the Bamboozi restaurant, I realized that maybe, perhaps, I’m no longer that young, or at least not as young as I would prefer to be. Here I was, sitting in a restaurant overlooking the Indian ocean, smoking a pipe, drinking pure vodka, reading Somewhere Over the Rainbow, a journalist’s travelogue on South Africa while young, kids, were drinking fancy mixed drinks, walking barefoot in shorts and proclaiming “this is really paradise, man”, while the Red Hot Chili Peppers thumped from the speakers and DStv was playing in the background. A short while later, a young girl sat down in the open window right next to me, to talk to her friends, sitting outside and, as she bended over a bit, her panties crept up, to above her pants. When we were kids…
We took a long walk today, passing the president’s residence, before arriving at the city’s fish market, way up north, where locals play Bantumi on 3 meter wide boards. Here, you can buy fish and have it prepared at a restaurant right at the market. We decided to take the shrimps and shells back to the lodge and make our dinner ourselves.
On the way to and from the market, we passed what looked like an abandoned construction site. An impressive multi story building was standing left unfinished.
Taking it easy, we walked around the rather rundown town, taking in the couple of sights the city has to offer. We stopped at the national gallery and, in the garden, were asked by Marcos Muthewuye to 'Cultuvate Your Ideas'. We had to make a drawing of something, anything, that would be planted in the garden, to see if it would 'grow'. We used one A4 paper, made a diagonal line on it and on one side drew a picture of Holland and on the other a picture of Mozambique.
We also stumbled upon the very well kept monument to Louis Trichard, a boer voortrekker who crossed the jungle from South Africa to end up in Maputo. Shortly after his arrival, everyone who had survived the journey had died from diseases.
The city's train station was a bit of a farce, similar to the one in Beira which we would see a couple of days later. The station is kept very clean and reasonably fresh signs from the national rail transporter claim that they should build on the experiences of the past and use the country's rail network to its full potential. In fact, the only train running in Mozambique only occasionally makes its way between Maputo and Nelspruit.
The track going north from Maputo to Inhambane is still there, but almost completely covered in dirt, sand, or plots where locals are cultivating crops.
At Fatima's, the guest room is actually the inner courtyard of the hostel, with an outdoor kitchen and pop music played way too loud. In the evening, Betsy and I were talking to a lady from Pemba, all the way up north in Mozambique, about local arts and crafts, when screams came from the kitchen area. One of the guests was trying to cook a lobster and the lobster had decided to take off, jumping out of the pan, on the table, on the floor.
We had to get up early to drop off our rental, after which we strolled around Nelspruit to find the departure point for buses to Maputo. We found no less then three offices and we opted for the cheapest ticket.
Waiting for several hours, we learned our bus had broken down and we were bumped onto a more expensive ride. However, that bus was already overcrowded and, for almost the whole ride to Maputo, I had to stand in the doorway of the bus.
The road to Maputo is good. In fact, it’s the only really good road in Mozambique and it’s been build by South Africans for South Africans.
In the evening, we had dinner at restaurant Zambezia, where we ordered all sorts of things from the menu, without knowing what they were. I ended up with butter, a dry pancake and xima, the local sadza. We were lucky, just before ordering, to find out that several of the dishes we first thought of ordering all contained chicken intestines in copious quantities.
Lodgings
We were staying at Fatima’s. It’s rather popular with tourists, but not rightly so. Service is crap and the facilities are mediocre. Staff forget reservations, are unclear about pricing and rip the guests off with exchanging money.
We would leave for Inhambane in a couple of days and had planned to stay at a guest house there, run by the same people. Upon arriving in Inhambane, we changed our minds and forgot about Fatima’s Nest.
Fatima’s might have been a backpacker’s in the past, not much of that remained now. Sure, there were still backpackers staying at the hostel, but so were middle aged Chinese couples, South Africans with huge 4x4s and complete families with noisy kids from all over Europe.
It’s surprising to find that both in Lesotho and Swaziland (and, as we found out later, in Mozambique too) there isn’t some apartheid ghost looming above everything you see or do. It makes for rather more carefree conversations with the locals, without the implicit and underlying blame, so prevalent in South Africa and Zimbabwe.
Also, things were surprisingly well organized in Swaziland. Upon leaving the country, we were even asked to complete a survey with a girl interviewing tourists on their experiences inside the country.
Unfortunately, we missed one of the two big yearly events only by a couple of days. In the yearly reed dance, hundreds of young girls dance before the king, for him to choose yet another wife. Next Saturday, not the girls, but their mothers would dance before the king. I admit it, not as spectacular, but still…
We did experience some of the five day preparations, where the mothers first congregate, close to the queen-mother’s residence, before collecting the reed.
First, we had heard the dance would take place today. Struggling to find the country’s tourist office, tucked away in some mall in Mbabane, we asked the very friendly guy on duty for more information, saying we had heard the dance would be performed today. He replied: “But I don’t understand, the king is not in the country.” And he wasn’t; this very morning, he had left for an AU summit.
The country seems to revere the previous king, Sobhuza II, who more or less saved the country from annexation by the British, early in the last century, and pulled his peoples together as one. We visited his memorial but weren’t allowed to take pictures of his grave.
I had read about the king leaving the country in The Times of Swaziland, which resembles a small village bi-weekly newspaper, with the ads and the listings of people changing their name because their new name was their ‘natural’ name.
We headed out of the country, making sure we would arrive in South Africa before the border closed, to drive to Nelspruit, where we would drop off our rental the very next morning. Next stop would be Mozambique.
Internet cafes seem to have sprouted up all over the country. The downtown Victoria St. Market is no exception. Between the Indian spices, cloth and tourist crap, there’s a high-speed Internet cafe filled with PCs with flat screens.
Inside, mainly Indians were selling regular stuff you expect to find at a market. Outside, blacks were selling voodoo equipment: crocodile legs, hippo teeth, etc.
In the afternoon, before driving up to Stanger to see Shaka Zulu’s grave, we visited a Hare Krishna temple just out of Durban to have even more curry.
During our five weeks, we only had a couple of rainy days, but today was one of them. We visited the Alayam Hindu Temple, small but the oldest and biggest in South Africa, and promptly were invited to join a wedding ceremony, after which we were completely stuffed with food.
Also, it finally dawned on me what the many black kids lying around, all painted white, we had seen almost everywhere over the past couple of days, were doing: Xhosa boys going through their coming-of-age ritual.
Durban has three main malls. There’s one downtown, The Wheel, only visited by blacks and although it used to be popular, it’s now nearly empty with shops. Another one is right on the waterfront, Sun Coast, which is packed with entertainment, including a huge casino, and it’s always filled with Indians. And there’s Gateway, some 15 kilometers away, where all the whites go. What do you mean no more apartheid?
Sun Coast casino, and the others we saw while in South Africa, kindly request patrons to leave their fire arms at reception.
It is thought that Durban has up to a million Indians living in and around the city. The town itself isn't that spectacular (and you're advised to stay out of the downtown area anyway) but it means the food is fan-tas-tic.
There's even a typical Durban dish: Bunny chow. It's a half (or quarter) loaf of bread (a 'bun') filled with curries. It is really, really good. Even Floyd (you know the cook) is crazy about the Durban Bunny chow.
We stayed at the Travelers' International Lodge, which was quite pleasant and got the lowdown on the Durban drugs scene from the two owners, a young couple trying their best.
In the evening, having a drink at the nearby Zeta bar, we bumped into some Aussies who had stayed at our lodge in Harare for the Zimbabwe-Australia cricket matches some weeks before. They were all so wasted that, after they had left, we could hear one of them vomiting just outside the bar for what sounded like hours.
A step to the left
We were able to obtain tickets for The Rocky Horror Show, of course in some mall on the outskirts of town. The venue was interesting, though, although they had made it look like some ancient barnyard. Below was a large space, filled with tables (and chairs) and then there were two balconies overlooking the floor below and the stage, also with tables and chairs. Guests were allowed to bring their own food but had to buy their drinks at the bar.
We had wanted to also do the Sunday matinee show, but a bout of drinking stopped us from getting up early.
Watching the show, I realised there's a book in analysing the musical, along the lines of "The Zen of Pooh". There's enough in the show to explain any real-world behavior and improve on it too. Mental note… Or maybe: "Don't dream it, be it!"
When South Africa was formed, pulling together several smaller nations, everyone was kept happy by creating three capitals: Pretoria as the administrative capital, Cape Town as the legislative capital and Bloemfontein as the judicial capital.
Although I hadn't planned on visiting Bloemfontein, this birthplace of J.R.R. Tolkien has some buildings downtown and a decent war memorial museum worth visiting, if you're around. It's a pity that, as with the other larger cities in South Africa, the downtown area is slowly changing into quite a seedy environment.
After touring Bloemfontein we drove into Lesotho, which calls itself 'The kingdom in the sky'. Today, however, it was nothing but 'The kingdom in the clouds'. Maseru, the capital, isn't very impressive although it was interesting to see literally everyone wearing the Lesotho national dress: a blanket.
We found it nearly impossible to discover a place to stay and when we finally did find one, a lodge some 30km out of town, we decided not to stay since the weather wouldn't have let us out anyway. We arrived and, upon asking how much a room was, were told it was a hundred Rands per four hours. Lesotho, together with Swaziland, has the highest HIV rate in the world.
Plastics
Although good fun can be had all over South Africa, the country strikes me as having lost a certain authentic touch. If you want to have a good time, party, you almost always will end up in some mall on the outskirts of town. Tonight, after we had driven to Harrismith, on our way to Durban, the owner of our hostel even directed us to some fast food colony next to the Jo'burg-Durban highway for dinner and drinks, where, in some fake old-looking-but-only-five-years-old pub we could have a decent meal. The background noise of muzak made it all so sad, considering, this was the best Harrismith had to offer.
Graaff-Reinet is also called 'The jewel of the Karoo', and with some justification. The town is sweet but quiet. The lodge we stayed at was more of a huge house where the older couple who owned the place appeared to be offering budget accommodation at 'Le Jardin Backpackin', just to have people to chat to. When we arrived the previous night, we had to insist on going out for a meal and watching Holland losing the Euro2004 semi-final, not at their place, but in a pub.
But this morning, we couldn't escape their kindness over coffee and grits when we sat in the garden, enjoyed the weather and talked for hours before leaving.
After strolling through Graaff-Reinet, we drove up the N1 towards Lesotho but only got as far as Bloemfontein because we made a detour to visit Nieu-Bethesda to check out The Owl House where, in the first half of the previous century, Helen Martins created statue after statue in the 'Art Brut' style. The house is still littered with statues in a village that's, literally, in the middle of nowhere.
Afterwards, we visited the Village Inn, which doubled as a tourist office, coffee house and memento store. And we did some shopping in one of the two general stores where the lady behind the counter, after telling us her life story, gave us a good bag of candy, including some tasty niggerballs, for free, on the condition that we had to tell the world how friendly Nieu-Bethesdians are.
Mossel Bay is on the edge of the Garden Route, a stretch of coastline all the Zimbos I talked to about South Africa went ape for. The Lonely Planet too, likes it a lot. I wasn’t overly impressed. Sure, the scenery is attractive, and although Mossel Bay was enjoyable enough, Knysna and George were nightmares, even now, in winter. With Steers next to Ocean Basket next to KFC next to Nando’s next to… the towns appear to be huge outdoor malls, if anything.
We quickly made our escape from Knysna northwards, towards the N9 and Graaff-Reinet.
Shortly after leaving Knysna, we drove up through the Diepwalle & Gouma Forest, visiting ‘The Big Tree’ (also known as the King Edward VII tree, why?) and driving up Spitskop for an excellent view, before heading down to Uniondale and the N9.
Getting up Spitskop was a bit of a tricky ride, but Betsy, who drove on this stretch, did well and the view was worth it.
There’s not much to see in the Karoo, besides Ronnie’s sex shop, but it being empty is also the Karoo’s main attraction. It’s empty, dry and vast. Some consider it boring, others find it a very impressive environment. I liked it.
It’s not completely empty, there are some villages, a lake or two and the occasional dirt road, but that pretty much sums it up.
We drove across the R62 from Montagu to Oudtshoorn, but before arriving at Oudtshoorn, we got of the main road and headed to the Swartberg pass, which is supposed to be one of the two most beautiful passes in the country. The road, which changed from two-lane tarmac to one-lane sand right at the beginning of the incline, winds up, up and up, until you reach ‘Die Top’ where the view, it has to be said, is very nice. But if you’ve ever been to Mongolia, as I have, you’ve seen it all before.
Nevertheless, the views are outstanding.
Oudtshoorn calls itself ‘The ostrich capital of the world’ and is surrounded by ostrich farms, many of which also do tours. The previous day, I was reminded of the fact that ostrich stake is goood, but particularly when Betsy was riding an ostrich, I also discovered that ostriches can be hilarious. They’re not very smart and eat anything, which can make for entertaining behavior.
On the farm, we bumped into an English couple who were also traveling South Africa. It was already the third time we met them, after Cape Town and the Karoo.
After Oudtshoorn, we ended up in Mossel Bay. A pleasant little town where we slept on the beach in an old train wagon. It was a hostel where the 4-sleepers had been fitted with double beds. Rather cramped, but the beach being only 30 meters from your windows and the rolling waves lulling you to sleep are not to be missed.
Before sleeping, we had dinner in a pub where the crowd went wild on the jolige boerestampmuziek coming out of the speakers.
Ancient connection?
Driving through the Karoo, we listened to some radio station airing some interesting music. I immediately recognized it as Mongolian throat singing. However, the singers weren’t Mongolians, but from some tribe in South Africa.
Combined with this area’s shaman culture, it made me wonder if some ancient connection between the two cultures once existed.
Contrary to popular belief, the Cape of Good Hope is NOT the southernmost point of Africa. It's the lesser and much less touristy Cape Agulhas. It's quiet, tourist-free and there's only one tarmac road going there. And we didn't take it. Instead, we drove down on dirt roads where, although the scenery is nice, I constantly was in fear of blowing a tire.
The view from this cape isn't that special, besides the very nice lighthouse, the second oldest in Africa, which was modeled on what the lighthouse in Alexandria was supposed to have looked like.
Last night, we had to fight to find a place to stay in Stellenbosch. The first two lodgings no longer accepted tourists so we ended up at the Stumble Inn which appeared to be overflowing with 20 year old youngsters. I had some time to surf and read email, but the fact that the bar was, in effect, outside didn't make it a pleasant place to hang around since temperatures were slowly dropping to close to freezing.
We had dinner at the excellent Bukhara and woke up early to stroll around town and enjoy the nice Cape Dutch architecture. Interestingly, as many blacks are flocking to the cities and whites are flocking to the suburbs, Stellenbosch has also seen a significant influx of whites over the last decade and an exodus of blacks. Maybe the Afrikaans university in town helped in this one.
By chance, we also stumbled on an exhibition by Keith Dietrich, called 'Horizons of Babel' where he "explores how images construct knowledge and investigates the relationship between the centre and periphery" displaying novel ways of using maps.
Before arriving on the cape, we stopped by at Hermanus to watch whales splash and play. The town has an official 'whale crier', a guy who should blow his horn as soon as whales are spotted in the bay.
Politics
We drove on to Montagu to spend the night and had dinner there at the slightly sterile Jessica's, where I had a very decent Ostrich stake. We started talking to Dominique and Iona, a British couple who had been living in South Africa for years.
Over the past four months, whenever I spoke with (white) South Africans, all of them seemed to be rather wary of the future, where they feared that, after Mandela's death, South Africa could go the way of Zimbabwe. Dominique countered that by saying that white South Africans have a rather negative world view. Meanwhile, he claimed that three of his family members had been killed in farm repossessions in, of all places, Zimbabwe.
Montague is not much more than a one-street town, which turned out to be a good introduction to the Karoo, we would be driving through the next day. The CalTex gas station in town was selling coffee from a thermos, but no tea and pies from a freezer.
At night, it was even colder than in Stellenbosch, but thanks to a movable electric heater that kept on beaming through the night, it was just bearable.
A busy day, we started off by renting a car from AVIS, which we would end up driving on a zig-zag route through the country, dropping it off on the other side, in Nelspruit, on the border with Mozambique.
I had wanted to tour Table Mountain the previous day, but the weather just wasn't up for it. In any case, climbing Table Mountain can be tricky for the sudden changes in weather. So we took a nice and comfortable cable car, after which we got a tour of the sights from a distinguished 69 year old gentleman who couldn't stop talking about the beauty of nature on and around the Cape. Then man had cycled around Holland in the 50s and had been to Zimbabwe in the 40s. Upon departure, he made sure we would say 'Hi' to Bob, on our return to Zim.
When we went up, the sky was perfectly clear. Shortly after, we could see the 'tablecloth' forming but, by the time we got back down again, the sky was, again, a perfect blue. The layer of clouds, the tablecloth, was formed so quickly that we could actually see the cloth building up, clouds being formed right in front of our eyes.
The view from the mountain is magnificent. And we bumped into what I believe was the vice president to the Chinese communist party. It was announced on telly and radio he was in town that day and, on top of the mountain, we saw four Chinese characters walk around, one small fellow with three HHUUGGEE cameras, taking pictures of everything the other Chinese did.
There are lots of stories to be told of the mountain. There's two I really like. The first is that the mountain is the only geographical feature in the world that has a constellation named after it. The second is that, according to (Dutch) legend, the nearby Devil's Peak got its name after the Dutch pirate Van Hunks challenged the Devil to a smoking contest, after which so much smoke was generated that the tablecloth was formed.
After Table Mountain, we drove down to the Cape of Good Hope, named by Diaz on his way back from the east side of what is now Southern Africa. Although it's close to Cape Town, it's still a relatively long drive, but the scenery is spectacular.
The Cape is actually two capes: The Cape of Good Hope and Cape Point. Tourism focuses on Cape Point, where there's a restaurant, two light houses and millions, well almost, of baboons trying to steal sandwiches from visitors, one of which being successful when we were there.
Also, the cape is home to two monuments, the Diaz Cross and the Da Gama Cross, in memory to these two great explorers who both rounded the Cape. But these crosses also serve a purpose. When they line up, sailors can deduce the location of a reef and steer clear of the danger.
We tried to steer clear of the many tourists and headed out to Stellenbosch, a lovely city with heaps of what is called Cape Dutch architecture in the middle of South African wine country.
I had hoped to climb Table Mountain today, but the weather was too foul. We ended up going to the South African gallery before watching Holland play the Euro 2004 quarter finals. Walking towards the gallery, through the Company's gardens, we not only were welcomed by another statue of Cecil Rhodes, we were also pleasantly surprised by hordes of squirrels, begging for the nuts we had bought from one of the street vendors.
In Zimbabwe, I made sure I read the weekly South African newspaper 'The Mail and Guardian', the only decent newspaper available in Zimbabwe. Over the past couple of months, some art exhibitions advertised in the paper seemed really worth visiting. The first, the political cartoons in Jo'burg, we had already seen, the second, 'Democracy X', we had walked through at the castle the previous day and now the third, 'Ten years of democracy', we were able to visit at the South African National Gallery, on the edge of the Company's Gardens.
One of the oldest European buildings in Southern Africa, this Fort never saw any action in it's 350 years. The castle is nice enough and the key ceremony, held daily at 12pm is mildly entertaining, notably for the tiny canon that roars.
We spent most of the day walking around the city, visiting the many sites the town has to offer. It's easy to see Cape Town is a much more friendly and more mellow place than Jo'burg. Gen, who had lived in Jo'burg for six months said that in that period, she felt she had aged 10 years; Now, after three months in Cape Town, she had already regained five of those 10 years.
After the fort, we walked down to the District Six museum. Not much of a real museum, it's mostly comprised of pictures of people who lived in District Six before it was bulldozed by the South African government for being too much of a multicultural area in the 70s.
We got a small tour from one of the original residents, Noor Ebrahim.
Mall country
South Africa is mall country. Over the last decade, more and more businesses have set up shop in suburbs, leaving the downtown area. Similarly, more and more whites have left the downtown area to live in the suburbs, sparkling the rise and rise of mall culture.
The bad part is that, if you want to party, you almost always end up in some mall. The good part is that facilities are spectacular.
Funnily enough, our taxi driver from Kimberley, a rather shy kid in his mid-twenties, had only been to Cape Town once, some 13 years ago, around the end of apartheid. He told us we really had to visit Golden Acre, 'a fantastic complex' of shops and entertainment. A mall built in the 80s, it's terrible.
The island got its name from the Dutch word for ‘seals’, which were found lounging on the island when the Dutch decided it would make the perfect penal colony, just of the shores of Cape Town. With Table Mountain always within view, I can imagine it being extra annoying to be trapped on this island, constantly being reminded of what it is you’re not part of.
The seals, for that matter, are still around, as are penguins.
Mandela’s story has been told numerous times and if you’re interested, I suggest you pick up Long walk to freedom by Nelson Mandela himself, a good as book as any, and probably better.
The tour of the island is highly organized and, in fact, not very interesting apart from the fact that many of the tour guides were imprisoned on the island at one stage or another. Most interesting were the personal effects exhibited in the departure terminal on the Cape Town Waterfront.
Just after leaving the departure terminal again, after having visited the island, I heard someone call my name. Now, in Afrikaans, ‘Baba’ means baby and in many of the native African languages, ‘Baba’ means father, so I wasn’t really expecting anyone to actually call me. Still, I turned around and looked straight into the face of a friend of mine I met in Mongolia. Small world or what?
In the evening, sipping from a bottomless coffee at the Mugg and Bean at the V and A Waterfront, mist was slowly seeping into the mall, and it was getting annoyingly cold.
Africa is in there somewhere
It’s interesting to see how, occasionally, Africa seeps through the facade that’s westernized South Africa: In an expensive restaurant, it wasn’t possible to change one item of an extensive starter platter for another; A pedestrian bridge on the waterfront broke down and wasn’t repaired for hours; South African airways only accepts local credit cards; A very decent Internet cafe had 30 PCs with LCD screens, but with Windows 98.
On our first train journey through South Africa, from Johannesburg to Kimberley, we had a comfortable four-sleeper, just for the two of us. Now, from Kimberley to Cape Town, we had to do with a two-sleeper.
Still, the ride was fairly comfortable and also took us through the vast and arid Karoo, covering almost one third of South Africa’s total area. It’s rather empty and, because of that, quite impressive. Later, we rented a car in Cape Town to drive to Nelspruit, partially covering the Karoo so that we could take a more leisurely look up close.
Arriving at the Cape Town train station, we were almost immediately overwhelmed by numerous taxi drivers offering their services. In the end, we went for a friendly looking guy who stuttered half the time. Friendly indeed, he even gave us a discount on the (very reasonable) metered fare when he couldn’t find our lodgings immediately. We agreed that, whenever we needed a cab, we would call him first. Although we bumped into him, by chance, the next day, we called him twice for a ride, but twice he had to turn us down.
In the evening, we watched Holland reach the Euro 2004 quarter finals, leaving Germany behind, just. We were staying close to the Victoria and Albert Waterfront, a huge mall, right inside and across Cape Town’s harbor and we watched the match in a big, big, big sports bar, together with Germans, Czechs and Latvians and started talking to a mixed Dutch/South African couple who invited us over for curry some days later, when Holland was set to play the quarter finals.
The girl was South African, mixed Indian and black although she looked more black than anything else; the guy was Dutch. Interestingly, they told us that, when they strolled around town, it was her who got racist remarks flung at her, by the black population, saying she should stick to her own kind and not mix with whities.
Later, when we had that curry at their place, Serge got totally drunk and passed out on the whiskey I had brought with me and Gen got reasonably drunk but only had to tell us her whole life story from start to finish. After both had fallen asleep we quietly made our getaway.
As northern South Africa is Boer country, the south, classically, is British country. Although you can still travel quite a bit further south from Kimberley, it is already part of (former) British heartland. Since the British' main reason for fighting the Boers was taking control of the soil's riches, it's not very surprising they wanted Kimberley.
We wanted to go on a tour of a working diamond mine, but we weren't successful. Although De Beers does organize tours, when I called, the operator sounded like she had never had the request in her life.
In stead, we walked down to the Honoured Dead Memorial, which is also home to 'Long Cecil', a gun used in the defense of the city during the Boer war.
We also visited the William Humphreys art gallery which wasn't all that bad. Most notably, we got lucky and bumped into Jeanette Unite, a South African artist who was just preparing an exhibit that would be opened that very evening. We started talking and got invited for the evenings ceremony with, yeah, free food and drinks. Her art, very abstract, uses materials from South Africa's mines so it's almost natural she had her exposition in this mining town of mining towns.
Although South African trains are quite comfortable, getting a ticket can be a challenge. It is required you make reservations before the train leaves its first station. Getting from Kimberley to Cape Town meant we had to get the ticket before our train left Pretoria, a good 12 hours away. We had tried making reservations the day before, but to no avail: the systems were down.
I had asked the guy behind the counter if he could keep trying and leave a message at our hostel upon success. When we got home the night before, I wasn't expecting a message waiting for us, but there was. Tickets had been reserved.
Our next challenge came this morning, when we had to try and pay for the tickets. The train stations normally accept credit cards, but this morning… the systems were down. On to find an ATM, which can be few and far between and, on top of that, don't all accept my bank card. It took us the good part of two hours to finally obtain the tickets today.
We also discovered former Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith was made honorary citizen of Kimberley in 1979. Why?