Au Revoir, South Africa

I've just about run out of things to say about our South Africa trip, so I'll leave you with a few more cute animal pictures. And I invite you to bookmark this site, as I'll be returning to it each time we take a trip to post more pictures and stories ... in the meantime, enjoy these last few shots:





Thanks for reading, and see you soon!

Random Beautiful Animal Pictures

The Wild Kingdom

When people asked me before the trip if we were going on safari, I said no -- thinking that "safari" meant porters and tents and dressing for dinner in the jungle.

But in the modern Africa, a safari can be as simple as checking into an air-conditioned hotel with a good wine cellar and then, twice a day, driving around in a big Jeep to look for wild animals.

There's no jungle, either, at least not in this part of the world. We went to a lodge in Pilanesberg National Park, about two hours' drive northwest of Johannesburg, near the Sun City resort complex. Like most of the safari country of southern Africa, it is semiarid scrubland reminiscent of the American West:


This type of vegetation makes it much easier to see animals from the "game drive" vehicle, which looks like this:


It helps, as well, that the animals are generally habituated to humans in trucks and tend not to run away. This is at least partly because many of the parks and game reserves where safaris occur are fenced in, to keep poachers from killing the animals and to keep the animals from wandering outside the park and killing the local farmers. So the animals have had quite some time to get used to nonthreatening humans.

This results in close-up encounters like these:



We even managed to get close to a pride of lions, which can be hard to spot because they're exactly the same color as the grass:



They did notice us and sat up:


The guide told us that we were perfectly safe, in an open-sided truck 10 yards from the lions, because the lions can't conceive of a truck full of people; they simply see the truck and assume it is a big animal that they can't eat and that doesn't want to eat them. Of course, if anyone had gotten out of the truck, it would have been a different story.

The most amusing animal encounter actually happened at our hotel, though. We checked in and, not having been told otherwise, opened the window for some fresh air. The minute we turned our backs, a vervet monkey dashed in, went straight for the minibar, grabbed a plastic-wrapped cookie and then took it back outside to eat:


Clearly, he had done this many times before.

Soweto: The Other Side of Town

As someone who went to college in the United States at the height of the divestiture controversy, it was quite a thrill to actually get to visit where it all began:


Soweto, an acronym for "South West Township," was originally built as segregated housing for transient black mineworkers. Some of the old barracks buildings still stand, although here, as elsewhere in the country (including the shantytowns near the Cape Town airport) the government is doing its best to upgrade slum-dwellers to modern middle-class-style housing:


There is still much abject poverty in Soweto -- many people don't yet have running water, and need to fetch it from a communal pump:


But there is also at least one neighborhood of comfortable middle-class housing ....


... and even a country club and shopping mall, which we saw from afar. And it is rife with the sites of protests and battles against the former apartheid government, including this Roman Catholic church, which the white army stormed in 1976 during the uprising that led to the divestiture movement and ultimately to the end of apartheid:


To this day, you can see bullet holes in various parts of the sanctuary of the church, and in panels from the windows that the caretaker has saved to show to visitors:


The 1976 uprising began as a protest by black students against the white government's decision to make them take all their classes in Afrikaans, a language many of them did not even speak. One of the first casualties was a 12-year-old boy, Hector Pieterson, gunned down while unarmed and protesting peacefully.

A museum now stands near the spot, but a better museum opened more recently between Soweto and downtown Johannesburg. Called the Apartheid Museum, it vividly recreates life under the segregationist regime:


I could not have imagined, back in 1984, that apartheid would end peacefully and with a real degree of reconciliation between the races. It is a tribute to all South Africans that it did.

Johannesburg: Urban Dystopia

800 miles inland and 5,000 feet up on a plateau, Johannesburg is as different from Cape Town as it could possibly be. It sprawls for more than 40 miles across rolling prairie, a sort of Blade Runnerish version of Dallas. Had we not had a friend there to show us around, I'm not sure we would have been able to even start to get a handle on it.

Johannesburg, of course, has a fearsome reputation for crime. Our friend, Abe, told us it was not as bad as it used to be, and said he could even drive around in the central city during the day if he wanted. However, he said it was too risky to take us there, so we had to content ourselves with this view from the freeway:


The northern suburbs look much like Pasadena, except for the eight-foot-high walls topped with electric fences that surround every home:


Many homes even have private guard shacks outside the gate:


It is so bad that even Nelson Mandela now lives behind fortifications like these rather than among his people. Home invasions and carjackings are the main dangers; gated communities are set up to make it difficult both for burglars to get in and for car thieves to get out with their loot. And even in fairly distant suburbs, you see signs like this:


There is another nightmarish aspect to the city, as well. It was founded on gold mines and even close to downtown is still dotted with giant slag heaps:



This, at least, is being addressed. Apparently new technology makes it possible to go through the slag and extract significant amounts of gold that the old miners missed, so much of the slag is being slowly carted away for reprocessing.

I don't want to leave the impression that Jo'burg is nothing but nasty, though. We did have fun at a gay bar there, as well as a couple of good meals. If you've got money, you can live very well, at places like the poolside bar of the Hotel Westcliff:



And while Nelson Mandela apparently must fear street crime like any ordinary citizen, he has lent his name (willingly or not) to a brand new upscale shopping mall in a white neighborhood, surely the ultimate mark of economic and political reconciliation:

March of the Penguin

There are three colonies of penguins in South Africa: on Robben Island , near the Cape of Good Hope and further east along the coast. They stink like bagoong (Filipino fermented shrimp paste), but if you can get past that they are actually quite cute:


You can get quite close to them, particularly at the Simon's Town site near the Cape of Good Hope. The penguins there seem quite habituated to people. This one got out of the water and, apparently unfazed by the paparazzi, began staggering up the beach:


It looked rather dazed and confused, and we weren't sure it knew where it was going, but then it headed straight for a bush -- and its spouse, in the nest:


And then, just like in the movies, it (you can't easily tell whether they are male or female) began regurgitating its dinner to feed its spouse, with a very loud noise. In fact, because of the noise, these were originally known as "jackass penguins," but in the new, ultra-politically-correct South Africa, that term has been banned and they are now called "African penguins."

Not quite as majestic as the ones in the movie, but a hell of a lot easier to see in the wild.

Sundowners

The western edge of Cape Town, facing the Atlantic Ocean, is a series of upper-class residential neighborhoods cut off from downtown by the backside of Table Mountain. Although it's a bit of a hike to get there, it's popular to go there at nightfall and watch the sun set into the Atlantic.

The play of light on Table Mountain itself is fascinating, as you can see from these pictures, the first taken about an hour before sunset, and the second taken maybe 45 minutes later:


And the sunset itself is indeed beautiful:


It is the local custom to have a drink in one's hand while watching this; such drinks are called "sundowners," and that has become the name throughout South Africa for what we would call "happy hour."

We will be adopting the term "sundowners" for drinks served at nightfall at our Fire Island house forthwith ...

One of the Ends of the Earth

You've probably never heard of the spot at the southern tip of Africa where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet. It's called Cape Agulhas, and apparently there is nothing there but some sand dunes and a plaque.

What most people think of as the tip of Africa, the Cape of Good Hope, is actually just a rocky point off the southwest coast, about 40 miles south of Cape Town. But it's a good deal more dramatic-looking than Cape Agulhas:


Here too (just on the other side of the point from this angle) there is a plaque marking the site, where we had our pictures taken:


Because it's so scenic and close to the city, it's a popular destination for tourists and local daytrippers. So much so that there's usually a line to get your picture taken at this sign:


Despite the beautiful weather when we were there, its European discoverer, Bartholomew Dias, named it the Cape of Storms. The Portuguese king later renamed it, an early example of what we now would call "rebranding."

Dancing on the Dark Continent

Joey and I always try to check out what gay scene exists in any country we are visiting. But except for North America and Western Europe, we generally come away saying, "That was pretty good, under the circumstances."

Both in Cape Town and Johannesburg, it was pretty good, period.

CAPE TOWN

Gay life in Cape Town centers on a small neighborhood called De Waterkant, at the foot of a hill separating the central city from the waterfront shopping mall. Since we were staying at the waterfront and dining in the central city, we decided to walk there and back and stop off in De Waterkant for drinks and dancing in both directions.

(Despite South Africa's hideous reputation for crime, we didn't feel unsafe walking around Cape Town at night. Yes, the streets were relatively deserted except for beggars, but the beggars are well dressed and polite and on the whole, the streets feel sketchier in Philadelphia.)

Our first stop, before dinner, was at a bar/restaurant called Manhattan. That early in the evening there were maybe 15 people in the bar, most of them clearly gay to my eye. Yet when we asked the bartender where to go later to dance, he bent down and, in kind of a hushed way, asked if we were gay. And then he mentioned The Bronx, which several people had told me before we left was the only gay club in Cape Town.

It is actually one of at least two, now, we discovered on our way back after dinner. Next door to The Bronx is a new place called The Crew. Both places are dance bars more than clubs, but both were a lot of fun. The Crew is definitely more of a bar; its dance floor is relatively small and the music was generic handbag with no real thought or effort put into it. The Bronx has two dance floors, a small one at street level and a larger one upstairs; it charges a cover while The Crew does not; and the music was excellent handbag tinged with harder trance (including a twisted trance mix of "Gypsy Woman" that I've never heard before). There's a fair amount of traffic back and forth between the two.

South Africans are among the friendliest people I've ever met anywhere, and a number of them are strikingly good-looking, particularly (to my eye) when they are of mixed race. Yet gay life in both cities was a predominantly white affair: except for having a few more South Asians and fewer East Asians, the crowd looked pretty much like you'd expect in the United States. Whether the blacks have their own parallel scene, or don't participate in gay life for cultural or economic reasons, I couldn't tell you. (We also noted that everyone in the bars was speaking English, not Afrikaans, which we were told is somewhat unpopular now because of its associations with apartheid.)

We had a great time shuttling back and forth between the two bars -- especially when the go-go boys at Crew grabbed bottles from behind the bar and started pouring free shots in the mouths of all and sundry (we tried to get pictures of this, but they didn't come out) -- but had to leave a bit sooner than we wanted because we had an early tour the next day. We will definitely carve out more time for this scene next time we are there.

JOHANNESBURG

We hadn't planned to carve out any time for gay life in South Africa's biggest city, because we were only there on a Sunday night and because Jo'burg is a much harder place to get a grip on than Cape Town. Had we not had a friend living there, we wouldn't have found anything, and even our friend was initially stumped about what to do on a Sunday evening. Several phone calls to his circle produced no definitive results, but suddenly as we drove through the far northern suburbs, he noticed that a bar called Risque was open with its parking lot full (this was at around 7 p.m.). So we went in for a peek.


You could find places like Bronx and Crew in most American cities, but not Risque. Outdoors, with palapa-shaded bars in huts surrounding a large kidney-shaped swimming pool, it resembled nothing so much as the game lodge we had just spent three days in, way out in the bush. The crowd was of a similar ethnic mix to those in Cape Town but much younger, on average -- as in really young, with many 18-25-year-olds. Comparatively few were dancing to what I thought was excellent funky house, reminiscent of Lydia Prim in her prime. They seemed more interested in flirting and gossiping. But the friend we were with knew people who knew people; shots were proposed, the barman produced a tequila bottle (of all things to find in that part of the world), and we had a fine old time, all the better for being unexpected.

Robben Island

Robben Island was the notorious apartheid-era political prison where Nelson Mandela spent 20 of his 27 years in jail. Because it's off the coast of Cape Town, within sight of the city but cut off from it by cold ocean currents, the obvious comparison is to Alcatraz. But Robben Island (seen here low on the horizon) is much larger, much flatter, and much further away from the mainland:


Since the end of apartheid it has been a museum, and it is quite cleverly done. First they take you to see this building:


But these structures aren't jail cells; they're kennels for the guard dogs. The actual cells, which they show you later, were not as nice.

Mandela's cell is of course part of the tour:


But perhaps the best part of the tour is the tourguide. All the tours are given by former political prisoners, thereby ensuring that the prisoners have jobs and the tourists learn more about life on the island. This fellow, who gave our tour, said he served seven years for helping smuggle weapons from either Zimbabwe or Mozambique (he was a bit vague about this, and may not have actually known precisely where the weapons were coming from) to the ANC's military wing:


The way he tells it -- and this is backed up by other sources -- while the prison was a harsh, debilitating place, it also forged close bonds among the prisoners and helped them improve their lives, as the ANC prisoners conducted literacy classes for those who needed to learn how to read and so forth.

Mandela, of course, came out of the experience as something close to a saint, referred to by all the South Africans we met, with deep affection, as "the Old Man."

He was in another prison by the time the last white president, F.W. De Klerk, decided to release him and negotiate an end to apartheid. That prison, in the wine country near Stellenbosch, is still a prison, but its gate has also become a monument and pilgrimage site.

The Molten Pot

If there's a place on Earth more multicultural than Cape Town, I have yet to see it.

It's not just white and black, or English and Dutch. In Cape Town, more than in most of South Africa, there are also large Indian, Malay and "coloured" (mixed-race) communities. The people are a fascinating blend of inheritances, and so is the architecture.

There's "Cape Dutch," influenced by the style of Amsterdam but distinctly different:


The English, when they took over in 1806, contributed both stolid neoclassical official buildings and lighter tropical colonial houses:


The Malay neighborhood of Cape Town is marked by mosques as well as a reliance on bright solid colors:



There is also a sizable Jewish community with a large synagogue, which unfortunately I couldn't photograph because it's across the street from a park and the trees prevented getting a good view.

And, as I showed in a previous post, late-20th-century America contributed its architectural ideas as well, in the form of skyscrapers and the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, a sort of South Street Seaport on steroids. (Incidentally, that's Alfred, not Albert; it's not named for Queen Victoria's husband but rather one of her younger sons, whose only importance to history was that he was the only royal of the era actually to visit South Africa.)

The food is similarly multicultural, and marked by the fact that Cape Town was the resupply point for ships headed to Europe from the Spice Islands; apparently casks of spices fell off the backs of the ships while they were in port here with some regularity, because even the Dutch-style stews and cakes are heavily scented with cinnamon, cloves and other spices.

Most "South African" menus include several curries and Indian dishes (especially samosas) along with European-style treatment of game animals like springbok, warthog and wildebeest (they taste, respectively, like venison, pork and buffalo, which oddly enough is also what the live animals look like).

And of course there is the wine, cultivated by French immigrants since the late 1600s, and easily up to the mother country's standards. The best South African wines we had were generally either red Bordeaux blends or Chenin Blancs or Sauvignon Blancs. Names to look for include Grangehurst, Buitenverwachting, Kanonkop, Tokara and Meerlust.