Howzit Cape Town
24 May 2010.
Here are some random facts:
1. On the flight to Joburg Steve did a ridiculous stretching routine in the aisle.
2. South African Customs don't care if you import massive quantities of malaria medication or emergency painkillers.
3. Apparently it is possible to put sidewall punctures in 2 tires, thereby writing them off, in the time it takes to load a 4WD into a shipping container.
4. Oversize 4WD tires are very expensive in South Africa.
MR
Howzit again Cape Town
27 May 2010.
Howzit again from the Western Cape.
After close to a week in Cape Town we feel both settled here and itching to go. Our schedule to date has been errand-heavy and tourist-light. We've covered almost 300km of trips around Cape Town sourcing final bits of gear for the vehicle and being led astray by false promises and miscommunication.
Camping World takes the gold medal for being led astray. A 45 min journey through some of Cape Town’s less desirable areas amounted to a mistake by an elderly and presumably senile man telling us the roof top tent he had ready for us in fact did not exist.
A successful trip to LA Sport (offroaders heaven) led to both the successful mounting of our awning on the cruiser as well as the glorious/shameful feat (in Mark’s/Steve’s respective opinions) of leaving that testosterone melting-pot cranking Justin Bieber’s classic “Baby” from our beast of a vehicle.
Steve may well have been shamed on that occasion, but he should recall that it was he who was calling Dave, the barman, “Pookie” the night before. He is a popular man at the hostel's rooftop bar.
On matters of a grander scale, we are pleased to report that KFC in South Africa is of an above par standard. Both the chicken and potato & gravy are of a darker hue, but bear a taste that is both recognisable and instantly satisfying. If you work for KFC and would like to sponsor us, kindly click here.
MR
24 May 2010.
Here are some random facts:
1. On the flight to Joburg Steve did a ridiculous stretching routine in the aisle.
2. South African Customs don't care if you import massive quantities of malaria medication or emergency painkillers.
3. Apparently it is possible to put sidewall punctures in 2 tires, thereby writing them off, in the time it takes to load a 4WD into a shipping container.
4. Oversize 4WD tires are very expensive in South Africa.
MR
Howzit again Cape Town
27 May 2010.
Howzit again from the Western Cape.
After close to a week in Cape Town we feel both settled here and itching to go. Our schedule to date has been errand-heavy and tourist-light. We've covered almost 300km of trips around Cape Town sourcing final bits of gear for the vehicle and being led astray by false promises and miscommunication.
Camping World takes the gold medal for being led astray. A 45 min journey through some of Cape Town’s less desirable areas amounted to a mistake by an elderly and presumably senile man telling us the roof top tent he had ready for us in fact did not exist.
A successful trip to LA Sport (offroaders heaven) led to both the successful mounting of our awning on the cruiser as well as the glorious/shameful feat (in Mark’s/Steve’s respective opinions) of leaving that testosterone melting-pot cranking Justin Bieber’s classic “Baby” from our beast of a vehicle.
Steve may well have been shamed on that occasion, but he should recall that it was he who was calling Dave, the barman, “Pookie” the night before. He is a popular man at the hostel's rooftop bar.
On matters of a grander scale, we are pleased to report that KFC in South Africa is of an above par standard. Both the chicken and potato & gravy are of a darker hue, but bear a taste that is both recognisable and instantly satisfying. If you work for KFC and would like to sponsor us, kindly click here.
MR
SOUTH AFRICA DIARIES
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On the Road
5 June 2010.
Howzit. We are in South Africa now now, at an unpronounceable place that begins with V.
South Africa has been a mixed bag of ups, downs, and admin admin admin, but we are on our way. We have driven through countryside reminiscent of France, Spain, and Australia, explored Cape Town, passed Gay, Kamp and Whore Streets, changed 2 tires and 1 fuse, been pulled over by the cops, eaten our body weight in biltong and undescribed meat-product and ridden out a lightning storm at the southernmost tip of Africa while sleeping in a rooftop tent atop our enormous steel lightning conductor.
Firstly, a little about South African lingo.
Howzit. A universal greeting, this appears to be an abbreviation of the question “How is it with you?” It turns out that howzit is not a question, but a simple greeting statement. Thus “I’m fine thank you, and howzit with you?” is not an appropriate response, and will generally be greeted with awkward silence.
Ciao. Saffas (as they are commonly known to Aussies) have inexplicably adopted this Spanish farewell as their own.
Ciaozit. It seemed to us that if howzit is a greeting, the most appropriate farewell would actually be “ciaozit”. To date this has been a universal failure, and the cause of more awkward silence.
Now does not mean immediately. Not in South Africa. This otherwise well-defined word has spawned a range of combinations, each with its own vague meaning. “Now” seems to mean some time soonish. “Just now” seems to be sometime in the next hour or so. “Now now” seems to be very soon - i.e. just as soon as I’ve drained my Jamiesons and Coke and finished my kudu biltong and maybe got in a fight. The only common theme is that “now” is future tense and you can damn well wait.
TIA is short for “This is Africa”, and is used as a cheerful gloss on the fact that sometimes on this continent, shit happens. It does not actually seem to be used by Africans; we got it from Blood Diamond.
We got here on Sunday 23 May keen to hit the ground running. The ship had arrived early and Toy had cleared South African customs before we even left Australian soil. But like all the other bits and pieces that have been done over the months to get us and the car ready, the short ‘to-do’ list that we brought with us grew faster than we could tick things off, and we spent a good 5 days of pure admin; driving, calling, emailing and waiting in Cape Town. On the upside, we are now fully equipped and on the road.
We hauled ourselves up and along the top of Table Mountain, which was both tiring and beautiful. We toured Robben Island and saw the tiny cell where Mandela slept (mostly on the floor - beds only arrived in the last few years) for well over a decade. The penguins at Boulders Beach were cute (and everywhere), and the beachside town of Camps Bay must go down as one of the most stunningly beautiful places to live that I have ever seen.
You don’t have to travel far to see the flipside. The slums on the Cape Flats seem to go on forever, there are people trying to eke out a living by selling bits and pieces at every corner, and there are beggars and signs of poverty everywhere. Cape Town seemed to us to be a weird mix of 2 parallel existences. On the one hand there is a white European-style culture of cafes and beautiful restaurants and shops and big houses, and entwined in the same city space (in a way I personally haven’t seen before) is a separate but overlapping community of poor people going about their lives. It’s bizarre but, here, accepted. Not to say that these divides don’t occur in our own country or most other countries around the world; but here the differences are so extreme and are overlaid one against the other in the same small space.
Several days ago we were camped out at Cape Agulhas, the absolute southern tip of Africa, with nothing between us and the Antarctic but water and icebergs. Walking round the town, something was wrong, but neither of us could put our finger on it. Eventually it clicked - there was no wire, electric fences or high walls in this town - sights which we had already grown accustomed to.
Our own brush with the law came on day 4 or 5 or so when I came back from the bathroom to discover that we were going somewhere now with some locals down from Stellenbosch. So 8 of us piled into a teensy little car and drove up into the Gardens area before a siren wails and the driver is answering to the police. “Tell me what is wrong with this picture?” is the first question. Despite the quiet suggestions from the back seat that a tail light was out our driver Sasha very cooly deals with the situation, deposits us on the corner, drops half the group off and comes back just now for the second load, fine-free. Only later do we discover that she is a cop herself but, we are told, the key is humility humility humility, and mentioning that particular fact was the last tactic to try before fine-time.
We have met lots of other great people. Trevor, who took us 4WDing in the beautiful white dunes of Table View just north of Cape Town, and who was a font of information and a non-stop helpful soul. Jarek, our Polish friend who made his way down from Cairo by public transport and hitching. Our friends at and from Penthouse on Long and Stellenbosch. Billie the self-described ‘old-hand South African cowboy’ at Ou Skip caravan park, who wouldn’t have needed much convincing to get in the back and come with us. And Francois at the Red Farmstall just out of Stellenbosch, who has previously overlanded down from Kenya, contributed to a Malawian hostel start-up, and had just started a restaurant. Everyone we meet wants to jump on board and live the dream too. Howzit to all!
Finally, happy birthday Davo and, if I don’t get to internet again any time soon, my bro Richard!
SC
5 June 2010.
Howzit. We are in South Africa now now, at an unpronounceable place that begins with V.
South Africa has been a mixed bag of ups, downs, and admin admin admin, but we are on our way. We have driven through countryside reminiscent of France, Spain, and Australia, explored Cape Town, passed Gay, Kamp and Whore Streets, changed 2 tires and 1 fuse, been pulled over by the cops, eaten our body weight in biltong and undescribed meat-product and ridden out a lightning storm at the southernmost tip of Africa while sleeping in a rooftop tent atop our enormous steel lightning conductor.
Firstly, a little about South African lingo.
Howzit. A universal greeting, this appears to be an abbreviation of the question “How is it with you?” It turns out that howzit is not a question, but a simple greeting statement. Thus “I’m fine thank you, and howzit with you?” is not an appropriate response, and will generally be greeted with awkward silence.
Ciao. Saffas (as they are commonly known to Aussies) have inexplicably adopted this Spanish farewell as their own.
Ciaozit. It seemed to us that if howzit is a greeting, the most appropriate farewell would actually be “ciaozit”. To date this has been a universal failure, and the cause of more awkward silence.
Now does not mean immediately. Not in South Africa. This otherwise well-defined word has spawned a range of combinations, each with its own vague meaning. “Now” seems to mean some time soonish. “Just now” seems to be sometime in the next hour or so. “Now now” seems to be very soon - i.e. just as soon as I’ve drained my Jamiesons and Coke and finished my kudu biltong and maybe got in a fight. The only common theme is that “now” is future tense and you can damn well wait.
TIA is short for “This is Africa”, and is used as a cheerful gloss on the fact that sometimes on this continent, shit happens. It does not actually seem to be used by Africans; we got it from Blood Diamond.
We got here on Sunday 23 May keen to hit the ground running. The ship had arrived early and Toy had cleared South African customs before we even left Australian soil. But like all the other bits and pieces that have been done over the months to get us and the car ready, the short ‘to-do’ list that we brought with us grew faster than we could tick things off, and we spent a good 5 days of pure admin; driving, calling, emailing and waiting in Cape Town. On the upside, we are now fully equipped and on the road.
We hauled ourselves up and along the top of Table Mountain, which was both tiring and beautiful. We toured Robben Island and saw the tiny cell where Mandela slept (mostly on the floor - beds only arrived in the last few years) for well over a decade. The penguins at Boulders Beach were cute (and everywhere), and the beachside town of Camps Bay must go down as one of the most stunningly beautiful places to live that I have ever seen.
You don’t have to travel far to see the flipside. The slums on the Cape Flats seem to go on forever, there are people trying to eke out a living by selling bits and pieces at every corner, and there are beggars and signs of poverty everywhere. Cape Town seemed to us to be a weird mix of 2 parallel existences. On the one hand there is a white European-style culture of cafes and beautiful restaurants and shops and big houses, and entwined in the same city space (in a way I personally haven’t seen before) is a separate but overlapping community of poor people going about their lives. It’s bizarre but, here, accepted. Not to say that these divides don’t occur in our own country or most other countries around the world; but here the differences are so extreme and are overlaid one against the other in the same small space.
Several days ago we were camped out at Cape Agulhas, the absolute southern tip of Africa, with nothing between us and the Antarctic but water and icebergs. Walking round the town, something was wrong, but neither of us could put our finger on it. Eventually it clicked - there was no wire, electric fences or high walls in this town - sights which we had already grown accustomed to.
Our own brush with the law came on day 4 or 5 or so when I came back from the bathroom to discover that we were going somewhere now with some locals down from Stellenbosch. So 8 of us piled into a teensy little car and drove up into the Gardens area before a siren wails and the driver is answering to the police. “Tell me what is wrong with this picture?” is the first question. Despite the quiet suggestions from the back seat that a tail light was out our driver Sasha very cooly deals with the situation, deposits us on the corner, drops half the group off and comes back just now for the second load, fine-free. Only later do we discover that she is a cop herself but, we are told, the key is humility humility humility, and mentioning that particular fact was the last tactic to try before fine-time.
We have met lots of other great people. Trevor, who took us 4WDing in the beautiful white dunes of Table View just north of Cape Town, and who was a font of information and a non-stop helpful soul. Jarek, our Polish friend who made his way down from Cairo by public transport and hitching. Our friends at and from Penthouse on Long and Stellenbosch. Billie the self-described ‘old-hand South African cowboy’ at Ou Skip caravan park, who wouldn’t have needed much convincing to get in the back and come with us. And Francois at the Red Farmstall just out of Stellenbosch, who has previously overlanded down from Kenya, contributed to a Malawian hostel start-up, and had just started a restaurant. Everyone we meet wants to jump on board and live the dream too. Howzit to all!
Finally, happy birthday Davo and, if I don’t get to internet again any time soon, my bro Richard!
SC
Richtersveld National Park
7 June 2010.
We are on Mars. Or at least we were for most of the day. Now now we are camped next to the rapids on the Orange River border between South Africa and Namibia, watching the light fade on the deep ruddy mountains of Namibia across the river.
Richtersveld NP is a remote park in the far northwest of South Africa. It is little visited by South Africans and even less so by tourists. But we had heard good things about it, and those good things were all true.
We took a bit of a punt on the route up here. Stopped at the ill-named mining-services town of Springbok yesterday for lunch (narrowly avoiding another KFC visit; thankfully we didn’t see the sign til we were on the way out of town), our friendly and very Afrikaans restauranteur/bookshopist pulled out a map and recommended a more spectacular route than the ‘coast road’, tackling some gnarly gravel, dirt and riverbed further inland. We went for it, and were glad we did, crawling over rocky passes and through sandy riverbed in low gear, hoofing it along good gravel and snaking all over the road with the anchors out trying to pull up before that awful THUMP of a ditch coming up just now. We only wished we’d got there earlier in the day so we didn’t have to keep the pace up.
We entered the park proper this morning, and found beautiful desolation. The road leading into the park winds through wide valleys and squeezes into narrow canyons, all stained red and brown and punctuated with a few bold cacti. It is rocky, dusty, Martian landscape, punctuated by bone dry creekbeds that irrigate this land with more dust. Some of the mountains bear ridges of white rock, like quartz mohawks. And to get there you have to tackle a rough 4WD trail over a dehydrated pass that saw us into low range 4WD for the first time on the trip.
We drove a good portion of the park’s 4WD trails today, pausing only to scramble up hills with shale clattering away underfoot, take photos, and cook some 2 minute noodles on the gas cooker on the tail-gate. I got lucky late this afternoon - scoring the hardest but best driving stint of the day - a steep climb scrambling up and down ledges and a rough track next to (sometimes ominously close to) a deep ravine.
And now we are camped at De Hoop Campsite, which Mark has already named as one of the top five campsites of the trip. The Orange River is the only water we have seen today (other than a ‘puddle’ which turned out to be a foot or so deep that I may have hit just a little bit too quick, judging by the way the lid of the fridge was flung clean off) and around it clusters the only green of the day, and it feels like Eden on Mars. The river is flowing over the rapids, we are sitting next to it drinking Brandy and Coke and waiting for the braai to heat up. Life is good.
Next stop Namibia!
SC
7 June 2010.
We are on Mars. Or at least we were for most of the day. Now now we are camped next to the rapids on the Orange River border between South Africa and Namibia, watching the light fade on the deep ruddy mountains of Namibia across the river.
Richtersveld NP is a remote park in the far northwest of South Africa. It is little visited by South Africans and even less so by tourists. But we had heard good things about it, and those good things were all true.
We took a bit of a punt on the route up here. Stopped at the ill-named mining-services town of Springbok yesterday for lunch (narrowly avoiding another KFC visit; thankfully we didn’t see the sign til we were on the way out of town), our friendly and very Afrikaans restauranteur/bookshopist pulled out a map and recommended a more spectacular route than the ‘coast road’, tackling some gnarly gravel, dirt and riverbed further inland. We went for it, and were glad we did, crawling over rocky passes and through sandy riverbed in low gear, hoofing it along good gravel and snaking all over the road with the anchors out trying to pull up before that awful THUMP of a ditch coming up just now. We only wished we’d got there earlier in the day so we didn’t have to keep the pace up.
We entered the park proper this morning, and found beautiful desolation. The road leading into the park winds through wide valleys and squeezes into narrow canyons, all stained red and brown and punctuated with a few bold cacti. It is rocky, dusty, Martian landscape, punctuated by bone dry creekbeds that irrigate this land with more dust. Some of the mountains bear ridges of white rock, like quartz mohawks. And to get there you have to tackle a rough 4WD trail over a dehydrated pass that saw us into low range 4WD for the first time on the trip.
We drove a good portion of the park’s 4WD trails today, pausing only to scramble up hills with shale clattering away underfoot, take photos, and cook some 2 minute noodles on the gas cooker on the tail-gate. I got lucky late this afternoon - scoring the hardest but best driving stint of the day - a steep climb scrambling up and down ledges and a rough track next to (sometimes ominously close to) a deep ravine.
And now we are camped at De Hoop Campsite, which Mark has already named as one of the top five campsites of the trip. The Orange River is the only water we have seen today (other than a ‘puddle’ which turned out to be a foot or so deep that I may have hit just a little bit too quick, judging by the way the lid of the fridge was flung clean off) and around it clusters the only green of the day, and it feels like Eden on Mars. The river is flowing over the rapids, we are sitting next to it drinking Brandy and Coke and waiting for the braai to heat up. Life is good.
Next stop Namibia!
SC
