In our original trip planning, we had decided that we both really wanted to see Africa, and, after talking further, South Africa seemed to be a gentle introduction. We had heard that it was a beautiful country with tons to do and was more developed than the rest of the continent. The only thing we were somewhat hesitant about was the notoriously high crime rates. (The capital, Johannesburg, has the enviable designations of the Murder Capital of the World and the Rape Capital of the World and carjackings are far from uncommon.)
We decided to take the Baz Bus, a bus intended for backpackers that picks you up at your hostel in one city and drops you off at a hostel in the next city so that you don’t have to lug your bags around. We made 12 stops along our path from Cape Town on the southwestern coast to Johannesburg in the northeast. You can divide our route into three diverse regions: highly developed and very westernized Cape Town and the Garden Route, rural village life along the Wild Coast, and real African big city life in Durban and Johannesburg. All three had unique characteristics and showed us the vagaries of South African life.
Cape Town is a strikingly pretty city but quickly reminded us that we were in the Southern Hemisphere where it is winter in June! The eternal summer of our travels so far finally ended, but this may have been a blessing in disguise since there is a huge option overload here – so much to do! Unfortunately, due to the weather, we couldn’t do many of the popular tourist things like climbing Table Mountain or visiting Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was held but instead explored the indoor sights that we could while trying to wait out the rain. (For more on Cape Town please see our blog entry – First Impressions of Cape Town). Yet after enduring four days of cold rain in Cape Town, we cut our losses and headed out on what is popularly called the Garden Route, an absolutely gorgeous, well developed, coastal and consequently expensive part of South Africa. It felt much like the US (at one point Kelli even questioned Rutvik why we were bothering to live apart from friends and family because we could be doing the same things back at home).
One of the highlights of the Garden Route for us was the wine towns of Stellenbosch, Franschoek and Paarl. Located barely an hour out of Cape Town, there are 300+ wineries in the area and we did a day long tour that included tastings at 4 different wineries. We are no wine connoisseurs but we would like to claim that we enjoy California wines more (future hometown pride!) and South Africa is known more for red wines anyway, which we can’t seem to enjoy as much. The best part of the wine tour, however, was the absolutely delectable cheese bar at the Fairview winery, where we made at least 2 full rounds of the 10 or so different cheeses on offer. Yum!!
South Africa is also adrenaline junkie central and we signed up for cage diving with the great white sharks in a cute little seaside town called Hermanus. The diving is exactly as it sounds – you boat out to an area where great whites are known to frequent and the diving company baits the sharks towards the boat. A cage is then lowered into the water alongside the boat and about 5 of us could be in there at any one time. As soon as the guide spots a shark, he tells everyone in the cage to hold their breath and duck to see the great beast go right past them! If that isn’t enough, sharks feel through their teeth (like we do with our hands) and a few times they came straight at the cage with their jaws wide open about 3 inches from our hands. It was quite a rush and it was also really fascinating to watch Jaws and his siblings in real life. Pretty ridiculous!
To add to this, Rutvik decided to use the birthday present from Kelli’s mom to jump 216m off a bridge into a gorge also called Bloukrans bungy – the highest in the world. Rutvik has never witnessed such breathtaking scenery in his life – two mountains almost fitting like puzzle pieces with a gorge snaking through the bottom and the waves of the Indian Ocean crashing against the mountains in the distance. On the same day as the jump, the hostel offered a free trekking trip to visit a waterfall and we signed up, thinking it would be a relaxing afternoon hike. Turns out, the hostel owner took us “on a mission” to a secluded waterfall he had learned about from the forest rangers. There was no trail and we climbed through intense African bush (in Kelli’s mind, snake haven!), over thick underbrush and burnt trees, and down a steep ravine until we hit the bottom where we were rewarded with two spectacular waterfalls. There’s something different about hiking when you know that over half of the world’s things that can kill you live on this continent! Suffice to say we were happier once we were safely back in our hostel!
After the Garden Route, we entered the homeland of Transkei, which was an independent country until Mandela decided to merge it into South Africa. The coast here, known as the Wild Coast, is in sharp contrast to the Garden Route. There are few paved roads from the main highways and most of the backpacker hostels are located in coastal fishing villages. They don’t have fast food chains or big supermarkets on every corner.
Chintsa and Coffee Bay, our first two stops on this leg, had two of the best hostels in all of South Africa, located inches away from almost perfect untouched beaches yet hundreds of miles from any upmarket hotels! Unfortunately, it was too cold to lay out and get a tan (ok that doesn’t apply to Rutvik anyway), but we took the opportunity to see the real rural Africa. We visited local villages on tours organized by entrepreneurial villagers and saw daily village life – villagers out in the fields carrying water, gathering firewood, and wearing traditional clothing - and learned a lot about Xhosa culture (the local tribe in the region). We visited the strange village herbalist who had two snakes, a rat, and a piece of bacon (all dead) hanging from his roof and also sampled the dirt cheap sorghum beer packaged in milk cartons at the local shebeen (illegal pub). Ok that tasted like a milkshake gone bad - disgusting! It seemed like men have it pretty easy and drink and hang out all day while the women are responsible for cooking, cleaning, fetching water and firewood, and even constructing the house. Rutvik could get used to that!
Our last stop on this leg was the eco-friendly Bulungula Backpackers, which is 40% owned by the local Xhosa villagers. We needed a 4X4 shuttle to pick us up and take us over really bumpy and what at times seemed unpassable terrain to get to a really remote area on the coast. Bulungula strives to leave a carbon neutral footprint and runs on solar and wind energy. There is no electricity and we used only candlelight at night. Our accommodation was a rondavel (a hut) just like the villagers with mud brick walls and cow dung flooring. The bathrooms had compost toilets and rocket showers – you pour paraffin wax into the base of the shower and set it on fire to heat the water! A very unique experience and a great idea but we did miss our TV and Edison invented light bulbs dearly, especially when we were bored by 6PM!
We also spent a few days in Durban, the third biggest city in South Africa and the second largest Indian population outside of India. It gave us more of a taste of how your average middle-class African probably lives. We saw people going to office jobs, taking minibuses around the city, out shopping, etc. They have massive Western shopping malls and tourist sights alongside townships (slums). We went to a Sea World like place called UShaka Marine World one day, which was cool but touristy. Much more interesting was a tour we took of a local township with a guy that grew up there. It was similar in a way to the tour we took of Dharavi (Slumdog Millionaire slum) in India but the township was much more sprawling (there was space between the shacks), somewhat cleaner (especially because there were proper toilets in places), and less safe. Also, the South African government seems to provide much more assistance (i.e. toilets, houses, storefronts, library, etc.) to the residents here than the Indian government does.
Since there was plenty to do elsewhere and even the locals seemed to be continually warning us about Johannesburg (very out of the ordinary in our minds) and it was FREEZING cold, we decided to only spend a quick night there before our flight out to Tanzania. It was a shame since it has the highly acclaimed Apartheid Museum, the largest township called Soweto, and the Cradle of Humankind, a place that supposedly has all sorts of fossils of early humans!
Unfortunately, along with the beauty of the whole country and the astounding number of things there are to see and do here, another thing that really stands out in our minds is how vulnerable we felt here compared to any other country either of us had ever been to. Violent crime is prevalent and seems to be regarded somewhat as a fact of life. In Cape Town, we had a group of teenage guys come up to us, physically pat our pockets, and ask “Ya got anything in there for me??” We also woke up one morning at 5am to a screaming match between the hostel owner and two Dutch guys because they had brought a prostitute back to their room and she was demanding more money. In Stellenbosch, Kelli’s crappy old running shoes got stolen out of our room (with 6 of us sleeping there) by a local thug in the middle of the night! The very next night, a guy came to check into the hostel and (stupidly) left his car unlocked. Within the 5 minutes it took him to check in, his backpack was gone. In Durban, we were waiting for a bus when suddenly about a hundred people burst down the street chasing a guy. We weren’t sure what was happening, but there were women dancing on the street and people chanting, so we actually thought maybe it was a movie star. Turns out that a guy had tried to steal a woman’s handbag and this massive mob was beating the crap out of him. The worst of the lot turned out to be the “security” that came and dragged him across the street to a back alley still kicking him. There is so much major crime here that the petty robberies are left to street justice! It was truly a stunning sight to watch, so far from the realm of what we consider normal and proper. When you really start to think about it though, it’s very hard to blame these people since they wouldn’t get proper justice in their courts. In Johannesburg, during our short ride into the city, we noticed that absolutely every house or business had armed response security and we saw cop cars with SIX cops inside (when you need backup – shit!). We also heard that people have panic buttons in their bathrooms and above their beds, there are carjacking warning signs all over the city, and people often don’t stop for red lights at night for fear of getting carjacked! What a different life. It’s okay for a short time as a tourist, but we could never live here. It also begs the question in our minds of why the crime is so high here when countries like India and Laos have similar (and probably worse) poverty and we would feel entirely safe walking down the street after dark in either place.
Also, life in South Africa is pretty expensive, especially in contrast to our last four months in India. Believe it or not, we could have spent another four months in India for the same cost as staying one month here! And the quality of life is pretty different too. Instead of having a private room in India with our own bathroom and color TV, we stayed in hostel rooms with shared bathrooms throughout South Africa. We cooked for ourselves quite a bit as opposed to ordering completely freely off the menus in India. Internet and phone were way more expensive and surprisingly much slower in South Africa, so we didn’t talk to our families as much along the way. Also, new books, which you can find on the street in India for a few dollars, seemed to be nearly double the US stated price in South Africa! (We wondered about whether this correlates with how educated their population is?!)
The upside to sharing bathrooms and living space with people and cooking our own meals in the hostel is that we met so many people, like a guy traveling through over 30 African countries, the son of the Iraqi Minister of Communications, and a woman that had been traveling for 14 years and counting!. I guess this is part of the argument for “backpacking” as opposed to staying in the usual hotels. There were a surprising number of gap year kids and “voluntourists” (our opinion is still out on how we feel about paying to volunteer but then again how else do you get to spend a month playing with lions??) We were really lucky to meet a lot of awesome people along the way and trade stories.
The food in South Africa was another big positive. It was amazingly easy to find veg options. Food in major cities and along Garden Route was very much like home – all sorts of cafes, sandwiches, and ethnic foods. The villages and the Wild Coast area have a lot of simple foods like pap (maize meal) and basic curries. Durban, due to the large Indian population, has terrific food, including a local specialty called “bunny chow” – a carved out loaf of bread filled with curry. There are very specific rules about how to eat it – especially no forks allowed! Johannesburg, well, we just ordered a pizza! (Speaking of which, we really think delivery guys there should get hazard pay!)
Even after a month, there’s still a ton that we missed and we’re planning to go back someday, especially in warmer weather! Now it’s on to Tanzania and Kenya for about three weeks before wrapping up our big adventure and setting out on a new adventure – life in California!
We decided to take the Baz Bus, a bus intended for backpackers that picks you up at your hostel in one city and drops you off at a hostel in the next city so that you don’t have to lug your bags around. We made 12 stops along our path from Cape Town on the southwestern coast to Johannesburg in the northeast. You can divide our route into three diverse regions: highly developed and very westernized Cape Town and the Garden Route, rural village life along the Wild Coast, and real African big city life in Durban and Johannesburg. All three had unique characteristics and showed us the vagaries of South African life.
Cape Town is a strikingly pretty city but quickly reminded us that we were in the Southern Hemisphere where it is winter in June! The eternal summer of our travels so far finally ended, but this may have been a blessing in disguise since there is a huge option overload here – so much to do! Unfortunately, due to the weather, we couldn’t do many of the popular tourist things like climbing Table Mountain or visiting Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was held but instead explored the indoor sights that we could while trying to wait out the rain. (For more on Cape Town please see our blog entry – First Impressions of Cape Town). Yet after enduring four days of cold rain in Cape Town, we cut our losses and headed out on what is popularly called the Garden Route, an absolutely gorgeous, well developed, coastal and consequently expensive part of South Africa. It felt much like the US (at one point Kelli even questioned Rutvik why we were bothering to live apart from friends and family because we could be doing the same things back at home).
One of the highlights of the Garden Route for us was the wine towns of Stellenbosch, Franschoek and Paarl. Located barely an hour out of Cape Town, there are 300+ wineries in the area and we did a day long tour that included tastings at 4 different wineries. We are no wine connoisseurs but we would like to claim that we enjoy California wines more (future hometown pride!) and South Africa is known more for red wines anyway, which we can’t seem to enjoy as much. The best part of the wine tour, however, was the absolutely delectable cheese bar at the Fairview winery, where we made at least 2 full rounds of the 10 or so different cheeses on offer. Yum!!
South Africa is also adrenaline junkie central and we signed up for cage diving with the great white sharks in a cute little seaside town called Hermanus. The diving is exactly as it sounds – you boat out to an area where great whites are known to frequent and the diving company baits the sharks towards the boat. A cage is then lowered into the water alongside the boat and about 5 of us could be in there at any one time. As soon as the guide spots a shark, he tells everyone in the cage to hold their breath and duck to see the great beast go right past them! If that isn’t enough, sharks feel through their teeth (like we do with our hands) and a few times they came straight at the cage with their jaws wide open about 3 inches from our hands. It was quite a rush and it was also really fascinating to watch Jaws and his siblings in real life. Pretty ridiculous!
To add to this, Rutvik decided to use the birthday present from Kelli’s mom to jump 216m off a bridge into a gorge also called Bloukrans bungy – the highest in the world. Rutvik has never witnessed such breathtaking scenery in his life – two mountains almost fitting like puzzle pieces with a gorge snaking through the bottom and the waves of the Indian Ocean crashing against the mountains in the distance. On the same day as the jump, the hostel offered a free trekking trip to visit a waterfall and we signed up, thinking it would be a relaxing afternoon hike. Turns out, the hostel owner took us “on a mission” to a secluded waterfall he had learned about from the forest rangers. There was no trail and we climbed through intense African bush (in Kelli’s mind, snake haven!), over thick underbrush and burnt trees, and down a steep ravine until we hit the bottom where we were rewarded with two spectacular waterfalls. There’s something different about hiking when you know that over half of the world’s things that can kill you live on this continent! Suffice to say we were happier once we were safely back in our hostel!
After the Garden Route, we entered the homeland of Transkei, which was an independent country until Mandela decided to merge it into South Africa. The coast here, known as the Wild Coast, is in sharp contrast to the Garden Route. There are few paved roads from the main highways and most of the backpacker hostels are located in coastal fishing villages. They don’t have fast food chains or big supermarkets on every corner.
Chintsa and Coffee Bay, our first two stops on this leg, had two of the best hostels in all of South Africa, located inches away from almost perfect untouched beaches yet hundreds of miles from any upmarket hotels! Unfortunately, it was too cold to lay out and get a tan (ok that doesn’t apply to Rutvik anyway), but we took the opportunity to see the real rural Africa. We visited local villages on tours organized by entrepreneurial villagers and saw daily village life – villagers out in the fields carrying water, gathering firewood, and wearing traditional clothing - and learned a lot about Xhosa culture (the local tribe in the region). We visited the strange village herbalist who had two snakes, a rat, and a piece of bacon (all dead) hanging from his roof and also sampled the dirt cheap sorghum beer packaged in milk cartons at the local shebeen (illegal pub). Ok that tasted like a milkshake gone bad - disgusting! It seemed like men have it pretty easy and drink and hang out all day while the women are responsible for cooking, cleaning, fetching water and firewood, and even constructing the house. Rutvik could get used to that!
Our last stop on this leg was the eco-friendly Bulungula Backpackers, which is 40% owned by the local Xhosa villagers. We needed a 4X4 shuttle to pick us up and take us over really bumpy and what at times seemed unpassable terrain to get to a really remote area on the coast. Bulungula strives to leave a carbon neutral footprint and runs on solar and wind energy. There is no electricity and we used only candlelight at night. Our accommodation was a rondavel (a hut) just like the villagers with mud brick walls and cow dung flooring. The bathrooms had compost toilets and rocket showers – you pour paraffin wax into the base of the shower and set it on fire to heat the water! A very unique experience and a great idea but we did miss our TV and Edison invented light bulbs dearly, especially when we were bored by 6PM!
We also spent a few days in Durban, the third biggest city in South Africa and the second largest Indian population outside of India. It gave us more of a taste of how your average middle-class African probably lives. We saw people going to office jobs, taking minibuses around the city, out shopping, etc. They have massive Western shopping malls and tourist sights alongside townships (slums). We went to a Sea World like place called UShaka Marine World one day, which was cool but touristy. Much more interesting was a tour we took of a local township with a guy that grew up there. It was similar in a way to the tour we took of Dharavi (Slumdog Millionaire slum) in India but the township was much more sprawling (there was space between the shacks), somewhat cleaner (especially because there were proper toilets in places), and less safe. Also, the South African government seems to provide much more assistance (i.e. toilets, houses, storefronts, library, etc.) to the residents here than the Indian government does.
Since there was plenty to do elsewhere and even the locals seemed to be continually warning us about Johannesburg (very out of the ordinary in our minds) and it was FREEZING cold, we decided to only spend a quick night there before our flight out to Tanzania. It was a shame since it has the highly acclaimed Apartheid Museum, the largest township called Soweto, and the Cradle of Humankind, a place that supposedly has all sorts of fossils of early humans!
Unfortunately, along with the beauty of the whole country and the astounding number of things there are to see and do here, another thing that really stands out in our minds is how vulnerable we felt here compared to any other country either of us had ever been to. Violent crime is prevalent and seems to be regarded somewhat as a fact of life. In Cape Town, we had a group of teenage guys come up to us, physically pat our pockets, and ask “Ya got anything in there for me??” We also woke up one morning at 5am to a screaming match between the hostel owner and two Dutch guys because they had brought a prostitute back to their room and she was demanding more money. In Stellenbosch, Kelli’s crappy old running shoes got stolen out of our room (with 6 of us sleeping there) by a local thug in the middle of the night! The very next night, a guy came to check into the hostel and (stupidly) left his car unlocked. Within the 5 minutes it took him to check in, his backpack was gone. In Durban, we were waiting for a bus when suddenly about a hundred people burst down the street chasing a guy. We weren’t sure what was happening, but there were women dancing on the street and people chanting, so we actually thought maybe it was a movie star. Turns out that a guy had tried to steal a woman’s handbag and this massive mob was beating the crap out of him. The worst of the lot turned out to be the “security” that came and dragged him across the street to a back alley still kicking him. There is so much major crime here that the petty robberies are left to street justice! It was truly a stunning sight to watch, so far from the realm of what we consider normal and proper. When you really start to think about it though, it’s very hard to blame these people since they wouldn’t get proper justice in their courts. In Johannesburg, during our short ride into the city, we noticed that absolutely every house or business had armed response security and we saw cop cars with SIX cops inside (when you need backup – shit!). We also heard that people have panic buttons in their bathrooms and above their beds, there are carjacking warning signs all over the city, and people often don’t stop for red lights at night for fear of getting carjacked! What a different life. It’s okay for a short time as a tourist, but we could never live here. It also begs the question in our minds of why the crime is so high here when countries like India and Laos have similar (and probably worse) poverty and we would feel entirely safe walking down the street after dark in either place.
Also, life in South Africa is pretty expensive, especially in contrast to our last four months in India. Believe it or not, we could have spent another four months in India for the same cost as staying one month here! And the quality of life is pretty different too. Instead of having a private room in India with our own bathroom and color TV, we stayed in hostel rooms with shared bathrooms throughout South Africa. We cooked for ourselves quite a bit as opposed to ordering completely freely off the menus in India. Internet and phone were way more expensive and surprisingly much slower in South Africa, so we didn’t talk to our families as much along the way. Also, new books, which you can find on the street in India for a few dollars, seemed to be nearly double the US stated price in South Africa! (We wondered about whether this correlates with how educated their population is?!)
The upside to sharing bathrooms and living space with people and cooking our own meals in the hostel is that we met so many people, like a guy traveling through over 30 African countries, the son of the Iraqi Minister of Communications, and a woman that had been traveling for 14 years and counting!. I guess this is part of the argument for “backpacking” as opposed to staying in the usual hotels. There were a surprising number of gap year kids and “voluntourists” (our opinion is still out on how we feel about paying to volunteer but then again how else do you get to spend a month playing with lions??) We were really lucky to meet a lot of awesome people along the way and trade stories.
The food in South Africa was another big positive. It was amazingly easy to find veg options. Food in major cities and along Garden Route was very much like home – all sorts of cafes, sandwiches, and ethnic foods. The villages and the Wild Coast area have a lot of simple foods like pap (maize meal) and basic curries. Durban, due to the large Indian population, has terrific food, including a local specialty called “bunny chow” – a carved out loaf of bread filled with curry. There are very specific rules about how to eat it – especially no forks allowed! Johannesburg, well, we just ordered a pizza! (Speaking of which, we really think delivery guys there should get hazard pay!)
Even after a month, there’s still a ton that we missed and we’re planning to go back someday, especially in warmer weather! Now it’s on to Tanzania and Kenya for about three weeks before wrapping up our big adventure and setting out on a new adventure – life in California!
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