Road Trip

I’m updating! Here is the first week of April break- Capetown will come soon…

After finally getting our rooms packed up and everything stored in padlocked rooms, we left Grahamstown around noon on what was probably one of the hottest days of the semester. Opening the windows as we drove down the highway only managed to blow more hot air on us. It was a relief to pass through Port Elizabeth and get closer to the coast and the cooler sea air.

We got to Jeffreys Bay in the late afternoon. Our hostel was called “Island Vibe” and set right on the beach. Made up of a bunch of low, wood buildings it was crowded with other vacationing backpackers. We had a small dorm room that we shared with three other people. We didn’t do much there, just relaxed, enjoyed the beach and celebrated our first day of vacation.



We drove off the next day, all of us a bit tired from a fun night, toward Tsikimma National Forest and Djembe backpackers. Arriving in the evening we were given most of the run of a large cabin, down the road from the main building. I was happy to sleep in the large open loft with its wood panelled walls and garreted roof. It was rainy that night but we made the short walk to the main building for a drink. We sat around the outdoor fire, still burning in the drizzle.

The next morning we were up around nine, and packed around ten. We said goodbye and drove the twenty minutes to Storms River and the world’s highest bungy jump. The bridge over the narrow gorge was certainly high and the gorge was definitely deep. We said farewell to Lindsey and Shenita as they strapped on their harnesses, promising to tell their mothers they loved them if they died, and made our way to the view point. From where we stood, looking at the platform balanced right in the middle of the arch of the bridge and under the road, everything looked tiny. The people were indiscernible, just movements in the shadow. The first person jumped, and the cord looked like a piece of string. Like the dolls tied to string that I used to launch from the backs of chairs in pretend bungy jumps. Yes I remember I used to do that. I sometimes got bored of playing dress up with my barbies.



I had brought my new camera with me, so I used the zoom to look for our friends. They were some of the last to go, falling straight, the cord loose and trailing behind, until suddenly, it snapped and their bodies hurtled up again, and then down, until they were just softly swinging upside down, in the shadow of the gorge.

After that excitement we went back a little further into the Tsikimma forest to go on a ziplining tour through the canopy. Standing on platforms at the tops of such huge ancient trees was amazing. And the ziplining wasn’t bad either!



After lunch we headed again for the coast, to the small beach town of Knysna. We stayed in a small house down the road from the quiet downtown. Filled with shops and restaurants, the town and waterfront reminded me a little of a beach front version of Old Town, Alexandria. And behind the more expensive stores, in the parking lots of the supermarkets, the large Rasta community of Knysna has their vending stands. Bob Marley t-shirts, knitted caps, jewellery and herbs of all kinds are in plentiful supply here. Jerica made friends with a rasta named Brother Charles. His dreads falling past his waist, he would smile showing the gap where his two front teeth used to be, and tell us the healing properties of the herbs he was selling.



After two nights in Knysna we left for a small beach house right outside of Mossel Bay. Probably the nicest place we stayed at, we had the whole upstairs to ourselves including a large tv and a kitchen. We walked up the road to the beach which was incredibly beautiful in the early evening light. A small river ran into the ocean- over the bridge running across it the sun was setting, and opposite, over the water the moon had just risen. We drove into the city to pick up some food and wine, and used the barbecue area (or braai area as we call it here!) to make dinner of hamburgers and sausages.



The next morning we had planned to go shark diving, but we had been warned by the very nice owner of our beach house that no sharks had been spotted in a while. So, not wanting to waste a trip, we decided to cancel and wait until Capetown. We drove over to the Cango Caves near the town of Oudtshoorn instead. Carved out of the side of a chain of mountains, the caverns were beautiful, and hundreds of millions of years old. They reminded me very much of the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, although I think some of these formations were even older. Walking out on the observation deck after our tour I noticed the mountain across from us dotted with forest fires, sending white smoke into the blue sky.

By late afternoon we were driving away from the caves and, finally, toward Capetown.

Two Worlds, One Week: World 1 Amakhala

Our second weekend trip was to Amakhala game reserve, about an hour from Grahamstown. I had had a late Friday night spent dancing at one of the clubs with some of my classmates from political science who were all feeling a little celebratory after finishing an essay. The club, Slipstream, was having a supposedly “indie music night” but it was more like an ‘American music from the 80’s night’ which was also good. Music in South Africa can be a strangely touchy and racialized subject, actually. The music that is usually heard in clubs or blasting from a student’s open window is very different from the music usually heard in America. Not that its not American, most of the music is- but hiphop and rap which are often heard in clubs in America are still considered “black” music and only the “black” clubs and bars play it. Clubs and bars that are more frequented by white people play techno and often old American songs that were popular in middleschool. We Americans, not being picky, will go to any of them, although sometimes we have had trouble getting white South African friends to go with us. No one admits they don’t want to go to a black club, they just say its in a bad neighborhood or its ‘dodgy.’ Slipstream, seems to not have as much of a reputation for being either black or white, but to attract more of the offbeat crowd.


Any ways I didn’t really want to get up early to charge my cameras and pack but I dragged myself out of bed and we arrived at Amakhala in early afternoon. This huge lodge was no backpacking hostel. A huge white house with a living room and five bedrooms was all for us. I got a beautiful room to myself with flowers on the pillows and a white claw bathtub in the bathroom. We walked up a little path to the building that held the dining room and we were served lunch. Then our ranger came and picked us up in an open jeep and we took a three hour drive through the park. I can’t name or count the animals we saw. We saw a herd of giraffe hanging out with zebra, we saw a mother and son white rhino and an extremely rare black rhino- only 3,000 of them exist in the world. We saw two cheetahs lying in the grass. It was an amazing experience.



When we got back we went to dinner and then downstairs to the tiny room that had been converted to a pub to hang out with the other rangers and the owner of the lodge, Bill. Sitting in the little room, surrounded by animal head trophies (most of which I think were killed for overpopulation reasons or found dead- but still not the decorations I would have chosen) and leafing through the scrapbook one of Bill’s granddaughters had made for him, I started to feel like I had stepped into some completely different reality. A version of South Africa, with ‘high tea’ and black servants that had existed long ago, and some people had just decided to stay in. I looked at the photo of Bill in his highschool uniform in the 1940s, pictures of the gamepark fields covered in flowers and at the old man, sitting at the bar, drinking his gin and water. It would be so easy, I thought, to never leave here. To sit in this bar every night, and go look at beautiful animals every day.



We all somehow managed to get up the next morning for a 6am boat ride down the river where we saw monkeys, gorgeous birds, and a humongous lizard, and then a drive over to the lion side of the park. The lions were being shy though, so we didn’t see them, but after everything else we hardly felt disappointed. I didn’t want to leave, but as we drove out of the gate I was glad. Even Alice couldn’t stay in Wonderland forever.

Elephants!

Yesterday we took a day trip to Addo Elephant Park, about an hour away from Grahamstown. An American we met named Wren who got a scholarship to go study music all over the world, rented a car and drove us over. Not sure what we would see as it was the middle of the day, not considered the best animal watching time, we drove quietly through the main gate and rolled down all the windows. We immediately spotted a couple animals: a kudu (an antelope/deer type animal) hanging out by the side of the road, a meerkat, some warthogs, a big pretty bird of some kind.



Coming to a turn in the road we were lucky enough to decide to turn right, because only a few minutes later we came on one of the watering holes which was surrounded by elephants! They are amazing to watch, so graceful. I read later in the brochure how elephants are contacts animals, they like to touch each other, and it seemed very true, they were always constantly grouped together, always aware of the other, in what seemed to be a very caring way.



One of them so wanted to get to the rest of the group that he had to cross the street, through and in front of the dozen cars that had stopped to watch the elephants and right in front of our car! It was wonderful, you don’t truly realize how enormous an elephant is until it strolls in front of your car.



By the end of the day my list of animals seen consisted of elephants, kudu, warthogs, zebra, red hartebeest, leopard tortoise, meerkat, ostrich, big bird thing and either buffalo or a big cow. Not bad for about three hours. This weekend we go on an overnight trip to another game reserve. Maybe we’ll see a lion…

Beach Weekend

This Friday Ashwin took us on the first of the four trips arranged by the international office around South Africa. We went to Cintsa, a town on what’s called the Wild Coast of the eastern cape. The area is known for its undeveloped land that holds lots of animals and hard to access beaches. We stayed at the Buccaneers backpacker lodge, about two and a half hours away (more if you get slightly lost as we did). Most of the route consisted of steep hills, some of it was on road that was hardly paved. Eventually we bumped and shook our way up into a compound of small bungalows. Our little bungalow had 4 rooms, a large main room with kitchen, two small bedrooms and a bathroom. Vines and flowers grew all over the walls and every morning we woke up to the noise of a monkey jumping on the roof.



There were things to do, we wanted to go to the game park and see elephants but there was a large group visiting and everything was booked. We’re still getting used to the South African laid back approach. Just because you say you’d like to book something to one person on staff tonight it doesn’t mean that he’ll automatically tell the person working tomorrow! So we just spent all our time that weekend, alternating our time between the beach, dinner, and the bar. Not a bad weekend.