Monday September 26th. Odds & Sods

For the next days we will be hanging around Durban waiting for a favourable weather window for the leg down to Cape Town, a topic that figures in most of the conversations we have these days. So here are a few odd paragraphs to fill the time. The photos folder has some corresponding pictures.

Our guide, driver and fixer for the last week was Greg Garsons. He made all the arrangements, did all the driving, gave 80% of the talks on the places we got to and dealt with all the issues along the way. There is no way we would have been able to put something like this together for ourselves. We really did get to "Peep behind The Curtain" of this amazing country. Here's to you Greg.
http://www.garsons.co.za/

There is a picture in the folder of the small, tatty, sorta-kinda-like punt that was cobbled together by a local boat tech. A laser like hull, a solar panel, an electric trolling motor a couple of batteries and you have a workable stand-on runabout. I think this idea, with a couple of racks for jerry cans and groceries, would make a fine fine way to ditch the dingies-with-outboards, which are a bit of a production to use, to get around anchorages. Drop it over the side, step on and off you go.

Today was fix the niggles on the boat day. We started with a list and did a lot of stuff that wasn't on the list. Zeke had fun adding those to the list so he could then cross 'em off.

We have a couple human albatrosses in our midst, solo sailors who just go round and round. One is Chris Swallow from the UK on a 39ft beneteau. He was part of BPO fleet for a while. He has been here for a week and is itching to get going on his next leg from here to Cape Verde, 5,800 miles. The other is Web Chiles, the sailors among you may recognise the name. He has been at this for decades and has five or six solo circumnavigations under his belt. He arrived here directly from northern Australia, about 6,000 miles, in his flush decked 24ft boat described by a wag among us as a sailing submarine. Previously he rounded Cape Horn in an 18ft open boat, a Drascombe Lugger (You are reading this Chris, right?).  He has written extensively about his travels, http://www.inthepresentsea.com .

A small egret or ibis like bird has been hanging around the marina. The water is
full of fish and he likes to lower his head over the side to snag 'em. It is a bit of a stretch and sometimes he falls in.

There are a lot of catamarans here, power and sail. One of the cat's has what I assume is an electrical hydrogenerator  of impressive proportions. Another stretches the concept of a double hull by adding a second mast, so two main sails, two roller furled jibs/Genoa's, and a lot more than twice the amount of standing rigging. I went to take a look at it and think it's a bit of a dog's dinner. If you saw it on the water you'd likely mistake it for a seaborne electricity pylon.

Half a mile down the waterfront, The Victoria Embankment, there is a tidy little maritime museum. It does a nice job of covering the broad history of maritime activity here, including whaling activity. They have a few magnificent builders' models of the liner's and freighters that served the country. In their dock they have a steam tug built in Glasgow. Its engine room has two open crankcase three cylinder engines that are a wonder to behold. Its boiler room, with nine oil fired boilers, must have been hell on earth despite having huge ventilation fans. Moored alongside was a 1957  Camper & Nicholsons minesweeper painted battleship grey and built of wood. It is a shame that both are rotting on their moorings and neither look like they will last much longer.

Some things shouldn't be so hard. Nano sized sim cards are as scarce as hen's teeth. Some cell services work sometimes. Though I can receive cell calls from the US, I can't place calls; CellPhoneCo is working on it. (That said, the geographic coverage here is impressive.) We can't get our propane tanks filled, there are no adapters for their US fittings. "Yes we can replace those deep cycle batteries" means "I haven't a clue". After about two flawless decades one of my email addresses is on the fritz. Evidently I have to get onto my DNS registrar's site to tweak the Rackspace MX record entries; yup I'm in the middle of freaking Africa and I have my two factor authentication credentials Right Here.

The weather has been unrelentingly dreary, and will continue to be. It guess it is driving my North American compadres nuts; Americans, with the possible exception of folks from the Pacific Northwest, seem to unable to put up with a month's continuous rainfall without going loopy.

Yesterday brought one day's glorious relief so our tour guide Greg scooped us up to witness the Zulus dance: good weather is a prerequisite otherwise you get to witness Zulu mud wrestling, which might also have been entertaining. It was pretty good and the call &  response singing brought the blues to mind. We were also shown around a  reptile zoo housing an collection of a couple of dozen snakes species including Boomslang, Black Mamba, small Anacodas and a whopper of a python weighing in at over 100lbs. A good collection of crocodiles ended with a 95 year male of truly disturbing dimensions and his 48 year old mate; they remain a profile breeding pair. We took the scenic route back, and most scenic it was - a jaunt through The Valley Of A Thousand Hills, home to fancy enclaves and modest township style housing that share the extensive valley with the Inanda reservoir. We collected his daughter Emma, just back from London, and partner Sue and showed them over the boats. He rewarded this imposition on their time with a bottle of Three Ships whisky for each of the three boats, which will ease the nighttime watches as we round The Cape.

Saturday, September 24th. Mandela, Drakensberg and Ardsmore

When we left Rawdons the fog was thick, and the trees were dripping. A short drive brought us to the Mandela capture site and museum and the iconic silhouette sculpture installed there. The serious atmosphere of the place was dispelled by a horde of garrulous school children, scrubbed and uniformed, skipping and babbling through the place. I have never waved to and greeted so many people in such a short time. I had seen pictures of the sculpture memorial though it has a lot more impact in the flesh. It is set away from the current temporary museum, a good 200 yards walk, so you have time to think as you approach it. The silhouette is a profile of Mandela, about 30ft by 25ft,  that can only be seen from just one particular marked spot, and you have to get your position just right. The museum itself was informative and very moving in parts.

An afternoon's drive brought us up into the Drakensberg mountains to the Giants Castle lodge set in a world heritage site wildlife reserve. We spent all our time in a single valley which perhaps can be described as a large Scottish glen with baboons. Rounded hills covered in course grass, occasional groves of indigenous trees, a small babbling river running along a wide valley floor, cloud on the the higher hilltops. At 4,500ft elevation it was cool and a pleasure to walk through. The park is known for eland, though they eluded us, and vultures which were numerous and easy to spot. The lodge, like Hluhlwe, was a main building surrounded by numerous thatched cottages.  I was taken aback to find we had a wood burning stove whose metal flue went up through the thatch.

The attraction here, other than the scenery, are cave paintings done by the Khoi San Bushmen, a tribe of diminutive stone age hunter gatherers who lived in the area until the end of 19th century. Their descendants now live in the Kalahari and Namibia. A park ranger gave a thorough talk on the paintings and the current thinking about their meaning plus a tongue knotting demonstration of the Clicks and Tsks of a Khoi San dialect. A British regiment was stationed in the valley in the late 19th century to stop the bushmen taking domestic cattle and their bullet marks are easily seen on the painting walls. The bushmen included a depiction of this event in the paintings and I have to wonder if this is the only place in the world where modern men, English soldiers, are shown in a stone age man's paintings.

Back on the road we headed out of the hills down to visit the Ardmore Ceramics centre. Now I am no particular aficionado of the arts and wasn't relishing the prospect of an afternoon with derivative renderings of mugs, bowls animals and human figurines. I was stopped cold to find work that is dazzling in its vibrant creativity, execution and finish. It was started in the middle 80's by Fee Halstead to foster the work of Zulu artists and has since grown to an extent that must wildly exceed what she hoped for. Dozens of artists have worked here, most starting from nothing and coming from deeply impoverished backgrounds.  The Aids/HIV epidemic has claimed the lives of many of the artists and their work has been used to raise awareness of the disease and new work has addressed it directly. One piece, that I was unable to get a decent photograph of, presents a nightmarish depiction of the disease. Ardmore has of course been discovered by the art world and has a world wide reputation. Their website does a fairly poor job of presenting the breadth of their work. You will find some here http://www.ardmoreceramics.co.za/buy/ardmore-ceramic-art, with other examples scattered across the site. A Google search yields a generous result, select the "images" results. I've added my few pictures to the web folder including picture of the "Aids Monster" lifted from the web. The unpainted pieces were works in progress.

Late afternoon found us back at the marina in Durban and me in dire need of a pot of tea. In the last eight days we have driven over 1,000 miles and have mingled with people from the poorest townships to wealthy enclaves and there is one overarching impression that I have to write large, particularly given this country's woeful history, remarkable transition, poor reputation and undoubtedly grave problems.   Everywhere, without a single exception, we have all been welcomed with disarming friendliness, freely offered. From the gritty city streets of Durban, to the rude hovels surrounding Gandhi's home site, to our rural stops for lunch, to the staff and guides of the lodges, to the downtown hotel in the coal town of Dundee, to the unlikely country house that is Rawdon's to the rarified atmosphere at Ardmore. The reception has been the same from the Zulu Africans to the Indian Hindu's, to the Muslims, to the descendants of British, Dutch and German colonials. It is sobering and stands in stark contrast to what I find the US and Britain.

Friday September 23rd. Photographs and video.

I've reorganised my inadequate pictures and added a few.

This LinkToPictures should get you there.

Wednesday September 21st. Off to meet Judi Dench's Sister

We spent the morning in the iMfolozi half of the game reserve, generally lower Savannah land. Today was hot and dry and it reminded me of the interior of Spain or Majorca. There is lots of budding greenery after the recent rain which brings out the wildlife to graze. We saw far too much to write up, but the highlights were giraffe, right at the road side, towering above us and moving with a languid sashay. We got close to rhino, buffalo, impala and miscellaneous other small antelope varieties, monkeys, gibbon, warthogs, elephant, grouse, eagles, vultures - it reads like a punch-list and creates the impression of teeming hordes of life. It wasn't like that at all. If you looked out over the veldt at any given moment it would seem vast, empty and arid, covered variously with low scrub, grassland and trees struggling back into life. The river gullies are a riot of jungly growth, including tangled growths of palm. Usually you can spot solitary of groups of wildlife off in the distance, but it is difficult for these old eyes to spot.  

In retrospect the strongest impression left on me was the breathtaking wide open spaces of rolling hills stretching as far as you can see. The air is wondrously clear and sweet to breathe in deeply. The silence is profound and pervasive and not much broken by birdsong. Sundown brings haze and shadows, the ranks of hills thrown into sharp relief out to the horizon. It is just magic and tragic when you see it surrounded by the march of big agriculture with it's huge timber and cane plantations and the spread of scruffy village sprawl with free roaming herds of cattle and goats. Wishing for the unenclosed African past is clearly futile and sentimental, but something precious and irreplaceable seems as good as lost to the march of progress.

Onward.

Most the day was taken up with a bum numbing  140 mile drive, stretched over eight hours, up to Dundee. We stopped for lunch at a cafe in Melmoth and continued on. Twenty miles out one of us remembered they had left their cameras at the café. As we pulled over and groaned the prospect of a forty mile detour, a pick up truck pulled front of us. Out jumped the café owner with cameras in hand, an impressive kindness and for me emblematic of the friendliness we have found everywhere in South Africa. We arrived in Dundee about an hour before sundown and checked into the Royal Hotel Country Inn. The hotel is a real throwback, established in 1886, it is filled with colonial war memorabilia from African, British and Dutch sources; all authentic we are assured. Our rooms are set around a small open courtyard filled with flowering plants dominated by the heavy scent of Jasmine. I'd defy anyone to resist having a gin and tonic there, while wondering when someone will show up to help remove your cavalry boots. The place is run by Motz Bezuidenhout, but you would swear she is Judy Dench's long lost twin sister.

For a rather good selection of wildlife pictures, take a look at Zeke's blog

https://zekethesailor.net/2016/09/21/wildlife/

Monday September 20th, On the road again.

Up the motorway/highway,  160 miles to St Lucia, the country looks like England's Kent, without the traffic and with the occasional palm tree. The rain adds to the feeling of familiarity. From a distance the sugar cane looks like corn, the extensive eucalyptus plantings do not look exotic. I have to make an effort to remind myself I am in Africa. The clues are there though. People hailing taxis on the highway, pedestrians on the hard shoulder (breakdown lane), workers riding in the open backs of large dump trucks, small rustic farmsteads, the exotic Zulu place names (Pongola, kwaMbonambi,   kwaMsani, Ntambanana), on one stretch a couple of dozen roadside stands peddling pineapples.

The side road to St Lucia presents a more compelling African scene. Rambling villages of small houses, goats and cattle roaming around, pedestrians everywhere, walking along the road side and appearing out of the bush from narrow tracks, children of all ages making their way home from school all immaculately turned out in in school uniforms.

St Lucia itself is a small tourist town. Souvenir shops, beach gear, a dozen firms offering safari tours, a burger joint and the firms offering jaunts up the estuary to commune with hippo's and crocodiles, which was what we had come for. Off we went on an oversized pontoon boat up the very muddy waters of the estuary several tens of kilometers long. In recent years the rain has been lacking and the water level in the estuary has dropped a couple of feet so it is now cut off from the sea by a barrier beach. It is now more of a fresh water lake than a salt water estuary. The mangos swamps have dried and large banks of reeds line the bank. The hippo's live in family groups and there are plenty of them; groups huddled around in the water, lolling about on the banks and one active group who eyed us with great suspicion and agitation. They are dangerous and account for very many deaths a year.

The crocodiles were thin on the ground, and do not grow to any impressive size. The few we saw were more cute than terrifying though we were told there are many more of them in the lake than hippo's and that they keep themselves concealed.

Hippo's and crocodiles now crossed off the list, we headed inland to the HluHluwe - iMfolozi wilderness park. HluHluwe defies pronounciation, and is usually rendered something like "shoosh-looway". The oldest game reserve in the country, it covers some 370 square miles of unmolested, uninhabited land. This was the Africa I had come hoping to glimpse. The country we saw is hilly and covered alternately in light scrub on the higher ground and dense undergrowth in the hollows and river valleys. It is very scenic and not wide open flat savannah grass land at all.  The wildlife is unavoidably Right There. On the few miles of paved road to the lodge where we are staying for a couple of nights we saw White Rhino, Zebra, Wart Hogs a pair of lionesses, Buffalo and various impala, antelope and the like. The rather swish lodge is set on a hilltop and offers stupendous views over the country. Frome here we set out out for a three hour tour in the ubiquitous Toyota trucks fitted out with a rack of bleacher seats, added elephants to our haul and got a much closer look at the animals. We were fortunate to be shown around by the head guide, he has been at this for thirty years, was an inexhaustible fount of expertise and possessed eagle eyes; on our way back to the lodge he stopped to point out a chameleon in a tree, we were less than four feet from it and I could spot it at all.

Nighttime brought a moonless sky filled with stars, the southern cross and milky way clearly visible. As we drove we swept the land with search lights and sniffed the fragrant night air. Eyes shone back at us and plenty of wild life was on the move. It is early spring here, and we are a couple of thousand feet above sea level the evening air was pretty cool.

Tuesday had us rested and up for a trip to a big cat rehabilitation centre. A night in a soft and immobile bed was most welcome. The cat centre exists to breed four species of cat for re-release into the wild. The population is split into the permanently captive breeding stock, which we get to see, and the offspring bred for release which are kept separated from human contact as much as possible. The high point was getting to stroke a full grown cheetah, who deigned to put up with us. It is not something you get to do everyday. The smaller cats, ranging from housecat size to mountain lion size, were lovely to behold and very interesting to learn about.

Back at the lodge I got to spend sometime catching up on the blog on the hilltop veranda looking out over the reserve. Basking in the cool breezes and warm sunshine soon brought on a nap.

A less than awesome connection here, so photos to follow.

Saturday, September 17th Durban

Today we escaped our yachtie's compound for a guided tour of Durban's surroundings. Durban itself is a good sized city, vibrant but it gives the impression of impending decay. There is plenty of life on the streets and from the waterfront you see a familiar high rise skyline, but get up close and you see fading glory. Most of the business and commerce seems to have moved out to the suburb of Umhlanga, of which more anon.

Five of us piled into a minivan and headed forty miles out of town to kwaDukuza to visit Shaka's grave. Shaka, or more properly Shaka kaSenzangakhona, is credited with establishing the Zulu nation in this part of South Eastern Africa in the early 1800's, around the time the colonizing Europeans started arriving in force. He was quite a character and his name, and his mother Nandi, are still held in high esteem. Next week is the anniversary of his assassination by two of his half brothers, an event marked by the attendance of hordes of Zulu dressed in traditional tribal garb. We are told you can't get near the place then. The site is a modest and tasteful park and museum set in the middle of a bustling small town which rather detracted from my ability to project myself back into the high veldt of two hundred years ago.

From there we took off to Groutville to visit the Albert Luthuli museum, most of  you are excused for thinking "who?" (Gary, you are not excused at all). Luthuli was a black African statesman and contemporary of Nelson Mandela who was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 1960 but who was not allowed to leave the country to receive the prize. He was a staunchly anti-violence in the mold of Gandhi and in contrast to Mandela who sought a more robust response to violent oppression. Under mounting international pressure he was very grudgingly allowed to go to Oslo in 1961 to receive the prize. The USA piled on the shaming pressure in 1966 when Kennedy sent his brother Robert to visit Luthuli at his very modest village home.Today the museum homesite is still set amid a gritty township neighbourhood which I found far more appropriate than some spiffed up park setting.

Up next was Mohandas Gandhi's home site. Gandhi arrived in South Africa in response to a petition from Durban's ex-pat Indian population who sought some legal representation to counter the oppressive regime that had brought them in to cut sugarcane; the African population having declined to make themselves available for the work. Gandhi came from a very well heeled Indian family and  bought the 100 acre Phoenix Plantation for his homestead. At that time he was completely pro-British. Legend tells that his Damascene moment came when he was turfed out of his first class railway seat in Pietermaritzburg for "Riding The Railroad While Coloured". His wealth notwithstanding, the home site (reconstructed following it's destruction in 1985 during the death throes of Apartheid) is also a modest affair. He described it as a pleasant spot with a stream at the foot of the hillside teeming with fish. In the years since a very rough and ready township has grown up to surround it, the stream is now muddy and loaded with trash. I should note that this has been a very wet, windy and grey day. All the rivers we saw were muddy carried a heavy burden of trash. For all that I found it a very evocative spot to contemplate the history and the rain didn't detract from that one whit.

Up next was the site where Nelson Mandela went in 1994 to cast his first vote in the newly democratic and emancipated South Africa. The prospect of visiting this place did not excite me at all. Surely a place of only symbolic significance after all the hard fights had been hard won in places far more significant and poignant than this. I found myself in Ohlange Secondary School, aka the Zulu Christian Industrial School founded by John Dube, one of the founders of the ANC, in 1900. The story of the school is worth looking up and it continues to operate today though clearly it is struggling. Having cast his vote, Mandela walked to Dube's grave on the Ohlange property to report to Dube that Africa was now free. Now I don't know how this happened, but I found myself quite choked up by this experience, and even now, hours later as I write there is a lump in my throat. Even though I had no part in it, I remember well the my initial awareness of the Apartheid issue in South Africa, it's development and resolution. To stand there on this perhaps "after the fact" and perhaps "only symbolic" spot was profoundly moving.

Thursday September 15, Durban, almost.

The final approach to Durban was unexpectedly simple. No current to speak of, light winds though plenty of freight traffic. This is a large and busy port. Port traffic control told us to come in, but to stay out of the channel, so in we came hugging the wrong side of the channel markers with some trepidation to be met by a very large outbound freighter with tugs leaning hard against its sides to keeping it straight in the channel.

We found our slip in the marina, kindly provided by The Point Yacht Club. We were greeted by a club member with a bucket of iced German beers that slid down most satisfactorily. Said member, Ed, also acts as a guide for us to immigration and customs; all simple enough for us in the end though it has taken over 24 hours to get through it. It has been a Kafkaesque nightmare for another boat in our fleet, a husband whose wife has two children from a previous marriage in Slovakia. Recently enacted anti child trafficking laws required them to prove legal guardianship and they were looking for original notarized birth certificates, marriage certificates, divorce certificates and a host of other documentation which a less scrupulous couple would have just cobbled together in PowerPoint and printed on store bought fancy bond paper and stamped with an official look stamp made locally. The English begetters of bureaucracy have a lot to answer for. Through all this Ed has been a model of patience, willing to do an unreasonable amount of running around on our behalf.

The folks in the yacht club have been super friendly and fortunately have a decent bar and cafe in addition to hot showers and the like. We have been a rather captive audience for them, but I can think of plenty of worse places to be stuck.

We have met with a tourist advisor who is putting together an itinerary for us  which should get us out for an edifying look around. The country's history over the past 200 years, and the more recent dissolution of Apartheid, looms large over most conversations we have had with white South Africans here, all of whom a quick to profess their deep attachment to this country.

So, a bit of a slow start, but very promising.