The Press and The Prez and The American Actor

A week and a half on the job and I'm schmoozing with the President of the country. Not bad, eh?

There was a press event in Cape Town, just blocks away from where I work near the South African parliament today where President Jacob Zuma was meeting with American actor Danny Glover. So a coworker and I grabbed a camera and headed down there.

See my photo slideshow here.

The Safari

Seeing some cool wildlife was a high priority for me when I came here. So high a priority that I took care of it on my first free weekend.

I signed up for a weekend overnight getaway through a cheesy little bus tour company called BokBus* and I convinced my travel companion Shannon to join me. Two other nice intern girls from Australia who Shannon and I had met on our horse riding excursion also decided to join. When our van arrived early Saturday morning we met the two other travelers signed up for the trip--a young white South African hippy couple.

So we were two Americans, two Australians, and two South Africans. Our leader was a 61-year-old South African fellow by the name of Dave. Dave has four kids, two ex-wives, a crude sense of humor, and phlegmy laugh that only someone who has chain-smoked for 40 years can have. Everything good, in Dave's vocabulary is "lekkar!" (an Afrikaans word) and everything bad he describes as "hectic."

Barreling out of Cape Town before sunrise, we headed toward the quaint, seaside town of Hermanus, a few hours southeast of Cape Town. Hermanus is supposed to be a great whale watching spot, but we didn't see whales. We did, however, spot a huge pod of very active dolphins leaping around on the horizon.

After a short stop in Hermanus, we hopped back in the van with Dave and his repetitive choices in music. Our next stop was to be Cape Agulhas, the southernmost point in South Africa. Halfway there, however, our young male hippy friend realized he had misplaced his expensive camera at the previous stop. Dave and the rest of us were sympathetic (if a little irked) by his plight and we collectively decided we should turn back toward Hermanus. The camera was not recovered.

It was too late to make it to our second destination of the day and keep on-schedule, so Dave assured us we could stop at Cape Agulhas on the way back the next day. Plans adjusted, we pressed on.

Driving through the South African countryside is really beautiful. It's simultaneously mountainous, coastal, and green. The roads are nice. The towns are cute. The highway is spotted with little farmhouse cafe rest stops, one of which became our lovely lunch spot. We ate and admired the scenery.

"Are most of these people here tourists or locals?" Shannon asked Dave.
"Shall I go around and ask them all for you?" Dave replied, laughing raspily at his own joke. 

After lunch set our for our final destination of the day--The Garden Route Game Lodge.

The Game Lodge is a delightful place. It's a privately owned nature reserve on a massive amount of land out in the middle of farm country. There is a main lodge area with a restaurant and reception, but the rooms are individual "chalets" done in the style of a Xhosa round hut. Twice a day, at sunrise and sunset, the Game Lodge offers game drives, so our first outing was the sunset safari.

We piled into an open air jeep-like vehicle, not unlike the one I rode in for my tiger safari a few years ago in India. Our safari guide was a tiny 20-year-old white Afrikaner girl named Anya with a heavy Afrikaans accent.** "Wild" is "waaald" for Anya, and "lion" is "loynn."

Anya is a fearless driver.

The park is completely open for all of the waaaldlife to wander around, except for the loynns. They are kept in a very large fenced-in area in the middle of the park, mostly so they don't eat the other animals. It also makes them easy to spot, so we got to see them up close almost immediately.

Our evening safari also featured giraffes, wildebeests, rhinos, zebras, ostriches, and some weird birds. Anya was not confident that we would be able to spot the elusive hippos because they spend so much time submerged in the hippo pond, but the nature-loving old British couple in our safari jeep had keen eyes and were able to spot one of the hippo's faces poking up from the water.

 (You should see a photo slideshow here. If you don't see it, update your Flash settings or click here.)

After the game drive we had dinner in the lodge, which was tasty, but unfortunately it made Shannon too sick to ride on the sunrise safari the next morning.

Perhaps it was just as well, the next morning, after a day of beautiful weather, we got rained on pretty heavily. The hippies began to smell of the universal stench of wet hippies, the Australians were cold, my camera lens kept fogging over.

We went to see the cheetahs that live in the park. It was raining hard at this point, but I had an umbrella. It is an umbrella my mom gave me several years ago, and I'm usually embarrassed of it's garish pattern, but for a cheetah visit in the rain it was amazingly appropriate.

Animals witnessed, we piled back into the BokBus to drive away though the rain.

We stopped briefly by the side of the road at an ostrich farm.

"Get out and bring your cameras!" Dave yelled. "They're inquisitive creatures, they'll come right over."

Sure enough, as soon as we approached the fence the ostriches ran over to us. I think they're my new favorite animal. I didn't even zoom in my camera for this one, he just stuck his face right in front of my lens. Inquisitive indeed.

As promised, Dave took us to Cape Agulhas on the drive back, teasing our hippy friend the whole way there for messing up the trip's itinerary.

Cape Agulhas, as mentioned, is the southernmost tip of South Africa. The sun had come back out by the time we got there and it was really gorgeous. I looked really hard to see if I could spot Antarctica, but I guess that's not humanly possible.

The drive back to Cape Town along the coast from Cape Agulhas was really gorgeous. We arrived back after dark and bid farewell to Dave and our little travel team.

*I learned that that animal on the 1 Rand coin which I identified on my last post as a gazelle is actually a "springbok" and that springboks are like the national animal of South Africa. It took me all weekend to figure out that BokBus is in reference to these same "boks."

**I haven't yet written an entry to explain all of the different ethnic and linguistic groups in South Africa, because I don't quite understand them all myself. But an Afrikaner is a white South African of Dutch descent who speaks Afrikaans which is a language used in much of South Africa. As far as I understand, the language is basically 17th century Dutch mixed with African indigenous languages. Many white South Africans are of British, not Dutch descent, however, and they speak with an entirely different accent than the Afrikaans accent.

Rand Rand Rand

The South African Rand is adorable.

Each denomination of the currency comes with a different safari animal.

(Not pictured: 200 Rand note featuring a handsome leopard)

The bills are nice, but my favorite is actually the 1 Rand coin with the little leaping gazelle. 

A Day's Work

I can't tell you much about my job yet, because I've only been working for three days. I don't even have an ID card to let me into the building without having to do the whole song-and-dance with the suspicious doorman yet.

What I can tell you is a little about the walk I take to get to work and the environment of my workplace.

I live in a "flat" (that's what they call it here) in the "Gardens" neighborhood of Cape Town. If you imagine downtown Cape Town as a big amphitheater where Table Mountain is the seating area leading down to the Table Bay's stage, my neighborhood would be like a back-row seat. So in order to get to work and to most of the action in the city, I have to walk downhill toward the water.

My building is the one in the center.

I am fortunate in that there is a beautiful city park called the Company Gardens (Company referring to the old Dutch East India Company, in this case) which basically stretches door-to-door between my apartment and my workplace.

It's a long walk, but I get to make the journey in the company of these unusual geese,

I saw two of these get into a squaky face-off this morning.

and these goose-sized birds which my guidebook identifies as ibises,

and in the shade of these oak trees which were imported by the European colonizers of yesteryear.

I arrive at work past this flower market where flower vendors shout at me, "DO YOU WANT SOME FLOWERS, LADY?"

And then I get to this plain-looking office building.

But inside it looks like this! Very colorful and modern.

There are so many similarities to an American workplace, but the differences are, of course, what makes it interesting. For example, I sit right be two women who gossip with each other speaking Xhosa all day. (For those of you who don't know, Xhosa is an indigenous language with a lot of "click" sounds.) And one desk over there is another group of employees who carry on in Afrikaans.

Another big difference is that, like a regular American workweek, I am looking forward to the weekend, but unlike an American weekend, I'll be spending this one on a safari trip...

 

First Days, First Impressions

I remember pretty distinctly the moment I found out the world was round. I was a little kid with my mind blown. I went to my mom and asked her again and again whether or not it was possible that if we could see the people in the Southern hemisphere, they would be upside-down.

This is my first time in the Southern hemisphere and I keep waiting to fall off the earth head first into space, but it hasn't happened yet. Not even so much as a head rush from being upside-down so long.

It took a long time to get to South Africa. The journey was about 24 hours door-to-door, but I left on a Monday and arrived on a Wednesday. Go figure.

I'm traveling here with two other grad students from USC: a half-Irish, half-Japanese, American-born but raised-in-the-Philippines, public diplomacy student named Shannon, and a shaggy-haired, Minnesota native, fellow journalist named Graham. We've turned out to be a pretty compatible travel team.

Our first few days were jam packed with sightseeing activities. Normally, I might resent this uber-touristy approach to acquainting oneself with a city, but it turned out to be a good crash course in Cape Town history and culture, and I'm going to have to start working in journalism in this city very soon, so any knowledge of the place that I can have under my belt will be helpful.

We started our first day with a walking tour led by an older woman named Ursula who pointed out all of the city's historical landmarks, and all of the buildings which she found to be ugly. "Here's the beautiful old city hall building. And would you look at that ugly apartment building beside it!"

The next day we took a hop-on-hop-off bus tour with a recorded audio guide that, interestingly also pointed out the eyesores along with the important stuff, so maybe this is just a Cape Town thing? One building, which creeps into the dramatic silhouette of Table Mountain, the rather snarky recorded narrator referred to as "an act of architectural terrorism," another, he mentioned was "built in the 1970s, not surprisingly."

In any case, we sped past Cape Town's beautiful and ugly buildings to our first hop-off, which was the city's "castle" which is really a fort. Old military uniforms and 19th century kitchen tools abound within. Outside, the yellowy walls looked beautiful against the blue sky.

After a near-death jay-walk to try to hop-on again, we rode up to the Table Mountain cable car. The little gondola takes you right up to the top of the mountain. We took in the spectacular views, then honored the moment by putting away a bottle of table mountain wine.

 
 The next day Shannon and I opted for a horseback riding excursion on a lovely beach south of the city. Shannon took many years of horseback riding lessons and is a graceful expert on a horse. I have ridden horses only a handful of times throughout my life and was less graceful, though I managed to stay upright atop Chelsea, a bitchy mare having a terrible morning who was irritated by my presence and the presence of the other horses on the trail ride. Nevertheless, I got some nice photos. And after our butt-bruising morning we had a delicious leisurely lunch at the little farmers market/craft village/petting zoo farm place where the horses live.

Today, we made our way to Robben Island, the high-security-prison-turned-museum where Nelson Mandela spent many years mining limestone. There is lots of interesting (and amazingly recent) history to be learned there. Our guide, a former prisoner, had spent years there after being arrested for partaking in the Soweto uprising.

The island is obviously a little bleak, but the ferry ride to get out there is quite pretty. From the boat I saw seals, dolphins, and AFRICAN PENGUINS! I didn't catch a picture of any of the marine life, but the views of the Cape Town skyline weren't too bad.

Tomorrow, I'll start my internship.