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"My Trip to South Africa (part one)"
or
"Money money money makes the world go 'round."
So as you probably know I went to South Africa a couple weeks ago. My dad was sent with the United Nations peacekeepers to Eritrea (northern Africa beside Ethiopia) and the rest of the family saw this as a great opportunity to escape North America for the first time. Upon further reflection, we figured that a country that has peacekeepers stationed in it *might* not be the best choice of vacation destination. My mom came up with South Afria, and then I found some cheap youth flights through travel cuts so I bought Tim and me a ticket, and off we went!
How cheap? $1500 Ottawa to Johannesburg, taxes included. What's the downside (why were they so cheap)? Flights: Ottawa to Halifax, Halifax to London, London to Athens, Athens to Johannesburg. The last two on Olympic Airways. Better known as still has a smoking section airways. Filled with chain-smoking Europeans airways. It wasn't actually that bad, we had about eight hours in London, and we put those to pretty good use.
We found the Olympic desk at Heathrow, checked in, discovered there was smoking on our flights (so of course Tim booked that section for himself), and then started following the Underground signs. Lined up and explained that I'd like to go downtown and back again, and was sold a 4-pounds-ninety daily ticket. Hopped on the train, and sat for 45 minutes!! Finally we reached Picadilly Circus, and hopped off. It was at this point we started to realize the time... our Air Canada flight was overnight, so it was now about 9AM on Sunday, and (shockingly) most things were closed. So we spent a lot of time walking around and looking at things. Saint James' Palace, Buckingham Palace, Green Park, Trafalgar Square. Fun stuff. Had lunch at (ugh) McDonald's... everything in London is so expensive!! After lunch we went to the British Museum and looked at the Egypt exhibits -- I've been a fan of mummies and pharoahs and such since I was like seven, and it was neat to see all these things I'd read about close up. The Rosetta Stone, for example. Actual mummies. Mummified cats from tombs! Very cool.
Started to get late, so we hopped the tube back. We had to sit for about an hour in Heathrow without a gate, one hadn't been assigned yet... so we sat, and wandered, and sat some more. It was at this point that I found a net terminal that was very limited in what you could do for free, so I sent out some electronic postcards. I thought I send one to suspects, but I don't know if it made it.... the terminal was very odd, with all metal keyboard and a button for a smiley, stuff like that. Finally found our gate (looked like an under-used gate, and the walls had little "asbestos inside!" signs) and had our passports checked (again). Sat for a while.
Olympic Airways was... well... not too impressive. Not horrid or anything (after you get past the smoking) but not great either. The inflight meals were a) very rich and b) very often. Coming home I was fed about five times in 24 hours... very good food though, I was impressed. The flight from London to Athens is pretty quick, relatively speaking (four hours), and then we were at Athens airport. While we were taxiing in, the captain came on the intercom and explained that the new Athens International is under construction, and when completed it will be one of the most advanced and modern airports in all of Europe. Once we stopped I realized why -- the current Athens International airport lacks such modernities as jetways. We left our very tall Airbus 340 and walked down steps, got into a standing-room-only bus, and then were driven to the customs door. There we lined up for quite a while, and were whisked through security. They never asked for our passports though, so I guess we were in the "staying in the airport" lineup. Tim was concerned that he wouldn't be able to leave the airport for a cigarette, until we actually got into the terminal. If it was possible, there were even more smokers in the terminal than there were in the plane. The terminal is about as big as the Halifax airport, but mostly empty. One coffee stand, one duty-free shop, and about 50 chairs, scattered through the rest of the empty space. Five or six gates, but only three doors. Bizarre. We played cards for a couple hours. I wasted $5 US to buy a couple cans of pop and get 300 drachma back, a deal in which I'm pretty sure I was the loser.
Time for boarding... reverse the previous process. Line up, check in, get on bus, drive to plane (another A340), climb stairs. This time I was more than one row ahead of the smoking section, which was noticeably better. The A340s have a tv screen in the back of every single seat, and several movies playing all the time -- that was pretty cool. Chicken Run, Gone in 60 seconds, some Woody Allen one (I watched it but missed the title), plus some other caper movie with Billy whatsisname the Scottish comedian. They also have the "GPS channel". Well, that's what I call it anyway. It shows a 8000km view of the planet, with the plane at the centre, and major cities marked. Then it zooms in to 2000km, more detail on the map, and you can see the path the plane has taken marked in red. Zoom in one to three more times depending on where you are (for example, plain ocean has no more zooming, there's nothing more to see), and eventually you can see the plane move every second or two. Then it cuts to an info screen with ground speed, air temperature (-60 C), altitude, and time to destination. Pretty cool way to keep up on where you are. Good geography lesson over the middle of Africa too.
Longest flight of all from Athens to Jo'burg. Also overnight, 1am-9am or so -- after an hour or so they walked around the plane demanding that everyone close the shades... I spent a few minutes contemplating the possibility that we were flying through unfriendly airspace or something, but once I woke up a few hours later I understood. I tried to open my shade and was nearly blinded, as the sun was RIGHT OUTSIDE! I guess these long flights get pretty high up. Once we landed in Johannesburg we did the customs thing, the waiting for baggage thing, and the waiting for baggage some more thing. Then we did the I guess your bag isn't coming Tim thing, and the reporting it missing thing. Then we finally headed out of security and found the parental units, who had been in town for a day already. We got some coffee and incredibly bitter lemonade for the non-coffee drinker, and then headed for the parking lot.
At this point my dad was still acclimatizing to driving on the left, and for those who haven't been, South Africa is not the place to get used to anything, least of all driving. The highways there are almost impossible to describe, but if you imagine four full lanes of traffice, two walking paths, and several cows and/or goats, plus a slow tractor being passed, all crammed into a regular two-lane street, and everything except the livestock and tractor moving at 100km/h+, you'll start to get a vague idea. Passing someone who is in the middle of passing someone else is not just common, it's expected. Young Drivers of Canada would have a coronary trying to teach "Defensive Driving" there, since everyone else uses "Offensive Driving."
Tim and I were just staring out the windows, drinking it all in, so we didn't really pay attention to where we were going. There wasn't really anything to see though, it looked just like the area around the airport in any huge city. We got off the highway and started driving around on city streets... for those who've never had to drive (or be in a car that's being driven) on the left hand side, let me tell you: it's disconverting. It really takes a bunch of getting used to. Turning right, for example, becomes very dangerous. You're not used to thinking very hard in right turns, and that can be kinda scary when you (halfway through a turn) see a bunch of vehicles heading for you! Anyway, we made another turn, and there was a security gate! I wasn't sure what the deal was, but the young (black) security guard just opened the gate and let us through. We weren't sure why he just let us through, but Mom broke the code: "we're white."
I tell you he was black because up until that point he was the only black person I had seen in a uniform, or doing something we would classify as "skilled / advanced". That's a peculiarity of where I was though. South Africa is an incredibly weird country... it's this incredibly advanced and modernized collection of cities, with very expensive and *very* fortified white houses and fences in the suburbs, but interspersed everywhere else are towns with no electricity or water, oftentimes not even marked on the map, and thousands -- *thousands* -- of black men and women working on streetcorners, selling things, carrying things, doing unskilled labour and roadwork, etc. I only saw black families and children at beaches and on the streets, and I only saw white families and children at the beaches and in the malls... it was stunning and shocking and amazing to see the country so obviously in the depths of apartheid's hole, trying to climb out.
If you're looking for a book to read, I highly recommend Long Walk To Freedom by Nelson Mandela. It's very interesting and very gripping... goes from his childhood through to the elections in 1994, and makes a great historical document for those interested.
We arrived at the bed and breakfast ("The Manor") where we would be staying for one night before driving to Durban (helpful map: http://www.lonelyplanet.com/mapshells/africa/south_africa/south_africa.htm), and the security was impressive. An electrified, alarmed, opens with a keychain doohicky gate, at least eight feet high. Makes you think you're in a high-crime area, which Jo'burg apparently is to a tee. Finally: a shower and a real bed!! You miss those things when you spend 36 hours on planes and in airports. The B&B had several cats and kittens and a dog, and all of them felt quite comfortable roaming into our rooms with no hesitation. It was all one level with the rooms lined up like little townhouses, back doors opening onto the backyard. Very nice. We went out and had lunch at (gasp) McDonald's, where a Big Mac cost R8.40, which works out to $1.68 CDN. Not bad... better than London!!
Then we went shopping at the nearest mall. It was... well, fancy. Not excessively, but was much nicer than say the Fredericton Mall or Billings Bridge. One thing I noticed that reminded me of Hawaii quite a bit was the open doors. Bugs are not a problem in Johannesburg at all, very few homes or places of work seem to have screens on the windows at all. Saw two computer stores right across from one another, one for PCs, one for Apples. iMacs were about R7000, on sale... divide by five for Canadian. Computers are more expensive there, unlike almost everything else. I saw ads for older Pentium II systems at a cost that would net you a high-end Pentium III here.
Gas costs exactly the same there as here, but that's different too. There's no self-serve gas, and every gas station has at least five or six, often more, attendants. When you drive up there are people directing you to a pump, people washing all your windows (very well I might add, putting attendants in Canada to shame!), people offering to check your oil, and still others doing the actual gas pumping. All for (obviously) very little pay. But the cost of living down there is tiny, so it makes me wonder. If you get the chance to be paid a Canadian or US wage, but live in South Africa, take it. Incredible experience, and good way to save money!! Even vacationing there was incredibly cheap, after the airfare was dealt with.
Most everything else is cheaper. Haagen-Daz ice cream bars cost like $3.50 here, right? Well the equivalent there was about R6.95, and when I was chanrged that the South African woman behind me scoffed and complained for me, said "there must be a mistake." I ended up paying R3.50 -- 70 cents!! A can of pop was closest to par, at R3.99.
We decided on supper at a patio restaurant at the mall, and while we were eating a big van drove up, and a serious looking man hopped out, carrying a machine gun. Carrying it like he meant it. He looked around, and then another guy got out, carrying a canvas bag, and walked into the mall. Gun-man stayed put, and the armoured van drove around the block. We almost forgot about him after a few minutes -- the mind does neat tricks when surprised! Then bag-man came back, probably having emptied the bank machine or something, climbed into the van, and they left. Made me understand a little more about the crime issues in Johannesburg.
We found that there was a lot of help doing things... pulling into gas stations, someone would direct you to a pump. Driving into a parking lot someone would direct you to a space. But we started to realize that these were not carved in stone directions, and that these people were for the most part not even paid -- the idea was to tip. In public parking lots people would be wearing orange "car guard" bibs, but your car was probably safe anyway... but you could never be sure. One time my dad cornered a woman and tried to get her to explain whether he had to pay, or how much he should pay or whatever, and she would not give him a straight answer at all. It was all quite odd.
That night we slept very well, and early the next morning we set out on the highway to Durban. Durban is only about 570km from Jo'burg, so we figured it would be an easy drive. As it turns out, everything is about 25% futher away than it seems, in terms of driving... it took us all day! But it was a beautiful drive, and not at all bad. We stopped at a rest stop / gas station / restaurant thing, just like the ones we have on highways here. At the back there was a big pen with no sign indicating what animal we should watch for, so Tim and I checked the water looking for hippos and crocodiles, and looked in the weeds for other things... finally, when we were driving away, we saw the plain old normal common horses come into view! Nothing exciting (to us) at all!
We were actually staying at a cottage on the beach about an hour from Durban, near Stanger. We got there after dark, managed to find the place, find our cottage, get moved in, find a gecko climbing on the wall, and then go to sleep. We were all too exhausted to do much else.
(to be continued)
or
"Money money money makes the world go 'round."
So as you probably know I went to South Africa a couple weeks ago. My dad was sent with the United Nations peacekeepers to Eritrea (northern Africa beside Ethiopia) and the rest of the family saw this as a great opportunity to escape North America for the first time. Upon further reflection, we figured that a country that has peacekeepers stationed in it *might* not be the best choice of vacation destination. My mom came up with South Afria, and then I found some cheap youth flights through travel cuts so I bought Tim and me a ticket, and off we went!
How cheap? $1500 Ottawa to Johannesburg, taxes included. What's the downside (why were they so cheap)? Flights: Ottawa to Halifax, Halifax to London, London to Athens, Athens to Johannesburg. The last two on Olympic Airways. Better known as still has a smoking section airways. Filled with chain-smoking Europeans airways. It wasn't actually that bad, we had about eight hours in London, and we put those to pretty good use.
We found the Olympic desk at Heathrow, checked in, discovered there was smoking on our flights (so of course Tim booked that section for himself), and then started following the Underground signs. Lined up and explained that I'd like to go downtown and back again, and was sold a 4-pounds-ninety daily ticket. Hopped on the train, and sat for 45 minutes!! Finally we reached Picadilly Circus, and hopped off. It was at this point we started to realize the time... our Air Canada flight was overnight, so it was now about 9AM on Sunday, and (shockingly) most things were closed. So we spent a lot of time walking around and looking at things. Saint James' Palace, Buckingham Palace, Green Park, Trafalgar Square. Fun stuff. Had lunch at (ugh) McDonald's... everything in London is so expensive!! After lunch we went to the British Museum and looked at the Egypt exhibits -- I've been a fan of mummies and pharoahs and such since I was like seven, and it was neat to see all these things I'd read about close up. The Rosetta Stone, for example. Actual mummies. Mummified cats from tombs! Very cool.
Started to get late, so we hopped the tube back. We had to sit for about an hour in Heathrow without a gate, one hadn't been assigned yet... so we sat, and wandered, and sat some more. It was at this point that I found a net terminal that was very limited in what you could do for free, so I sent out some electronic postcards. I thought I send one to suspects, but I don't know if it made it.... the terminal was very odd, with all metal keyboard and a button for a smiley, stuff like that. Finally found our gate (looked like an under-used gate, and the walls had little "asbestos inside!" signs) and had our passports checked (again). Sat for a while.
Olympic Airways was... well... not too impressive. Not horrid or anything (after you get past the smoking) but not great either. The inflight meals were a) very rich and b) very often. Coming home I was fed about five times in 24 hours... very good food though, I was impressed. The flight from London to Athens is pretty quick, relatively speaking (four hours), and then we were at Athens airport. While we were taxiing in, the captain came on the intercom and explained that the new Athens International is under construction, and when completed it will be one of the most advanced and modern airports in all of Europe. Once we stopped I realized why -- the current Athens International airport lacks such modernities as jetways. We left our very tall Airbus 340 and walked down steps, got into a standing-room-only bus, and then were driven to the customs door. There we lined up for quite a while, and were whisked through security. They never asked for our passports though, so I guess we were in the "staying in the airport" lineup. Tim was concerned that he wouldn't be able to leave the airport for a cigarette, until we actually got into the terminal. If it was possible, there were even more smokers in the terminal than there were in the plane. The terminal is about as big as the Halifax airport, but mostly empty. One coffee stand, one duty-free shop, and about 50 chairs, scattered through the rest of the empty space. Five or six gates, but only three doors. Bizarre. We played cards for a couple hours. I wasted $5 US to buy a couple cans of pop and get 300 drachma back, a deal in which I'm pretty sure I was the loser.
Time for boarding... reverse the previous process. Line up, check in, get on bus, drive to plane (another A340), climb stairs. This time I was more than one row ahead of the smoking section, which was noticeably better. The A340s have a tv screen in the back of every single seat, and several movies playing all the time -- that was pretty cool. Chicken Run, Gone in 60 seconds, some Woody Allen one (I watched it but missed the title), plus some other caper movie with Billy whatsisname the Scottish comedian. They also have the "GPS channel". Well, that's what I call it anyway. It shows a 8000km view of the planet, with the plane at the centre, and major cities marked. Then it zooms in to 2000km, more detail on the map, and you can see the path the plane has taken marked in red. Zoom in one to three more times depending on where you are (for example, plain ocean has no more zooming, there's nothing more to see), and eventually you can see the plane move every second or two. Then it cuts to an info screen with ground speed, air temperature (-60 C), altitude, and time to destination. Pretty cool way to keep up on where you are. Good geography lesson over the middle of Africa too.
Longest flight of all from Athens to Jo'burg. Also overnight, 1am-9am or so -- after an hour or so they walked around the plane demanding that everyone close the shades... I spent a few minutes contemplating the possibility that we were flying through unfriendly airspace or something, but once I woke up a few hours later I understood. I tried to open my shade and was nearly blinded, as the sun was RIGHT OUTSIDE! I guess these long flights get pretty high up. Once we landed in Johannesburg we did the customs thing, the waiting for baggage thing, and the waiting for baggage some more thing. Then we did the I guess your bag isn't coming Tim thing, and the reporting it missing thing. Then we finally headed out of security and found the parental units, who had been in town for a day already. We got some coffee and incredibly bitter lemonade for the non-coffee drinker, and then headed for the parking lot.
At this point my dad was still acclimatizing to driving on the left, and for those who haven't been, South Africa is not the place to get used to anything, least of all driving. The highways there are almost impossible to describe, but if you imagine four full lanes of traffice, two walking paths, and several cows and/or goats, plus a slow tractor being passed, all crammed into a regular two-lane street, and everything except the livestock and tractor moving at 100km/h+, you'll start to get a vague idea. Passing someone who is in the middle of passing someone else is not just common, it's expected. Young Drivers of Canada would have a coronary trying to teach "Defensive Driving" there, since everyone else uses "Offensive Driving."
Tim and I were just staring out the windows, drinking it all in, so we didn't really pay attention to where we were going. There wasn't really anything to see though, it looked just like the area around the airport in any huge city. We got off the highway and started driving around on city streets... for those who've never had to drive (or be in a car that's being driven) on the left hand side, let me tell you: it's disconverting. It really takes a bunch of getting used to. Turning right, for example, becomes very dangerous. You're not used to thinking very hard in right turns, and that can be kinda scary when you (halfway through a turn) see a bunch of vehicles heading for you! Anyway, we made another turn, and there was a security gate! I wasn't sure what the deal was, but the young (black) security guard just opened the gate and let us through. We weren't sure why he just let us through, but Mom broke the code: "we're white."
I tell you he was black because up until that point he was the only black person I had seen in a uniform, or doing something we would classify as "skilled / advanced". That's a peculiarity of where I was though. South Africa is an incredibly weird country... it's this incredibly advanced and modernized collection of cities, with very expensive and *very* fortified white houses and fences in the suburbs, but interspersed everywhere else are towns with no electricity or water, oftentimes not even marked on the map, and thousands -- *thousands* -- of black men and women working on streetcorners, selling things, carrying things, doing unskilled labour and roadwork, etc. I only saw black families and children at beaches and on the streets, and I only saw white families and children at the beaches and in the malls... it was stunning and shocking and amazing to see the country so obviously in the depths of apartheid's hole, trying to climb out.
If you're looking for a book to read, I highly recommend Long Walk To Freedom by Nelson Mandela. It's very interesting and very gripping... goes from his childhood through to the elections in 1994, and makes a great historical document for those interested.
We arrived at the bed and breakfast ("The Manor") where we would be staying for one night before driving to Durban (helpful map: http://www.lonelyplanet.com/mapshells/africa/south_africa/south_africa.htm), and the security was impressive. An electrified, alarmed, opens with a keychain doohicky gate, at least eight feet high. Makes you think you're in a high-crime area, which Jo'burg apparently is to a tee. Finally: a shower and a real bed!! You miss those things when you spend 36 hours on planes and in airports. The B&B had several cats and kittens and a dog, and all of them felt quite comfortable roaming into our rooms with no hesitation. It was all one level with the rooms lined up like little townhouses, back doors opening onto the backyard. Very nice. We went out and had lunch at (gasp) McDonald's, where a Big Mac cost R8.40, which works out to $1.68 CDN. Not bad... better than London!!
Then we went shopping at the nearest mall. It was... well, fancy. Not excessively, but was much nicer than say the Fredericton Mall or Billings Bridge. One thing I noticed that reminded me of Hawaii quite a bit was the open doors. Bugs are not a problem in Johannesburg at all, very few homes or places of work seem to have screens on the windows at all. Saw two computer stores right across from one another, one for PCs, one for Apples. iMacs were about R7000, on sale... divide by five for Canadian. Computers are more expensive there, unlike almost everything else. I saw ads for older Pentium II systems at a cost that would net you a high-end Pentium III here.
Gas costs exactly the same there as here, but that's different too. There's no self-serve gas, and every gas station has at least five or six, often more, attendants. When you drive up there are people directing you to a pump, people washing all your windows (very well I might add, putting attendants in Canada to shame!), people offering to check your oil, and still others doing the actual gas pumping. All for (obviously) very little pay. But the cost of living down there is tiny, so it makes me wonder. If you get the chance to be paid a Canadian or US wage, but live in South Africa, take it. Incredible experience, and good way to save money!! Even vacationing there was incredibly cheap, after the airfare was dealt with.
Most everything else is cheaper. Haagen-Daz ice cream bars cost like $3.50 here, right? Well the equivalent there was about R6.95, and when I was chanrged that the South African woman behind me scoffed and complained for me, said "there must be a mistake." I ended up paying R3.50 -- 70 cents!! A can of pop was closest to par, at R3.99.
We decided on supper at a patio restaurant at the mall, and while we were eating a big van drove up, and a serious looking man hopped out, carrying a machine gun. Carrying it like he meant it. He looked around, and then another guy got out, carrying a canvas bag, and walked into the mall. Gun-man stayed put, and the armoured van drove around the block. We almost forgot about him after a few minutes -- the mind does neat tricks when surprised! Then bag-man came back, probably having emptied the bank machine or something, climbed into the van, and they left. Made me understand a little more about the crime issues in Johannesburg.
We found that there was a lot of help doing things... pulling into gas stations, someone would direct you to a pump. Driving into a parking lot someone would direct you to a space. But we started to realize that these were not carved in stone directions, and that these people were for the most part not even paid -- the idea was to tip. In public parking lots people would be wearing orange "car guard" bibs, but your car was probably safe anyway... but you could never be sure. One time my dad cornered a woman and tried to get her to explain whether he had to pay, or how much he should pay or whatever, and she would not give him a straight answer at all. It was all quite odd.
That night we slept very well, and early the next morning we set out on the highway to Durban. Durban is only about 570km from Jo'burg, so we figured it would be an easy drive. As it turns out, everything is about 25% futher away than it seems, in terms of driving... it took us all day! But it was a beautiful drive, and not at all bad. We stopped at a rest stop / gas station / restaurant thing, just like the ones we have on highways here. At the back there was a big pen with no sign indicating what animal we should watch for, so Tim and I checked the water looking for hippos and crocodiles, and looked in the weeds for other things... finally, when we were driving away, we saw the plain old normal common horses come into view! Nothing exciting (to us) at all!
We were actually staying at a cottage on the beach about an hour from Durban, near Stanger. We got there after dark, managed to find the place, find our cottage, get moved in, find a gecko climbing on the wall, and then go to sleep. We were all too exhausted to do much else.
(to be continued)
