11 November 2016: South Africa- Coffee Bay

                On the way out of Oribi Gorge, first of all I stopped at this place called the Waffle House (no, not the diner you go to in the middle of the night on road trips) and got my good-food-deprived soul a super fancy macadamia nut, lentil, and salad waffle. It was both delicious and gorgeous.

                My drive to Coffee Bay was filled with potholes and fog, and waiting at traffic stops for my turn to go down a street that let cars go one way for about half an hour, then switched and let the other side go. There were so many people trying to hitch on the side of the road, and I wanted to pick them up, but I also didn’t want to kill them with it being day 3 for me in a manual car, plus I was enjoying the solitude on the road I did stall a few times today, but it was nothing unrecoverable, and I’d consider it a success given the amount of stop and go traffic I had to go through. After what seemed like an endless drive through potholes and puddles in the fog and the rain, I finally arrived at Coffee Bay and went to my hostel called the Coffee Shack. This place was awesome- easily one of the best hostels I stayed at in South Africa. They even have a bunch of friendly hostel dogs that will run around on the beach and go with you wherever. There are also pigs and goats wandering around, but I don’t think they’re officially part of the hostel. I had intended to camp (R90), but it being super rainy and all, I managed to snatch up the last dorm bed (R150, 5^th night free). This hostel was packed with a lot of cool people, and so many Germans. I don’t know what it is about Germans coming to South Africa, but it seems to be very popular with them.

                Being right on the beach, I decided to take advantage of the sand to do some running. Having packed super light, I only brought a single pair of shoes, my trusty Chacos, and didn’t bring any tennis shoes, so sand is a great opportunity to run barefoot. I also wandered around these green hills that surround the beaches and the bays.

                It was pretty rainy most of the days I was there (and, as you’ll see, rain is a common theme through my entire vacation), so a lot of time was spent talking to other travelers, watching things like cricket on tv (which I still don’t really understand), and playing cards and board games.

                They have a restaurant on site, and Sundays are free dinner nights, so we all had heaping plates of beef stew over rice and Xhosa bread, which was awesome.

                One day I decided to rent a surf board (only R50 for a half day!) and went out to the beach. There was a guy giving a group lesson out there, and he gave me some pointers on paddling and how to stand up easier. After a few hours and many improved catchings of waves, I was rocking it.

                The next day, I hiked with an English couple about 10km to a place called Hole in the Wall where there’s a huge rock in the bay with a hole/cave in it. The hike was so beautiful. It wasn’t super easy, as we had to go up and down lots of steep hills, but we passed lots of cool aloes, a waterfall, saw some enormous grasshoppers and lizards, and even a pod of dolphins swimming off shore. With the help of my five phrases of isiXhosa, we avoided getting too lost. We got to the hole in the wall finally and we were so wiped out. Luckily, on our way back, we eventually found a hitch that took us back to Coffee Bay.

                This was also the time of the election, so on the day the votes were counted, everyone was basically in shock that Trump could actually be elected president. There are a few other Americans here, and it’s making us all very embarrassed, actually. Having to try to explain for my country is gonna be so bad now. That night, everyone was sitting around a big table watching the news and watching speeches, absolutely confounded about how this could have happened. 
               But luckily, the lamenting didn't last for long, and we could quickly get back to enjoying the beauty of Coffee Bay. It was one of the best hostels I stayed at, and the area is so gorgeous. Definitely recommended. 

4 November 2016: South Africa- Oribi Gorge

I arrived at Oribi Gorge just in time for it to start to be super cloudy and thunderish. I got to the office and saw a map of the trails around the gorge. I decided to take one of the short hikes near the camping area before I set up my tent, just in time for the rain to start. Other than the zillion dragonfly-esque bugs that were buzzing around and plopping upon my tent (perhaps turning on the campsite light was not such a good idea during the night), the campsite area here is really nice. There are very clean bathrooms and showers, a very well-equipped kitchen, a small pool, and a bunch of little huts you can also stay in. I think camping was R90 per night, and if you just want to go for the day it was something like R30, but you have to go out of your way to get to the office, so I doubt very many people actually know to go over and pay.

                I drove through the gorge and did a few of the hikes. There were amazing views as I climbed up the side of the gorge to get to the top edge. Along with a ton of fat millipedes and other huge/weird/fuzzy bugs and spiderwebs to walk through, I also saw what I think was a wildebeest and some pink-butted baboons. Back at the campsite, I swam in the pool while watching baboons scamper around in the trees and across power lines. It was a cool place. Shame I was literally the only one in the thing...

3 November 2016: South Africa- Durban, round 2

For my post-Lesotho travels on the blog, I’m gonna be pretty specific about places and prices and things just in case you’re trying to do some traveling in Southern Africa and somehow stumbled upon my blog to help you with your plans. In this case, please enjoy and feel free to comment or email me with any questions

                I specify this post as Durban round 2 because I did go to Durban once before about a year ago, but that post has been removed because of...reasons. So here’s a little, much less exciting, snippet about my second go at Durban.

                After arriving at Tekweni hostel (R190/night for a dorm) on Halloween day, I just kind of lazed around and read and wrote. I came to Durban as my first stop because it would be the place I would pick up a rental car that I would use to hop down the coast toward Cape Town with. My plan was to spend about a month doing this in South Africa. So Durban consisted mostly of me getting the car, but other than that I didn’t do much in the city besides eat Indian food, try so hard to swim at the beach but being thwarted every time by rain, and generally wandering around town.

Moses Mabhida Stadium

Cloudy skies, but the fishermen are still out

                Oh, my other plan in South Africa was to, once done with Cape Town, stop off in Pretoria to get a visa to visit my dear friend Milea in Liberia. Southern Africa is great for free or cheap visas that you can, with little exception (Mozambique), get upon arrival. It’s all very low stress, except when you get stuck at the border of Malawi with no US Dollars after being super fried from being on a train for like 18 hours (See the Malawi "Panic! at the border" post from July if you missed out on that fun story). So the point is, almost every other country outside of Southern Africa has expensive visas that you have to apply for ahead of time, Liberia being no exception. So eventually I’d have to get into contact with the Liberian embassy in Pretoria. So I promptly bought some airtime for my South African sim card and called the number I found online. No answer. I called again so many times at different times of the day and different days of the week with the same non-response. It also didn’t help that my emails to their listed address kept bouncing back to me undelivered. I decided that I would just show up in person in Pretoria in a few weeks and see what I could make happen.

                Perhaps the most interesting part of my Durban story is getting the rental car. I reserved it through a company called Around About Cars, which farmed me out to another company called Tempest. I walked to their location downtown, having to ask a bunch of people where the actual place was, because it wasn’t super easy to find. I had reserved the cheapest car they had, for about R200/day. Being a cheap car, it was a teeny tiny Chevy Spark. Also being a cheap car, it was a manual, not an automatic. Mind you, I didn’t drive a manual at home, and the only few times I had practiced with a manual were when a bunch of us rented a car and went through Namibia a year and a half ago. My friend Lea had shown me the basics, and the most I’d done was go maybe a few hundred meters on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, stalling all the way. In preparation for renting this car, I had called both Lea and my mom for some last-minute refreshers, and I used the wifi at the hostel to find some Youtube videos to give me some tips as well.

                I decided to rent a car for several reasons: I really wanted to learn to drive a manual car, it would give me much more freedom to go when and where I wanted, and the other options were not ideal. Public taxis were, well, the same taxis I had been dealing with for the past two years, which leave whenever they feel like it and only limit you to certain routes. There are also big busses like Greyhound and Intercape, but similarly, they run on set schedules and don't go everywhere. The other popular option among backpackers is the Baz Bus, which is like a hop-on-hop-off type of thing that goes all over South Africa and drops you right at your hostel, but you have to book it several days ahead of time, and it is pretty expensive considering what it is, and it would have cost me almost as much as the rental car.

                The day came. I had been pushing imaginary pedals and shifting imaginary shifters in my mind all morning. So here I am at the rental place, and as the rental car guy and I are going around the car checking out the scratches and stuff, I mentioned that it had been a while since I drove a manual. This was an understatement to say the least, as I had never actually driven a manual other than for a few middle-of-nowhere stretches. He said that my license was for a manual car, so it would be fine. I found out at this point that in other countries, your driver’s license specifies if you’re certified to drive a manual or just an automatic. The US doesn’t do this, so I guess no indication of “automatic only” on my license gave him the impression that I had passed my test with a manual. After I immediately stalled out a few times trying to get the thing out of the driveway, the rental car guy offered to give me a mini lesson around the block, assuring me all the way that my (non-existent) muscle memory would soon come back to me. Then he put the car in a little strip of the parking lot so I could just practice going forward and backward a bunch of times. After I decided that I could sufficiently start the thing without stalling it, and after many odd stares from the lady cleaning the parking lot, I jerkily and haltingly unleashed myself to the open road. First, to do some more practice, I got myself to a pretty calm road with lots of roundabouts that parallels the beach. I took a break to photograph this cool skate park I found covered in graffiti, then continued on to my hostel.

                Let me take you aside here, oh reader, to tell you about the wonders of an app called Maps Me, which lets you download maps ahead of time and use them offline so you don’t suck up all your data. This is the app that routed me to my hostel, and all the way to Cape Town with many stops in between.

                It was a while before I got to my hostel again because I was having trouble starting up hills. Durban is quite a hilly city, and starting up a hill without stalling was proving to be very difficult. At one point, these people eating at the patio of a restaurant nearby looked on with much concern as I stalled out at least a dozen times trying to turn a corner going uphill, and it was only after I assured them that “I’m still learning; don’t worry,” that I realized I was trying to start in second gear, then corrected my mistake and managed to actually continue driving. Ooff. Then I found a residential hill nearby and did a million hand brake hill starts in little increments, and then when I got to the top I drove down the hill and looped around to the bottom to do it again and again and again. Content with my progress, I got my bags from the hostel and got kind of lost trying to find the highway. I was sweating at intersections (exactly as Lea told me I would) with the anxiety of thinking about starting without stalling and worrying about making tons of cars behind me start honking at me like I was some moron on the road.

                I finally found the highway and set myself free, taking so much pleasure in the freedom and in the speed. It was at that moment that it started to hit me that I had left my Lesotho life behind, as I was driving away literally as fast as I could (safely) go. My next stop was an hour or so southwest, past Port Shepstone to a beautiful place called Oribi Gorge.