25 December 2016: Zimbabwe- Train to Victoria Falls

              

               After being dropped off at the train station in Bulawayo, I got in line to buy a ticket on the train that runs daily from Bulawayo to Victoria Falls. I got out of the car of the guy who was low-level hitting on me the whole time, then got in line and then immediately had to deal with the the guy who got in line behind me who was RELENTLESS about trying to get my phone number and asking to marry me and have me bring him to the US. When I said no, he kept asking why why why why why and I was thinking GAHH I DON’T KNOW JUST BECAUSE I DON’T WANT TO AND I DON’T KNOW YOU AND THIS IS EXHAUSTING JUST STOP.  Yep, that charade gets old before it’s even new. Anyway, the line started moving when they open the ticket window, and by the time I get there, second class ($10) was already sold out, so I got a first class ticket ($12). Both first and second classes get sleeper cars where there are long, cushioned seats/beds. I opted for this since, first of all, it was an overnight train, and secondly, I had flashbacks of my aching body and brain from spending 18 hours on a hard seat in a crowded/loud train across northern Mozambique. So yep, for $12, I happily paid that low price for both transportation and a bed. Not too shabby.

                After getting my ticket, I went to the waiting area, where lots of people were already waiting with their bags and bags of stuff, and other people were selling things like bread and cokes. After a while, people start crowding around one side of the waiting area that leads to the platforms. 6:30pm hit and a guy whistled. Someone should have announced, “AND THEY’RE OFF!” because people were sprinting for their lives, scrambling across other platforms, running to the front of the train. I just stood there staring, kind of dumbfounded. Then I realized that those with tickets for the general/economy seating probably weren’t guaranteed a seat, and they were running to make sure they wouldn’t have to stand all night. After I was finished being mesmerized by this show of speed, I hoisted my backpack up, grabbed my other bag of camping gear, and leisurely walked to the train car indicated on the back of my ticket.

The side of the train- "National Railways Zimbabwe"

The waiting zone

                I found my compartment and soon realized that I had it to myself (except for a few hours when this other lady was put in there with me, but I was asleep, so I didn’t care). This train must have been pretty fancy in its heyday when it was called Rhodesian Railways. There were even still RR logos on the mirrors and windows. My compartment had a lower seat and an upper bed that flipped down, and even a little sink and shelves. After some reading and listening to podcasts, it started to get pretty dark, so I quickly climbed up to the top bunk, laid out my sleeping bag, and absolutely passed out. Sure, to some people, trying to sleep on a train that stopped every five minutes might not have been easy, but I was just so happy to have a “bed” for once. Sleeping in a tent on a worn-out ground pad doesn’t give you the best sleep, but it sure makes you appreciate the little things, like sleeping on something cushioney where your hip bone isn’t digging into the ground.

The cabin. The thing with pictures and a mirror on the left flips down for an upper bunk.

They still have the RR logo for Rhodesian Railways

                The train arrived at the town of Victoria Falls around 11:30am, for a total of 15 hours on the train. Not bad. Plus, watching the baboons out the window, on the tracks and climbing on top of old trains, was pretty entertaining. Happy to have arrived, I plotted my route to Shoestrings Backpackers with maps.me, walked through the small town to get there, and checked in.

Baboons on the tracks

Out the window

24 December 2016: Zimbabwe- Bulawayo

               From Francistown, I got on this bus to the Ramokgwebana/Plumtree border between Botswana and Zimbabwe. To get out of Botswana, it was slowish, but organized. The bus picked everyone up after we’d all stamped out and took us to the Zimbabwe side, and there it took insanely longer and was much more chaotic, with people butting in, crowding around the counters, etc. It costs $30 for an American to get a single-entry visa to Zim. I had the option to pay with USD, Rand, Pula, Pounds, or Euros.

                Let me elaborate on the money situation here, oh readers, because it is an interesting one indeed. Seriously- I went down the internet wormhole just reading so far into this. Here’s the Wikipedia link if you’re interested in reading more.

                The gist of the situation is that in the 1980s, Zimbabwe was doing pretty well economically. In the late 90s, though, Mugabe’s government instituted land reforms that put the land owned by white people into the hands of black people. This included a lot of farmland, which the white farmers had been growing lots of successful crops on. Once the whities were forced out and the new black “farmers” took over, it was soon evident that they didn’t have any experience with farming, and the country fell into a food shortage situation. The fact that banks were also failing didn’t help, and Zimbabwe turned from an exporter into an importer, effectively accruing lots of foreign debt. So how do you get out of debt? You need more money. What’s the easiest thing you can do to get more money in a bunk economy? Print it, of course. What could possibly go wrong? Answer: everything.

Printing vast quantities of money, as you probably learned in some economics class, causes inflation, as there is more money for the same amount of goods, so the money loses its value. The money becomes more and more worthless, so you have to print more and more bills of higher denominations to keep up. What results is a horrific vicious cycle of hyperinflation. It was so bad that at the end of 2008, the money was inflating at a rate of about 80 billion percent…per month! You’ve probably heard about Germans taking wheelbarrows of money to the store to buy a loaf of bread in the 1920s. Yep, same story here in Zim. The highest denomination that the government printed, right before the currency was abandoned in 2009, was 100 trillion dollars. Yep, that’s trillion with a capital T, which rhymes with P, which stands for pandemonium. But it wasn’t even really 100 trillion; the number value should have actually been 10²⁵ times more than that, because of various droppings of zeroes in the process of successive printings. If you checked the price of, say, eggs at a shop in the morning, went home to get wads and wads of cash to pay for said eggs, and returned in the afternoon, whoops, the price skyrocketed and you don’t have even close to enough money anymore. Even before the Zim dollar was discontinued, the country informally, and then formally, switched to a multi-currency economy. Bartering was also very common. The USD was the currency of choice, as it was the strongest currency, but you could also use a whole host of other global currencies. I’ll go into the current currency situation a little more in the next post, but this just gives you a good idea about how chaotic things got, and how uncertain anything concerning money was/continues to be in this country.

                So yes, back to the journey at hand. But before I continue, loyal readers, my mom in the next room would like to add that she was in Zimbabwe in the 70s when it was still called Rhodesia. Wild. Anyway, overall, from border to border to freedom, it was three hours, mostly spent waiting in lines. I walked to the taxi rank on the Zim side and got the last spot (read, the taxi was full but I got squeezed in there anyway) on a minibus taxi to Bulawayo for $5, plus another $2 for my bag in the back trailer. Not wanting to use my dollars, I paid 80 Botswanan Pula instead, which they happily accepted.

After getting off the taxi in Bulawayo, I immediately went to the Pick and Pay grocery store where, guess what, I waited in more interminable lines for both the parcel counter to drop my bags and for the registers. I forgot that it was super close to Christmas, so that was probably why the store was so crowded. Then I wandered through the outdoor market to find my way back to the taxi rank. Everyone was very friendly directing me to the local taxi going to Burnside, the neighborhood my hostel was in. It was a short 50 cent ride. Here they only took USD. They laughed when I tried to pay with Pula again. But the cool thing about that ride is that I paid with a $10 bill, and in my change, among the super gross and floppy dollar bills I received (they never go out of circulation since they can’t afford to have less currency going around), I also got some new Zimbabwe Bond Notes, which are the government’s answer to the currency shortage. The thing about the Bond Notes is that they are only good within Zimbabwe, so they can’t be used to pay for foreign goods, so they’re pretty worthless in the grand scheme of things. They were only introduced a month before I got to Zimbabwe, and they're made in the form of coins and $2 notes (they have since started making $5 notes), tied to the USD.

I got out and walked to Burke’s Backpackers. It’s a beautiful and green property with the Burke family home, a pool, a pond, lots of trees, and some rooms and space for camping. That night, the family was having lots of people over to (badly) sing Christmas songs on the porch. Their out-of-tune voices lulled me to sleep as I lay in my tent that I set up next to the pool.

                The next day, the owners put me in touch with two other guests, a Swiss German and French Canadian who were traveling between semesters studying in Stellenosch, which is the wine country right outside of Cape Town. I recognized their car from several other places in Botswana, where we both had been staying, but somehow we had never talked to each other. I distinctly remembered them at Planet Baobab in Gweta, where they had quite a loud girl with them who never stopped singing and talking. She had since left the trip to go see family or something, and the two guys seemed relieved to have dropped her off a few days earlier.

                Making friends with people with cars is great. The three of us drove around Matopos National Park ($15 entry fee each person, $10 for the car). This park has lots of rock formations and balancing boulders, which feature on one side of each Zimbabwe Dollar note and the new Bond Notes (see picture above). We drove around the park, admiring the rocks, and did a little hiking including up to some cave paintings, then to the top of this small mountain. At one point, there was the option to pay $10 more to see Cecil Rhodes’s grave, but we enthusiastically declined. Why should we pay our respects (and our money) to a guy who took over and exploited Southern Africa for its diamonds and other natural resources? He is highly vilified by most people around here, so we passed.

Push!

Cave drawings

Hiking

 A view of the park

                The next afternoon, after paying for my camping spot at Burke's in both Pula and USD, I got all my stuff and walked to the road to wait for a taxi to pass by. Without even trying to flag down anyone, a guy just stopped for me and took me straight to the train station. On the way, he stopped at the Spar grocery store to see if his friend had cash for him. No cash today. This country is so strapped for cash and there isn’t any in most banks. And if there is, you can only take out $50 per day. This means that a lot of company owners effectively can’t take out enough money to pay their workers. One method of getting cash is at the grocery stores, because they seem to be the biggest source of it. You pay with a card, then get some cash back.

                So after the obligatory asking me to marry him and bring him to the US and me subsequently shutting down the conversation by truthfully saying that I literally did not have a sim card on which he could call me, the guy dropped me off at the train station. It’s so weird- even when I so vehemently shut down someone like that, they’re still super friendly, and he still said that it was nice to speak English with me and get to know what I was doing in this part of the world.

                In the next post, your hero takes an overnight train to Victoria Falls!

Another view of Matopos

The whole crew

On top of the rock mountain

Balancing rocks

More balancing rocks (middle)

21 December 2016: Botswana- Francistown

               After arriving in Francistown, I got a shared taxi to Dumela Lodge, the only place around that seemed to be reasonably priced, as it offered camping (P85/night). Might I add that Dumela is the Setswana (language spoken in Botswana) way to say hello, pronounced exactly like Lumela, the Sesotho way of saying hello. Sesotho and Setswana are very close, even mutually intelligible, and I was entertaining my taxi driver by conversing with him in Sesotho.

                We arrived at Dumela lodge, where I’d be camping for the next two nights before I headed off to Zimbabwe. Spoiler alert: there’s nothing to do around here, so the only thing I did was swim in the pool (It was h-o-t hot. The heat was so much more intense in Botswana than in South Africa.) and read. I’m pretty sure I was the only one in the whole place besides the staff. But the good news is that, even though this place didn’t have a self-catering kitchen either, I was actually able to start a fire and make some hot oatmeal and boiled eggs. Hooray for hot food. Their camping bathroom was pretty gross, filled with bugs (giving me flashbacks to summers with the family in our trailer using those buggy campground bathrooms) and at the time had no hot water. But they let me take a shower in one of the really nice chalets, which was awesome. Not so awesome was that when they finally turned on the hot water heater, I was using the outside sink that might have somehow been connected to the electric current, because I got electrocuted. So the facilities weren’t great, but it was fine for a couple nights to stay before a long trek into Zimbabwe.

                The reception lady was super nice, if a little sycophantic. My last morning, she gave me a ride into town to the taxi rank where she made sure I got exactly where I needed to go, walking me around to the different busses and talking to everyone to make sure I got on the right one to get to my next destination of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. 

My path through Botswana, from Pretoria, South Africa to Gaborone to Maun/Okavongo to Gweta to Francistown, on to Bulawayo, Zimbabwe

19 December 2016: Botswana- Gweta

               My plan was to go eastward across Botswana after visiting the Okavongo Delta, so my next destination was a tiny place a few hours away called Gweta. Back in Maun, all while kicking ants off my feet, I folded up my super sandy and wet tent at Old Bridge Backpackers, got on a taxi to Maun town, then got on the Francistown bus, intending to get off at Gweta. Actually, the place I was going, Planet Baobab, was about 5km past Gweta, so I asked the driver to drop me there, and he happily did. A gigantic aardvark and a planet mounted on top of an enormous termite mound pointed the way.

                Planet Baobab is mostly a fancier lodge that happens to have camp sites (around P75/night). It has a great pool too, but no self-catering kitchen, so I ended up eating dry ramen and cold-soaking oatmeal to eat it for breakfast. After several failed attempts to start a fire with trash and damp leaves and twigs, I went to their restaurant for a grilled chicken salad that cost the same as my camp site. Oh well. True to its name, there are baobab trees everywhere, which I didn’t know grew in the Kalahari. Well, actually, I didn’t know anything about the Kalahari, so there you go.

                The best part about this place, besides the pool and the fact that the camp sites are covered, is that there are these little green caterpillars absolutely everywhere. Instead of raining water, I suppose it’s raining caterpillars as they descent from silk strings down into my tent, getting through the mesh at the top. Speaking of my tent, the poor dear, I had to do more sewing repairs on it, as well as duct tape one of the pole segments that was splitting apart lengthwise. This thing has been beaten up.

                I’ve just been lazing around, swimming reading a lot, including Packing for Mars by Mary Roach, which talks about prepping to go to space, and how people go through all these tests and simulations to prepare for the boredom/loneliness/stir craziness of being in Space. Sure sounds a lot like me in my rondaval for two years…

                My last morning, I half hitched, half walked to Gweta town where the bus would pick me up. (I later realized that I could have just stood on the road right outside of Planet Baobab and the bus would have also picked me up there. But then maybe I wouldn’t have gotten a seat.) I talked with another traveler from Planet Baobab, who turned out to be the guy who almost got squashed by the falling branch back at Old Bridge. He was on his way to Namibia to work at a bush camp, whatever that entails. Soon enough, the bus let everyone off at the enormous taxi rank in Francistown. Stay tuned!

16 December 2016: Botswana- Maun

               P175 later, I was on the 12 hour bus from Gaborone to Maun. And it actually left on time! Amazing. Out the window, all I saw was scrub brush, scrub brush, goats, cows, and more scrub brush. My butt was so sore. Three long-distance bus rides in the same week was not so ideal for my body. I arrived in Maun, got some food at the grocery store, then caught a combi taxi to the part of town where the rest camps are. I arrived at Old Bridge backpackers via, yes, an old bridge, and it was raining. I really just wanted to take a warm shower after the lovely all-day bus ride, but the showers were roofless, so I would never have gotten dry. I just said screw it; I could handle being stinky and at least somewhat warm instead of being clean and shivering. I cooked some eggs and peanuts for dinner and went to sleep in my trusty, somewhat leaky tent.

                I hung around the hostel for a couple days until I couldn’t stand any more. I got pretty bored because, compared with South Africa where there were tons of other people to meet and hang out with, there aren’t so many in the more booneyish places. I really wish I had a travel buddy for the more boring times like this.

                It finally cleared up after raining nonstop for a few days. My tent only let a few drops through, monstly at the front flappy part where the mesh touches the outer fly layer. It’s been hard to sleep, being perpetually moist, but most days I took a nap to counter that. Last night, I heard a super loud CRACK CRACK CRACK that turned out to be a giant branch falling off a tree and almost crushing another tent. Good thing it wasn’t even close to my tent.

                I signed up for a mokoro (canoe) trip on the Okavongo Delta, the main attraction here in Botswana other than game parks like Chobe. I had enough animals, so I decided to go to the Delta. I signed up through the hostel, and they took me and a middle-aged South African couple in one of those safari cars about an hour to the launch point. I got out of the car and into the boat with my guide, also called a “poler” since they use these long wooden poles to propel the boats along, kind of like the Botswanan version of a Gondolier. He poled the boat through the watery channels, pointing out all the different birds, frogs, and huge termite mounds along the way. Termite mounds here lean westward because of the wind that always blows from east to west. Who knew?

Day lilies

Chillin on the delta

Poler traffic jam

                We got out at a huge island and went for a walk, where we found four elephants and were able to get about 100m away. We also saw some red antelope and some kudu in the distance. The guide said that normally, one day trips don’t normally see many animals, as the animals are more out at dawn and dusk. Also, the off-and-on rain probably chased them off into the bush. He told me about lots of plants, like a flower with an eye-dropper-like squeezey thing that was used to cure eye problems, the fan palm with which people make palm wine, and he even made me a “delta necklace” out of a day lily.

My guide scouting out animals, standing on a termite mound

Delta necklace

                After lunch, he let me try to pole the mokoro. It took so much balance! I almost “went swimming” a couple times trying to balance on the skinny boat while trying to move and steer the thing. We started heading back, even passing a hippo in the water, and then he started booking it through the water because the rain was coming “now now.” Then, soon enough, it was absolutely pouring. I was huddling under this poncho thing they gave us, but I still got soaked. That part was really fun, actually, in the rain, with the drops hitting the water all around me. Then it was a wet and bumpy ride in the safari car back to the hostel, and just went to bed early because I was wet and cold and wanted to wrap up in my sleeping bag. 

Before it started raining

11 December 2016: Botswana- Gaborone

               You probably thought that my transportation logistics would actually go well for once. Well, you’re wrong, because TIA. From my Pretoria hostel, I took the Gautrain one stop over to the bus station and waited for my Intercape. It was only one hour late arriving. Not bad. I’m so immune to being delayed now, it doesn’t even phase me anymore. I got some caffeine for my exhausted self with a couple free cokes being handed out at the station and waited for the bus with the reliable company of my Kindle. The other waiting passengers and I finally boarded the bus, and as I sat down, this lady across the aisle from me immediately started complaining about the lack of air conditioning in this section of the bus, even though it wasn’t that hot at all. I entertained her for a little while, then couldn’t take her negativity any longer and stopped responding, letting her keep whining into the ether.

At the border post to leave South Africa, we waited in super long lines to get through, and when we got into no man’s land, thank bob there was a currency exchange booth so I could get some Botswanan Pula for once, since I had failed to do so in Pretoria. Then at the border post to get into Botswana, we were held up another hour for seemingly no reason, and Complainer Lady was at it again, riling up a bunch of other bus patrons who were spreading rumors that the bus didn’t have the proper paperwork to cross the border. With my this-is-Africa-lower-your-expectations attitude on lock, I wasn’t phased at all. I just put my headphones in and popped on a podcast and tried to go back to sleep in my seat.

We finally arrived in Gaborone in the pitch dark and three hours later than scheduled, and I was met by Henk, the hostel owner’s son and his squeaky girlfriend, who drove me to Mokolodi Hostel. It cost me P120 for them to drive me, an outrageous sum in my opinion, but the P3.50 bus wasn’t running that late at night. Oh well. At the hostel, I set up my tent near the pool and crashed. I was kept up by a horde of ducks who decided that as soon as the people got out of the pool, it was ducky swim time, but eventually they decided to stop being quacky and splashy and went to bed themselves.

The next day, I was entertained looking around the hostel grounds for all of their animals, including an enormous pig named New Year and a peacock. I started to walk down the road where I could catch a ride or the bus into town, as Mokolodi is a ways outside of Gaborone itself. As I was walking, a guy driving the other way stopped me and said that there was a sketchy-looking character lurking on the road, and he drove me toward the nature reserve where I could find another ride into town. We found another guy who was going to town, and he drove me and dropped me off at the mall, where my mission was to get a sim card and some groceries. I flagged down the P3.50 bus for a fast and cheap ride back to the hostel.

The next morning, I woke up at 4:30am for a 5:00 ride to the bus station in town to catch the 5:30 bus to Maun, my next destination.

Peacock vs. Duck

9 December 2016: South Africa- Pretoria

                After a butt-crunching 20 something hour ride on the Intercape bus, I had arrived in Pretoria. Let me tell you about Intercape, loyal readers. The bus was pretty nice, with plushy seats and air conditioning. They also had some TVs spread through the bus that played movies interspersed between preachy messages. Intercape is a Christian company, and some of their movies have non-in-your-face Christian overtones, but it was pretty annoying in between the movies when this blonde preacher lady would come on and explain some bible section or whatever the heck she was blabbering on about. I mean, it wasn’t offensive, just weird. The other weird thing was that whenever we’d stop at a gas station or something, their programming would start over in the middle of the first movie they played, so I saw the last half of “Robo Dog” at least three times. But no one complained or even mentioned it to the driver, weirdly. It was super loud, too, and no one seemed to care. That seems to be a common theme here. Some inconvenient thing is happening- we have to wait in line at the bank for four hours, there are no tomatoes today at the grocery store, I’m suffocating in the back of a taxi- and you just deal with it without complaining because that’s just how life is sometimes.

                Anyway, I arrived at the Pretoria bus station and went to the PRASA train station to get a ticket to the next station over to go to my hostel. Little did I know that there were two train stations right next to each other: the PRASA metrorail station, and the Gautrain station. I actually wanted the Gautrain station, but I didn’t know that it was right there, so I figured I could just take metrorail. Nope. I bought a ticket, and after the train I wanted pulled away just as I arrived, I waited an hour for the next one. I got on and it was going the opposite direction I wanted to go, according to my little blue dot on my maps.me app. I got off at the next station, waited about half an hour more to go the opposite direction back to where I started at Pretoria station, then got off and asked how to get to the station I wanted to be going to. Turns out the train didn’t currently go in that direction, so I’d have to go back on the original train I thought I had mistakenly gotten on earlier, go some roundabout way around some closed stations, then take a shuttle. Nope, nope, nope, I thought. So, frustrated and exhausted, I abandoned my R7.50 ticket and decided that, though I was an expert at waiting, I just wanted to move. Like a zombie, I blankly handed my unused ticket back to the turnstyle attendant and left, not looking back to see what was probably a very confused look on her face. I mapped the route to the hostel, and it would take about an hour and a half to walk there. Yep, that was fine. As long as I don’t have to wait for any more trains.

                Having had sat around for more than 24 hours at that point, it was good to move. An hour and a half later, exhausted and sweaty, I finally arrived at the hostel, Pumba’s Backpackers (R100 for camping, R180 for dorms, discounts for volunteers) and set up my tent. I ran into some South Africa PCVs, some of whom I had met at Sani Pass in Lesotho, who were staying there while they had some PC business in Pretoria. Then, I attempted to scout out the Liberian embassy, which was the whole point of why I had gone to Pretoria in the first place, to get a visa for Liberia. I went to the place where it was supposed to be, according to the internet, only to see a sign that said that it had moved across town. Ugh. At that moment, I was just so tired of being slapped around by the system that I just said screw it, and decided to get it when I flew up to Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire in a few weeks.

                The next day, I lazed around the hostel, and the only thing I did was attempted to change my extra Rands into Botswanan Pula (as I was going to Botswana the next day) or US Dollars (a good alternative currency for so many countries in Africa). After trying at a bank and being told that I needed an account or proof of residence to change there, I went to another exchange place. I pulled out this massive wad of Rand cash and carefully calculated how much of each currency I’d need, but they told me that they needed proof of where I’d gotten the cash. Since I’d taken it out of my bank account in Lesotho when I closed it, and didn’t have that receipt, they were not about to change it for me. I got on my online banking and found one time when I took out a bunch of cash in Lesotho, took some screenshots of that transaction, and emailed it to the exchange place lady. But, nope, Julie gets slapped down again because they didn’t accept that because it was taken out in Lesotho and not South Africa. But it’s the same currency! Ughhhh. They suggested that I could change money without all the proof and receipts at the airport in Joburg. I'd have to figure out how to get over there, either by Gautrain or by taxi, change money before business hours were over, and then get back to Pretoria. Hahaaaa, nope. Not doing that. I’ll just hang on to my Rands and change it elsewhere if I can, or else just keep it and change it in the US.

                So, in summary, I accomplished nothing I came to Pretoria for: no Liberian visa, no Rand exchange. Cool…But I wasn’t super bothered by it because, as I described above, sh*t happens and most of the time there’s nothing you can do, and complaining won’t fix a thing. So I bought my bus ticket to Gaborone, Botswana, and hoped that the next destination would allow me more excitement and allow me to actually do what I’d planned to do for once.

Bus life

6 December 2016: South Africa- Cape Town!!!

               My British friend George and I left for Cape Town from Hermanus in the morning. It was so stressful driving in a city with traffic again. We returned the car, super dirty and needing gas, but the car rental guy said he wouldn’t charge me, which was great. I checked into my hostel, Zebra Crossing, a really nice hostel with wifi and lots of indoor/outdoor chilling space (R170/night, the cheapest I was able to find in Cape Town). We wandered around a little bit, then decided to try to make it to the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens with the train. But it turns out that the trains were all screwed up and delayed due to people stealing parts of the train or something, so they weren’t running. TIA. So we wouldn’t be making it to the gardens. We then met up with these other girls George knew from other hostels, and went to their fancy hostel and swam in their pool, which was awesome. Then all of us went out on Long Street, which is the primary street for bars and music, etc. Every night on Long Street is loud and crazy, but this was Saturday night, so it was especially so, and really fun.

                The next day, I went on one of several free walking tours of Cape Town. I ended doing all three they offered, but on that particular day, I did the historical tour. I learned the following: There are 4 million people in Cape Town, with 1 million in the surrounding townships. Most people are coloured and speak English as a first language. On the tour, we saw Desmond Tutu’s church, some Dutch East India Company buildings, the company gardens, the spot where Nelson Mandela made his first speech after being released from prison, and a court house where they determined people’s race with such banal things as the the “pencil test,” in which they stuck a pencil in your hair, and if the pencil stayed put, you were black. If it didn’t, you were white or coloured. The way they classified race was so arbitrary sometimes, and people would often be reclassified from year to year, depending on how some clerk thought they looked. Absurd. I didn’t realize that Apartheid only ended 22 years ago, and the effects are definitely still being felt. Our tour guide was very careful in his choice of racial terms, saying things like “African” or a specific tribe like “Zulu” instead of saying “Black.” Other guides I had had no problem saying “Black.” I guess it’s up to everyone’s specific preference. The first guide said that everyone treats the racial terms differently, some wearing a label like “coloured”  as a badge of honor, but others refusing to be defined by their race. They used to call all black people “Bantu,” even though that’s a specific language classification, and certainly not all Southern African tribes fall under this category. Things were divided into “whites only” and “non-whites only,” and even important foreign businesspeople visiting from Japan and China were put into the non-whites category and were treated as second class citizens. Then eventually all Japanese people, and then Chinese people became honorary whites, being granted all human rights and privileges, because of important business dealings. Cape Town, from the start, was always treated like a business for the Dutch East India Company, being used as a pit stop half way between the trade routes, so I guess they decided that people who were favorable to their business interests should be treated well even though they weren’t technically white.

One of two benches outside of the High Court. The other says "Coloureds Only." They are just kept for historical significance; the benches in Cape Town aren't all like this!

                One day, a few people from my hostel decided to rent a car and drive down the cape to go to Simon’s town and Cape Point. Our cast of characters include a paramedic/ambulance driver from England/Cyprus, a photographer and adventure company owner from India, and an annoying nature cult lady who only wore white from the US. We rented a car from Around About Cars and picked it up in the morning. Our first stop was Simon’s town/Boulder’s Beach to see the awesome and waddley penguins. They were so cute! I also found my Peace Corps Lesotho friend Hillary there too, who I didn’t even know was in Cape Town, so that was a total coincidence to run into her. She rented a bike for the day to go down the cape as well, because the trains were still out of commission.

Penguins!

                Our next stop was Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope, which had amazing views of the surrounding mountains and cliffs, as well as the endless expanse of the ocean. There were a few trails we walked along in the area, including to an old light house. (It was at this point where Nature Cult Lady split to go to a special beach to do her voodoo rituals. Obviously, we did not join her.)

The road to Cape Point

Cliffs at Cape Point

Hey guys!

Obligatory handstand

"The most southwestern point on the African continent."

So many lizards!

I'd never get tired of these views

                Then on the way back, we drove through Chapman’s Peak, on a road that was partially cut out of a cliff, which was awesome. Then we arrived back in Cape Town in the afternoon to return the car. That evening, we decided to light the braai (bbq) and roasted some meat and vegetables. This oldish guy was talking about working as a cameraman all over South Africa and having lions jump at him, which was pretty entertaining to hear.

                In Cape Town, there are two main mountains to climb: Lion’s Head and Table Mountain. The next day, I decided to climb Lion’s Head in the morning. The hike takes you spiraling around the mountain, giving views of the city, the harbor, the ocean, and the beaches on the other side. There are also ladders, chains, and staples to help you get up, which was super fun to climb up on.

A ladder on the path up to the top of Lion's Head

A view from partway up Lion's Head. Signal Hill is on the right.

Staples and chains

The beautiful city

A sign at the top of Lion's Head. Who knows what it originally said?

                On the way down, I took the path down to Signal Hill, where they fire a cannon every day at the same time. I saw paragliders taking off and floating around, swooping toward the hill and then gliding out toward the sea.

Paragliders that just took off from Signal Hill

                Hillary and I met up for Free Tour #2, which was a tour of the Bo Kaap neighborhood. It’s a super colorful area of Cape Town where everyone still greets you (“Salaam” – it’s mostly Muslim there), people look out for each other, and troublemaking kids play a kind of ding-dong-ditch game. Our guide had practically grown up in that neighborhood, so it was great to hear some of his first-hand stories of the area. He explained that it’s so colorful because a long time ago, when everything was painted white, one person painted their house a bright color to distinguish it from the others as a sort of advertisement for the business they were running there. Other people caught on, trying to be more colorful than the next, and the result is:

                Hillary and I finished off the evening with dinner at Bisemilah restaurant in the Bo Kaap for some delicious bobotie, a traditional South African dish of spiced mincemeat coated in a kind of egg topping, served over rice. It was so flavorful!

                About halfway through my stay in Cape Town, I decided to move to a new hostel. Zebra Crossing was great, but I wanted to check out another hostel that some of my friends had stayed at, Long Street Backpackers. While Zebra Crossing was calm and quiet, Long Street Backpackers had a reputation of being loud and crazy. And it delivered, in a good way. It was also R170 per night, but wifi wasn’t free. I wasn’t mad, though, as I feel like it forces people to actually interact with each other (gasp!), which traveling is all about anyway. Wifi is a crutch. Plus I had a sim card with a little data anyway, so I could do the essentials like Whatsapp and email.

View from one of several balconies of Long Street Backpackers

                So the day after I moved hostels, I loaded up my Cape Town bus card and bussed to Hout Bay, which is a beautiful beach and harbor area just south of Cape Town. I really wanted to surf, but the waves were tiny to nonexistent. The surf shop guy there told me it wouldn’t be worth trying to surf. I love the ocean, though, so I couldn’t resist at least swimming in the (freezing) water anyway. On the way back from Hout Bay, I stopped by Lladundo and Camps Bay, incredible-looking beaches.

Camps Bay Beach

                I got back to Long Street Backpackers and immediately met an Israeli girl staying in my dorm. All Israelis have to go into the army, and she just finished three years of field intelligence. She was traveling now and would start college in a few months, and felt behind compared to similar-aged people of other nationalities, because lots of them have already established their careers by now. But I told her that having three years of life experience was better, because now she has a better idea of what she wants to do with her life before going to college. Lots of people, me included, just went to college without really knowing what they wanted to do, because going to college is just “what one does” right after high school.

                Other people I met at this hostel include a sweet but crazy English guy, covered in tattoos, who takes a few weeks off every year and just goes insane partying in some foreign location. His blood brother, one of the managers of the hostel, and this English guy were being crazy together while another manager, a guy with a beer belly and a ponytail, looked on with a mixture of indifference, judgement, and brotherly love. There were also a couple of stunt guys who liked to hang out at the hostel a lot, one of which legit looked like a ken doll. The fun and craziness continued through my stay, helped along by the hostel bar’s free-shots-for-varying-levels-of-nudity policy (which I did not personally participate in. Don't worry, Mom.).

                Perhaps the most iconic destination in Cape Town is Table Mountain, named so presumably because it’s flat on top. Many afternoons, a cloud will descend onto the top and start spilling down the sides, which people aptly call the table cloth. I woke up early one morning and bussed up the long hill to the base of the mountain. I went to the info booth and they pointed the way to the advised path, which I heard was just 2+ hours of stairs up to the top. I asked where the fun/hard path was, and they told me that that path was not advised because it was more dangerous, and that if I got hurt and told someone that the info people had told me how to go up the hard path, they would get in trouble. After persisting, the lady reluctantly nudged her head in the direction of the start of the trail. Sweet! It was really fun, with lots of rock scrambling, some chains and staples where they didn't need to be, no chains or staples where they definitely needed to be, and great views of the city once I got toward the top. For those who don’t care to climb the mountain, there is a cable car that will take you right to the top in just a few seconds. The hard path up would have been almost impossible to go down, as I was hoisting and squeezing myself on and between boulders on the way up, so I decided to take the normal path down. Surprise, it was an hour and a half of stairs, to the detriment of my knees. Ouch. While I can go up a mountain all day long (and have), I always hate going down a mountain. I might have taken the cable car down had I known/wasn’t so cheap.

Partway up Table Mountain, looking at Lion's Head

"This is not an easy way down," accurately advises a sign at the top where the hard path pops out

The tiny city below

                Another great place in Cape Town is the V&A Waterfront. It’s a big expanse of shops and restaurant on the edge of the harbor. AKA it's pretty fancy. I got some awesome food, including a pan-seared beef and feta cheese wrap and some bubble tea. There was a Korean cultural festival happening when I was there, and I watched some k-pop dance contest on the steps of a little amphitheater. Then I walked to the Sea Point Promenade, which is a path along the water.

These yellow frame things are all over the city

Tourists think they're funny

                The main reason I was at the waterfront was because that’s where the Robben Island tour leaves. I had ordered my ticket online a few days earlier because they sell out pretty quickly. My tour mates and I lined up to get on the ferry, which takes you 45 minutes out to Robben Island. After we got there, we got on some busses that would take us around the island. Before getting to the prison, we had a small tour of the island itself and what buildings used to be what, and also saw some penguins. At the prison, we got a tour with this awesome ex-political prisoner who told us all about life in the prison. There were many people, including Nelson Mandela, who were held there for many years for being part of the resistance movement against apartheid. He told us about how you were only allowed to have a few letters per year, and they were heavily censored by prison authorities by having words and sentences physically cut out of the paper. He told us about working in the quarries hammering rocks, and that the prisoners used to have secret meetings there to discuss political plans against the apartheid government. Even in prison, apartheid was going strong, as black prisoners had to wear short pants like children, got easier jobs, and got less food, and coloured prisoners got better treatment. Then we all ferried back to the mainland. I don’t think I would have understood/appreciated the tour NEARLY as much if I hadn’t read Nelson Mandela’s book, Long Walk to Freedom. It’s super interesting, and in general it helped inform me about life in South Africa (and in turn, somewhat about life in Lesotho).

Entrance to Robben Island

Beautiful Table Mountain on the mainland

Our guide talking to the group in the prison yard

                One day, I decided to take the third of three free walking tours, this time in the District 6 area of the city. The tour was pretty boring, so I abandoned it and walked to Woodstock, a neighborhood in the northeast of the city. It was such a good idea to go there instead of enduring the rest of the tour, because I found SO MUCH STREET ART! If you know me, you know that I love love love street art, and it was literally around every corner in this neighborhood. Some people sitting outside their houses were super friendly, and when they saw me with my camera, they even pointed me in the direction of the best pieces. So cool!

Woodstock, straight ahead

This was one of the murals that the tour guide showed us. It's very important, but the building owner was painting over it! We might have been some of the last people to see it. It depicted what life was like in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s in South Africa.

A huge mural

Beep

Lots of the murals were animal-related, including this elephant...

...and this rhino

And even some of the buildings are crazily painted

                The last place I went around Cape Town was Muizenberg, a beach town known for surfing. By this point, the train was actually running again, so a German guy (who I had first met in Coffee Bay and was staying at my hostel again in Cape Town) and I trained about an hour down there. Someone had told him that the train was unsafe, but I found it perfectly fine. Sure, there was graffiti all over the outside, but I felt completely safe. Some people are just sketched out over nothing, I guess. After we arrived at Muizenberg, we both rented surf boards and wetsuits and tried our hand at the waves. I still kind of suck at surfing, but every time I do it, I have the best time. Then after falafel for lunch, we went on a quest to buy him a wetsuit that he could take with him when he went to New Zealand in a few days. He was doing the one year working visa, which I am becoming more and more enthralled by. He was going to be a hiking guide there, which sounds awesome because I heard that New Zealand is absolutely beautiful for hiking. We eventually found him a suit and trained back to Cape Town, sufficiently exhausted by the day.

A screenshot of all the places I had dropped pins on my maps.me app. It shows where all I stopped along the coast from Durban to Cape Town!

                I was super sad to leave Cape Town, and I forced myself to buy a bus ticket to Pretoria a few days earlier because I knew that if I didn’t buy it, I’d just stay in Cape Town forever. A friend I’d made at the hostel was super nice and drove me to the bus/train station where I got on the Intercape bus to Pretoria. Cape Town was one of the best places I’d visited by far: outdoor activities, indoor activities, food, night life, ocean, more food, diverse cultures, and cool people, Bye, Cape Town! I’ll definitely be back!