19 November 2016: South Africa- Storms River, Knysna

               On my way out of J Bay, I stopped at Storms River Mouth Park for the day. Once again, I got the SADC price no problem. I found lots of little baby rock rabbits on my way to do a beautiful Oceanside hike to a suspension bridge and to a waterfall.

Yet another selfie because, you know, solo travel

Lounging rock rabbits

Suspension bridges

I spy a deer

Orange on the trees...

...and on the rocks

Scrambling over the rocks

                Then I quickly passed through Plettenberg Bay. I didn’t really stop there, but I heard it’s also a really nice place to visit. I ended up in Knysna. Island Vibe also has a location in Knysna (“nyz-na”), but they were all booked up when I tried to reserve, so instead I ended up at Knysna Backpackers (R170/night for a dorm), which is a cute old house not too far from the town center. Knysna is basically a big bay with cliffs at the opening to the ocean called the heads. I drove to the eastern head to several really picturesque lookouts. Then I drove around an island in the bay called Leisure Island, then walked along the waterfront where I ran into some people I’d met in J Bay.

Views on and around the heads, and from Leisure Island

                The next day, I killed a bunch of time wandering around and watching people fishing before I got a mid-day cruise around the bay. It was on this big boat that basically took you to the heads and back. There were other cruises and speedboat rides that you could take even through the heads, but those were either all booked up or super expensive. The other people on board were pretty loud and obnoxious, but the views of the cliffs were really cool. Later, I drove to the nearby beach at Buffalo Bay and swam in the glorious ocean and tried to even out my awful shorts tan while trying (and failing) to concentrate on some philosophical book by Albert Camus that I had found in a previous hostel. It was too heavy for a casual beach day.

Shops at the waterfront

Boats at the docks

Long day for fishers

From the tour boat

                Then it was back to the hostel where who should be in my dorm but my ever-present vacation friend George. Since this was the third hostel we saw each other at, he said I must be following him (even though I got there first…). Then all of a sudden everyone in the hostel, including two South African guys, a German girl, George the Brit, and even a hermit-type French guy ended up in the kitchen drinking all the stuff that the Afrikaners said that they needed to get rid of before they go back to work in the next few days. Man if there’s one thing South Africans can do, it’s drink. So what would have normally been a quiet hostel night turned into a lively party in the kitchen. Then somehow someone got the French guy in an argument about cheese, which was hilarious because, being French, he was just so passionate about his opinion on different cheeses. After a while, the kitchen could not contain us, so we decided to go out into Knysna, following some people who actually lived there, and they took us to some pretty cool spots, so that was a nice ending to a fun night.

At one point I pulled one of the South African guys aside and asked him some linguistic questions. He was black, of Khoisan heritage, but he was speaking Afrikaans. I was quite confused, so I asked him about it. I had the impression that only white South Africans spoke Afrikaans. He said that the Khoisan language has all but died out, so being in a region where Afrikaans is a dominant language, they’ve adopted that as a first language. It’s also a first language for many coloured (technical term for mixed race or European/African/Asian heritage) people as well. Well, who’d have thunk it? The linguistic situation in South Africa is super complicated, but very interesting.

18 November 2016: South Africa- Jeffrey’s Bay (J Bay)

          I checked in to camp (R80/night out of season, R170 for dorms) in Jeffrey’s Bay at a really cool place called Island Vibe. The place is really big, with lots of areas to hang out, two kitchens, a bar and restaurant area, and an outdoor area with tables and a little grass space to camp. It’s right on the beach too. The first full day I was there, it was insanely windy and kind of cold, so instead of swimming in the ocean like I’d intended to, I just walked around on the beach. Walking around outside in the same pair of shots wasn’t helping with the 2016 Shorts Tan Fiasco caused by hiking in Coffee Bay all day without sunscreen, but whatever. Maybe later I’d try to strategically put more sunscreen on the tan part and let the white part get a little darker…Anyway. The sea was super foamy and the beach was quite empty. I walked back through town and boredly browsed some of the surf-brand outlet stores. Back at the hostel, I did some writing on my computer as I talked to a guy named George I had met back in Coffee Bay who happened to be at my hostel again. This tends to happen around here. In South Africa, you’re either going from Durban to Cape Town or from Cape Town to Durban with little deviation in the route, so you get to run into the same travelers from place to place. The night ended with some rowdy card games and partying with a really cool group of people in the restaurant/bar. I love nights like that- a group of mostly complete strangers comes together and just has a blast together.

A view from the hostel to the beach

The camping area

A chunk of very smelly whale that washed up on the beach. A bulldozer very shortly carried it down the beach and buried it.

                The next day, it was also super windy, and my tent was acting like it was gonna blow away. It probably also didn’t help that I had only 3 tent stakes at this point. So I folded it up and put it in my car, then I was very silly and decided that I wanted to surf. J Bay is one of the best spots to surf in the world, so I decided that I didn’t want to miss out. However, after renting the board and carrying it down to the beach, it got so windy that I had trouble carrying the board as it acted like a sail trying to carry me away. I got several waves, but mostly it kinda sucked because of the wind. I got out and started to go back to the hostel, but I could barely hold on to my board. My struggling must have been obvious, because a lifeguard out for a run noticed me stopping every few steps to get a better grip on my board, so he was a doll and helped me carry it back. Phew!

Surfers

                The last day I was in J Bay, the only thing of substance I did was take a super long (for me, anyway) run on the beach, taking advantage of the sand to be able to run barefoot, then I had a conversation with this Afrikaner guy who has been traveling by bicycle through South Africa and Namibia for a few months. I gave him some advice about biking through Lesotho, and suggested some bike-friendly routes he might be able to take through the country.

                I so wish that the weather had been better while I was in Jeffrey’s Bay, because I would have done a lot more (quality) surfing, but alas, the rain and clouds have been out to get me this whole time. But it was still really fun and highly recommended.

16 November 2016: South Africa- Addo Park and Port Elizabeth

Note: After I posted about East London, I was asked by a family member how England was. Apparently it was not clear that East London is a city in South Africa. I did not go to London, England. Sorry for any confusion!

                I left Fairyland (aka Hogsback) super early, rolled up my tent, and drove. On the road, I picked up a nurse first, then a lady going to the clinic. They both offered me money, but I told them to keep it. I’m trying to pay it forward for all the times I hitched for free. My destination for the day would be Addo Elephant Park, close to Port Elizabeth where I’d be staying for the night. The park is enormous, and of course I arrived at the completely wrong entrance (the one for people just passing through), so I had to promise the guard I’d drive straight through it with no deviations so I could get to the actual paying entrance. I did just that, but on the way I found a buffalo, and there was a cool turtle walking across the road where I stopped to pee. I exited the park only to drive to the official entrance and enter again. Still technically a resident of Lesotho, I was able to pay the SADC (Southern African Development Community- a collaboration of Southern African countries) price, which as like half the international price. Surprisingly (or not?), they didn’t even check to see if I was actually a SADC resident. I drove around the park for like 5 hours finding elephants (and baby elephants!), warthogs, an ostrich, meerkats, some kind of fox/jackal, different kinds of big deer types, huge tortoises, dung beetles (which, according to signs along the road, I must give the right of way to), zebras, and more elephants. Then I got sick of it and booked it back to the main gate.

Tortoise in the road

The actual entrance

Zebras

My rental car used to be all white...

Heyo

Elephant booties

The baby chilling under the mom

Line of cars waiting for the elephants to get out of the road

                This may not seem very significant, but on my way out of Addo and toward Port Elizabeth, I found myself in the middle of a huge herd of ENORMOUS wild windmills. They were so big, slowly turning their blades in sync. I felt like the 2016 version of Don Quixote. Let me add here that I never read the book Don Quixote, just saw the Wishbone version on TV when I was little, and I distinctly remember him fighting a windmill and swiftly losing.

Anyway, coming into Port Elizabeth was pretty sketchy and trash heap-ey. It was pretty gross. I finally got into the actual city (much cleaner) and found my hostel called 28 Towpath (R100/night camping), a giant house and gardens with a super sustainable and hippie vibe.  As he pointed out where I could set up my tent, the owner was like, “The [normal] bathroom is in there, here’s the compost toilet, and if you don’t want to go all the way inside, you can just pee in the garden.” Nice I love when people are that laid back. I spent the rest of the evening making dinner, chilling in the hammock, and snuggling up with a little dog. Hostel dogs are the best dogs.

                The next day, I woke up in my tent, packed up, and headed to the waterfront. This hostel’s back yard is basically a strip of grass that comes right up to some kind of canal. It’s really peaceful, and I decided to go for a morning walk along the water as Little Dogs 1 and 2 followed me down the path. I took advantage of the grass to do a little workout and stretch out there. Then I peaced out and drove into the Port Elizabeth city center to explore Route 67, which is a series of 67 (more or less) works of art and quotations to commemorate Mandela’s 67 years of political life. It was really cool, from under-the-highway murals to this nice park with the second largest flag in Africa and pieces of art all around. One of my favorites kind of blended into the city and I didn’t notice it at first. It was  the side of a combi (minibus taxi) on a rock face that, in several steps, looked like it was taking off into the air.

Airborne combi

Murals under the bridge

 Library

 Under/inside of one of the big sculptures

The park with the 2nd biggest flag in Africa

 Completing the chain

Mosaic benches at a park

                After getting my art fix, I headed off to Jeffrey’s Bay (J Bay). Stay tuned!

14 November 2016: South Africa- Hogsback

If there’s one word I can use to sum up Hogsback, it’s “fairyland.” I had to go inland from the coast a bit to get there, and it's up in the very green mountains. This whole town is like a permanent renaissance fair. It’s weird. My hostel, Away with the Fairies (R90/night for camping, R160 for dorms), is super cutesy with elves, fairies, and Tolkein quotes painted all over it. My first day, I went on a short (and slippery, muddy hike due to the recent rain) hike to an 800-year-old “big tree” and some streams and waterfalls and such.

I can't tell you how many people I met who have "Not all those who wander are lost" tattoos...

                My second day, I went on a longer, 6 hour hike and wander around. I found a bunch of waterfalls, one of which was called Madonna and Child falls. There, some guy asked me if I had washed me face in the water. No…I hadn’t. He said that it was an “Africanism” to wash my face in the water and it would wash all my bad luck away. Why not, I thought, and I washed my face. “Feel better?” he asked. Yes, actually. Strangely I felt much better.

The cleansing power of the waterfall

                Back at the hostel, I had signed up for the outdoor bath. They have a bathtub in a secluded spot in the trees that overlooks the mountains. It was a great view, but just a mediocre bath because it was a little cold outside and the water wasn’t too hot. Should have stoked the donkey heater, I guess. Still wanting to bathe, I immediately just went to the normal shower block and took a hot shower in there, then relaxed in front of the fire.

13 November 2016: South Africa- East London

Leaving Coffee Bay, I drove in the rain north to the main highway. Confident in my driving abilities so far, I picked up two girls  on the way to school as my first hitch passengers. Then somehow I got led to this dirt road where I had to do some serious off-roading in the grass where the road was under construction. Let me tell you- bouncing down a bad dirt road in a tiny car with tires the size of your head is not the most fun thing in the world. Then I picked up an old lady (people call grandmas “gogo” here), again used my infantile isiXhosa to greet her and ask her where she was going, and dropped her off at the highway junction. Then I drove to a town called Cintsa just to check it out. It was pretty meh, especially in the rain, but I guess worth a look since I was able to write about it. I’m trying this new thing where I write city descriptions for this website hostelz.com and get a few bucks for each one. I think it’ll help me break into travel writing if I decide to get serious about that.

                Soon enough, I got into East London, where I would be staying with my friend Colleen’s extended relatives who live there. They moved about a year ago from Germay because they just wanted to live abroad. Good enough reason for me. The family was amazing and so sweet, and I spent the afternoon playing with their dog Scooper (named after Sheldon Cooper, as they are obsessed with the TV show Big Bang Theory) and with the daughter. The father and son and I did some obligatory, post-election political talk over an amazing German-inspired dinner they cooked.

                The next day, I took the dog to the beach, then the family went out to this adorable café called Lavender Blue where I got an awesome pear/biltong/brie/peanut brittle salad. I am in love with salads now that they are actually available. Salads in the traditional sense (and certainly not fancy salads) don’t really exist in Lesotho. Then I met up with a girl I had met in Coffee Bay at a restaurant called Sanook for dinner.

                East London doesn’t really have much going for it in terms of touristy things to do, except a pretty nice beach, but it was just so nice to be so fully welcomed into a family’s home for a couple of days after camping and solo traveling thus far.

An article to keep you entertained

while I'm perpetually behind on my blog. I'm still in Africa, so wifi isn't really a thing. Patience.

This article talks about the crazily disproportionate education rate of girls over boys in Lesotho, even though there is still a lot of violence against women in this patriarchal society. 

http://www.ozy.com/acumen/the-african-country-where-girls-learn-way-more-than-boys/74896

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.