ZIM OR ZAM?

The long overland journey has finally ended.  We made it over the border and  to our last destination – Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. 

One of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World, Victoria Falls  are fed by the Zambezi River which, after falling over the largest waterfall drop in the world, eventually empties into the Indian Ocean.

Last year we visited the Falls, which straddle both Zimbabwe and Zambia.  The big debate is where the view is better – Zim or Zam?   I can say that each viewpoint has its advantages, although the spray is so strong that we were sopping wet, through to our underwear, in both countries.     I wrote last year about our departure from the Zimbabwe airport.   Robert Mugabe, one of the world’s worst despots, turned what was formerly known as Rhodesia, into one of Africa’s worst basket cases of dysfunction and poverty, and created hyperinflation that exceeded one million per cent.  He has robbed the mineral-rich country blind and has socked away BILLIONS in private foreign bank accounts.   The country recently stopped printing trillion dollar notes and switched to the US dollar as its official currency.    The difference the changeover has made in just a year is stark.  Whereas last year the airport was dismally and barely lit and had nothing – absolutely nothing – no food, no drink, nothing in the shops - this year the tiny terminal was bursting with tourists and nourishment was plentiful, as we waited patiently to check in for our flight to Johannesburg.   And, the electricity worked!


Johannesburg is enormous, sprawling over a huge geographic area.   We rented a car in this left -side driving country.   Not a great idea.  Yosy lost his license (er, "misplaced" it . . . somewhere in the world), so I had to handle the LIE-rush-hour-type traffic from the airport to the hotel with the manual drive rental.   Not only is driving on the left, so is the stick gear, as well as the blinkers and the windshield washers - all is reversed.   Yosy was screaming at me the whole way, to "shut off the window shield washers," and to stop hugging the left curb.   It wasn't fun

But back in Zim, we had high tea at the gorgeous Victoria Falls Hotel, housed in a 1904 colonial building that sits high on a hill overlooking the narrow gorge and the Falls. The Hotel was the setting for the movie The African Queen, with Bogie & Bacall.   For dinner we tried smoked crocodile appetizer and medium-rare warthog.   I can highly recommend both.

While Jozi is not as stunningly beautiful as Cape Town (in fact, its not pretty at all), there seems to be a much greater mixing of the races here.   With a thriving black middle class, blacks are patrons and not just the employees of the shops and restaurants.  This city is bustling and very alive.   It feels more cosmopolitan and sophisticated. 

We spent hours yesterday at the incredible Apartheid Museum, which I can write pages  about, but will spare you, since we are about to leave for an (escorted) bike tour through Soweto, the largest black township in the country.   No Township in the world has as much historical and politcal resonance as Soweto.  Created in 1904 to move non-whites out of the city but close enough to provide workers, it is the birthplace of the uprising against apartheid and former home of two Nobel Prize winners (Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu).   

Tomorrow we fly home.   

NORTHERN NAMIBIA

Thirteen days of travel northward in Namibia and (other than the City of Swakopmund; pop: 20,000) we’ve seen three people.   Not a village, town or even a compound has crossed our path.   Where are all the Namibians?  Does anyone live here?

 It would take another few days before we bumped into the 2 million who call this place home.

In the meantime though, the scenery is spectacular.   Hundreds of kilometres of red sand desert or rocky wilderness.  Gorgeous rust-colored granite mountains or green valleys appear mirage-like, around a corner, lit up by the diffused sunlight of a foggy morning or  shrouded in ambiguity as stormy,  lightening-filled skies loom on the horizon.  It is the joining of the western and eastern thirds of the US; Big-Sky Montana, Utah and Nevada meet New England in the vast emptiness of the moon.

Namibia is not like the rest of Africa.   Tap water is potable.  Hot water, electricity and paved roads abound.  There are clean, well-lit and well-stocked supermarkets.  And unlike West Africa, the heat and frenzy of a desperate people are absent.

We drove along Namibia’s western shore, known as the Skeleton Coast for its treacherous shoreline.  According to the guidebook, early Portuguese sailors called it “As Areias do Inferno” (The Sands of Hell), as once a ship washed ashore, the fate of the crew was sealed.

Our first stop outside of Swakopmund was Cape Cross, home to thousands of seals sunning themselves and playing in the surf.  It smelled awful but it was so much fun to view the seals up close and personal – milking from their mothers’ breasts (what are seals’ breasts called anyway?), playing in the ocean and lazing on the sand beneath the boardwalk on which we walked, meandering among them.

We bush-camped at Spitzkoppe (“Pointy Head” in Afrikaans) and saw 6,000 year-old drawings painted in caves that sheltered the descendants of the original Man, and watched as both the sunrise and sunset transformed the valley into spectacular shades of orange, red, mint green and white.  (See photos at above link).

But the highlight so far was the visit with the San Bushmen including a night of camping in their village.  The San were the original inhabitants of Southern Africa.   Only 2,000 of the 30,000-member tribe remain in the bush,  hunting and gathering as they have for 300 hundred centuries – an astounding 30,000 years!.   The majority however are in transition.  This generation is the first to have moved permanently out of the bush, settling on land given to them by the government.  For them hunting is only done at the supermarket.   But the gathering of nuts, berries, medicinal plants, and beauty supplies is still practiced. 

We turned off the main road and drove along what can only be described as sand pathways which twisted and turned amongst the scrub, knee-high bushes and the occasional tree, traveling deep into their tribal past.  Arriving at last, we had our first encounter with aboriginal Namibians.

The main sources of income now for the San are government subsidies and tourism.  As we pitched our camp they changed from their “street” clothes into their bush costumes, transforming their village into a living museum, to teach us what it was like to have lived in the bush, completely dependent on hunting and gathering for survival.

 The San is a complex egalitarian society without hierarchy, and because they were never able to build up a surplus of food, full-time leaders and bureaucrats never emerged.  There were no aninals, crops or possessions; no ownership and no Chief.   While it has been noted in 17^th century literature that their lifestyle was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” recent ethnographic data has shown that “hunter-gatherers worked fewer hours and enjoyed more leisure time than members of industrial societies.” (Lonely Planet).

When the school bell clanged loudly at 7 am, children came running from all directions, darting barefoot in the sand and bush, scurrying between the donkeys and acacia trees to get to their classrooms before the bell stopped ringing.  We rose with them and spent almost 3 hours on foot learning about San traditions and their secrets of survival.   The San alphabet contains 4 different clicking sounds,  mesmerizing to hear – I could listen to them speak all day -  and extremely difficult to mimic (hopefully, the video at the above link will be audible enough to detect the clicks, clacks and snaps of their tongues and palates).    After dinner they entertained us with traditional song and dance and answered our multitude of questions with humor, patience and grace.  The night was cloudless and the southern sky was ablaze with stars; the Milky Way dazzled, undimmed by the bright lights of the faraway city.

The next day we were off to Etosha National Park, at 20,000 sq. kilometers it ranks among the world’s greatest wildlife preserves.  Its name, which means “Great White Place of Dry Water,” is taken from the greenish-white Etosha Pan, an immense, flat saline desert, and is home to a great diversity of wildlife, including lions, oryx, wildebeest, giraffes, zebras and rhinos, to name just a few of the animals we saw, some of which were crossing the dirt road we were driving on.  (No walking is allowed in the park – or even stopping to pee - way too dangerous to exit the vehicle.)

We are now in northernmost Namibia, on the banks of the Kavango river, which separates it from Angola, just a stone’s throw away.  Tomorrow we enter Botswana and the Okavango Delta, THE place to be in southern Africa, where we will canoe the delta for 2 days and nights.

Ex Africa semper aliquid novi: Out of Africa always something new (Pliny, The Elder)

My last full day in Africa turned out to be just about the best.

We spent 4 hours biking through Soweto today and felt completely comfortable and not at all threatened.   The Township, with between 4-6 million people, is vibrant and pulsates with energy and the lively beat of life.  Created in the the early 1900's to segregate blacks from the white community, it was built only 17 km from the center of Johannesburg so that cheap labor could commute to the nearby gold mines, white homes, and other businesses.  While there is extreme poverty in the “3^rd class” neighborhoods, the 1^st  &  2^nd class areas are clean, well-maintained, walkable and typical of many Saturday morning lower and middle-class suburbs all over America.

We drank homemade beer from a calabash in a shebeen (pub), had lunch in a local restaurant and visited Nelson Mandela’s house.  We walked Hector Pieterson Square, the birthplace of the anti-apartheid movement which began when Hector, age 13, was shot dead in 1976 while marching peacefully for the abolition of South Africa’s racist laws.   Desmond Tutu and Winnie Mandela, as well as many black South African musicians and other celebrities have chosen to continue to live in Soweto, rather abandon ship and move to “better” (i.e. white)  neighborhoods, a fact that is so very different from the reality of African-American stars, professionals and successful business owners,  who leave their childhood homes as soon as possible rather than stay and improve the ghettoes in which they grew up.  

We would have stayed longer and taken the night tour of the local shebeens, jazz clubs and other music venues, but its dinner at a fancy African restaurant and early to bed.   I have plans for us to drive to Pretoria, South Africa's capital, tomorrow, only 50 km away.   (Ssshhhh ...... don't tell Yosy).   We don't have to be at the airport for our flight home until 5pm.

Hector Pieterson, 1976, in arms of his friend)

Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno;

It is a photographer’s paradise, a hunter’s Valhalla, an escapist’s Utopia.

It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations.

It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one.

 It is all these things but one thing – it is never dull.

                                                                                      - Beryl Markham