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Date: 15 Jul 2012 10:22:07
Title: South African Seduction - Blyde River Canyon, South Africa
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24:35.01S  30:48.99E

June 24, 2012 - June 25, 2012


South Africa.  Now that we've been here for a while, and travelled around some, we understand why and how people fall under its spell.  This is a place that quietly sucks you in.  It's sneaky, crawls under your skin, stays there for a while, and only starts to reveal its full power of seduction the first time a giraffe's head pops up over a nearby tree as you slowly drive by.  In fact, driving through a game park is like opening an endless selection of Christmas presents.  You creep along slowly in your rented Toyota Camry with neck swiveling this way and that, then you spot a few stopped cars ahead and a most delicious present-opening anticipation starts to bubble up from within while you think, "Is it an elephant?  More warthogs?  A herd of impala?  A zebra family?  A white rhino?  Or…... could it be? A lion??"  Suspense builds as you position your Toyota behind the last car in line and then scan the area, looking for your latest exotic African animal surprise.  And there it is... a tower of giraffes.  Yes,  a tower.  Isn't that the perfect word for a group of giraffes?  Learning the words for groups of various African animals is almost as much fun as seeing them.  A bloat of hippos, a dazzle of zebra, a crash of rhinoceroses, a troop of monkeys.  Isn't this fun?

Ok, back to the plot as they say.
But it isn't just the animals that draw you in to this place.  It's everything.  It's the lack of rules (hitchhiking is common, the South African constitution allows for polygamy, and there are very few handrails built on the edges of cliffs), the fantastic scenery, and the northern slanting afternoon sun.  Many an author has described the peculiar quality of the African sun, and its filmy, gold, shimmering light.  Yeah, yeah - you might say - big deal, so the sun slants from the north.  Oh, but when the late afternoon sun shines through the winter-yellow savannah grass, it turns it into a sparkling gold sea.  Really.  We saw it happen more than once.  That's not all though, it's the people too.  The people draw you in.  Everyone from the at-first shy Zulu housekeeper to the exuberant restaurant owner with Italian roots, or the descendants of Dutch farmers who now run a pig farm/B&B, or the lady with the deep voice who proudly introduces passersby to her very large Vietnamese potbelly pig named Bacon, who she claims to sleep with every night ("I slept with a pig of a husband for seventeen years, so what difference does it make?").  All of those we have met are proud - proud of their Zulu heritage, proud of their pig farm, or proud of their pet pig.  At the same time, the pervasive attitude is fatalistic.  I don't mean this to sound negative - it's just that South Africans seem to take things as they come, and deal with it.  Sometimes, things come in a nasty rush of misery.  Like the pillar of a rural community near Rorke's Drift who worked so hard to reconstruct a more balanced historical record of the Zulu/British battles through discussions with the local Zulu people.  He was murdered in a robbery gone wrong.  His wife and three sons carry on with his work, run the fabulous lodge we stayed in called Fugitives Drift, and have started a foundation to build schools for the local Zulu kids funded by donations given in memory of their husband/father.  A woman from the North Sails agent in Durban had her own rush of misery when she lost her husband in a long distance sailing race, followed by her son a few years later in a motorcycle accident.  She has since remarried another racing sailor.  So yes, there are bad things that happen in South Africa, but the people take it as it comes, and carry on.  Such a matter-of-fact attitude toward life is strangely appealing.

After six weeks, it's probably safe to say we've been properly seduced by South Africa.  We really like this place, and we've only seen parts of two provinces so far (out of a total of nine).  We haven't spent any time in cities, preferring instead to roam the countryside on surprisingly good back roads.  We've been careful, as one is often warned to be in South Africa.  We ride with the doors locked, don't stop in isolated places, and don't wear anything flashy (not that we own anything flashy).  South Africa is still in apartheid recovery mode, so the difference in wealth between the have's and have-not's is still enormous.  We've seen townships full of have-not's in our travels, so we do have some sense of the extreme state of poverty in which many black South Africans still live.  However, South Africa's black middle class is growing.  Reported to be 9.3 million in 2008, the black middle class grew an average of 6.5%  per year from 2001 to 2008.  9.3 million equates to about 19% of South Africa's population of 48 million.  Compare that with white South Africans, who make up only 9% of the total population, and you can see that things are definitely improving for a growing portion of the population - it's just that there is a ways to go yet before a better balance is reached between rich and poor.  In the meantime, crime remains a problem, and an unemployment rate between 20 and 25% is certainly not helping.  With all of that said though, we traveled many miles through KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga (we've yet to learn how to pronounce Mpumalanga) provinces with no trouble at all.  None.  Everyone we dealt with was friendly and helpful.  No one was threatening.

Speaking of the people.
What a fascinating history South Africa has.  It's maybe not so different from other colonized nations like our own or Canada or Australia or New Zealand or most of the Pacific Islands and Southeast Asian countries we visited, but history feels, and in many cases, is, much more recent here.

Like Indonesia, and Malaysia, the Portuguese arrived in South Africa first (1487), but in this case, didn't stick around.  Next came the Dutch in 1647, who built the first fort in what is now Cape Town.  Shortly thereafter, the Dutch established the first European settlement in Cape Town in order to give their fleet of ships plying the spice trade a safe place to stop.  In the 1650's, the Dutch India Company released employees to establish their own farms on South African soil - these were the first Afrikaners.  The British moved into Cape Town in the early 1800's.  What followed was a hundred years filled with a series of battles and wars between Dutch settlers and African natives, the British military and Zulu natives, the British military and the Dutch (the first Boer War was fought in 1880 and won by the Dutch; the second Boer War was fought in 1899-1902 and won by the British).  When the dust settled, the Union of South Africa was created in 1910 with English and Dutch as the official languages.  From there, things continued to go downhill for native Africans, and apartheid was officially put in place in 1948.  The rest, as they say, is history, and although apartheid was abolished in 1994, the country is still recovering.

All that history makes for a very interesting mix of people.  There are dozens of native African groups, descendants of European and British settlers and about 1 million Indians - descended from those brought in from India by the British to work the sugar cane fields.  South Africa now has eleven official languages, only three of which we've become familiar with:  English (spoken with a lovely, smooth South African accent), Afrikaans (based on Dutch), and Zulu.  Several Zulu travel guides we met along the way tried to teach us a few words, but so far we're hopeless.  The Zulu language is soft on the ears (unlike Thai, which when spoken fast and loud by a group of women, sounds like a brood of hens being attacked by a fox), but so far impossible for us to replicate. 

Moving on to the Blyde River Canyon.
Right.  The Blyde River Canyon.  We visited some fantastic places over the past several weeks, starting with this one.  Located just a few miles west of Kruger National Park in Mpumalanga Province, the Blyde River Canyon is said to be one of South Africa's "most outstanding natural features".  Or so the Lonely Planet says.  Based on what we've seen so far, we'd agree.
     

A lovely view as seen through the flowering aloe so prevalent in this part of South Africa (yup, this is a form of aloe vera, that cure-all wonder plant you've always known about, but never seen).


Bridge over the Blyde River.


The spectacular Blyde River "potholes".


The intrepid travelers posing next to the Blyde River.  From the left:  Don, Ray, Helen (Australian friends), Sue, John (of trawler Storyteller, which is currently waiting patiently for them to return to her in Phuket, Thailand).


Top 'o the heap.
Don gazing out over the canyon.


The Three Rondavels.
Rondavels are the traditional round huts the Zulu people built from natural materials, and in many cases, still live in.  These three round rock formations look very much like their namesake as you'll see in later blog entries.


This local guide joined us briefly near the Three Rondavels.  We're not sure whether she is Zulu or part of one of the other more northern tribes, but like everyone we've met in our South African travels, she was happy to tell us what she knew, and point us in the right direction when it was time to go.
Photo courtesy of Helen.

Next up:  Kruger National Park
Anne





 

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