SOUTH AFRICA and LESOTHO
March 2005 - St Lucia, South Africa
St. Lucia is nice! This peaceful town is next to Africa's largest estuary, full of hippos and crocodiles and birds. Unlike a number of places in South Africa, the town is safe to walk around at night, except for the hippos. Just last week, a croc ate a snoozing fisherman. We drove with Steve and Regina through the local game park (our first safari). We saw loads of wildlife but alas, no elephants.
One nice thing about traveling in South Africa is the network of backpacker hostels and the door-to-door Baz Bus service. I usually avoid tourist buses, but given the sketchy scene near some bus stations, this service makes traveling safe and easy. We are no strangers to tightly-packed buses with our backpacks on our laps, and I'm told this is the norm in Africa, so we'll enjoy the Baz Bus while we can.
The owners of nearly every business we have dealt with are white, even though the vast majority are black. Unfortunately, the question of race cannot be ignored.
No commentary about South Africa is complete without mentioning HIV / AIDS. It's an enormous problem. In the most remote area of Lesotho we met a boy with infectious sores all over his body; given the horrific statistics, this was surely AIDS related. Local people constantly bring to my attention the quantity of suffering. This is a sad reality all over Africa. OK, I mentioned it.
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Lesotho is that country completely surrounded by South Africa. We went horse trekking in the unspoiled highlands, where we stayed in huts with the Besotho people. It was well worth the long and uncomfortable bus rides. The white owner of the Malealea Lodge says that there are six (6) white people born and raised in Lesotho who are still there. The rest left with the end of the British colonial period in 1966. We left Lesotho via the scenic Sani Pass, en route to the coastal city of Durban, South Africa. I never saw Internet access in Lesotho, so I'm posting this from Durban.
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I've been to Africa before, but Morocco is a world apart. Johannesburg is not what one thinks of when one thinks of Africa. At first glance, it seems to be a modern city. It is well-organized, green, and friendly. BUT... JoBurg has a bad reputation for violent crime (mostly theft), as does every large city in South Africa, and this reputation is well deserved. Those nice houses are protected by high walls topped with electric fences, and it is unsafe to walk on many streets, even in daylight. People talk all the time about what is safe and what is not safe. They say, "If you go there with your camera, you won't have your camera for long." Needless to say, I don't have pictures from such areas.
JoBurg reminds me of a Brazilian city, except that the crime is worse and there is less racial integration. This makes sense because the brutally racist Apartheid laws were abolished so recently (in 1990). The whites are descendant from the Dutch and British colonizers, they tend to be blond, and they dominate economically. Their language, Afrikaans, is similar to Dutch, but the blacks speak nine other languages, plus English.
South Africa is a well-developed country, with good roads and infrastructure, and it is expensive. A typical double room in a backpacker's hostel costs about $30 US (no private bath, no free breakfast). We didn't stay long in JoBurg but we did tour the Soweto area, hit some museums, and met up a friend of a friend, Jethro, who showed us a good time. Then we went into the mountain kingdom of Lesotho. Our plan is to head north as far as Israel.
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