It began in Africa-ca-ca-ca

I’m taking you to South Africa.
-I will father your children!
I never did father her children, but we did go to South Africa. 🙂

The gamble

We drove to Zagreb, to the airport, stopping along the way to jump around in the snow like little children. It was February. Getting the visa was a bit of a hassle, we had to attach a document from the bank (that stated we had at least 500€ in our accounts) to our application and going to the bank is always a drag. There was no SA embassy in Croatia so we had to get the visa from Budapest. But all that had been behind us and we were all set. We left the car with a friend and got to the airport, all excited to be going.  I presented my ticket and my passport with the visa in it. When it was her turn to present the visa I watched her expression turn to stone as we heard the guy say “madam, you can not travel”. The date on her visa was wrong, they put in the wrong month so it was as if the visa had expired (we had even checked the date but only on my visa and since everything was ok we didn’t think to check the other). It looked like our trip had ended before it even started. There was less than an hour left to board the plane, we couldn’t even get our money back (and the tickets were far from cheap). But we were not going down without a fight.
“So, we can’t get on the plane without the visa?”
“No.”
“But this flight is to Istanbul, we don’t need a visa to go to Turkey” (we didn’t at the time, this was 2012)
“Well, no, but you will not be able to continue from there”
“But you will let us on THIS flight without the visa?”
“Well, yes, but once you get there you won’t…”
“Thank you”
We ran off on our nerve wrecking quest to get the SA embassy contact information of the spitefully slow internet, get them on the phone, wait for what seemed like forever, explain the situation and request that they email us some sort of document which would state that they had made an error and her visa was, in fact, valid. The time to board the plane had almost run out and the email had not come. F**k it. We boarded the plane.
It was hard to relax since we had no idea whether we would actually get on the next plane or be left in Istanbul and not only lose the money we spent on these tickets but spend even more on tickets back home. Although, a part of me was loving the adventure of it, I’m funny that way.
“What if this doesn’t work?”, she asked.
This whole let’s-jump-and-worry-about-landing-later approach to the situation was kinda on me, she was always…well, smarter. And this was a pretty big gamble, I knew that, but I was confident it was one worth taking and she went along with it.
So, in order to reassure her, I said “Well, I don’t know what you’ll do, sweetie, there’s nothing wrong with MY visa!”.
I was joking, of course, I would never have left her. Or would I? I mean, the tickets were paid for, better one go to waste that two… And it’s not like I’d be leaving her to fend off marauders in the wilderness, she’d just fly back home… No, no. I wouldn’t have left her. Unless she insisted… No, no leaving the girl I love.
We landed in Istanbul and went on to figure out where we could check our mail, me still shooing the little voices that were finding new ways to justify going on without her if this didn’t work. No leaving her, we both go or neither of us goes!
We went to one of the offices, squeezed our predicament through the language barrier and went online. Everybody was extremely friendly and helpful so even though communication was difficult we soon had the document printed out. It was good enough to get us on the plane and we had that feeling that you get when a high stake gamble goes your way, you know what I mean.

Istanbul

We had some six hours to kill before the next flight so we took a taxi into the city. It was some kind of a big holiday so the city was very quiet. I was sort of sorry I was missing out on the Istanbul vibe I had heard about, especially the infamous traffic. The Hagia Sophia was nowhere nearly as glamorous as I had expected, the Blue Mosque was better but not quite there either, and the Bazaar was closed. Even the baklava was not that great. So, meh. But I did have one of the three coffees I mentioned in the Russia story. X-ray vision!

Cape Town

We boarded the plane to SA. There was still a chance we would have a problem with the visa once we land but I was fairly confident we were ok now that they let us on the plane. And we were. A rush of joy came over us once we were officially in the country and we hop-hugged like I imagine a couple of teenage girls at a Justin Bieber concert would (I must say, I don’t really know much about him except that I’m supposed to hate him. I have remained uncanningly well shielded from his work but having heard a fragment of one of his songs and people saying that he actually considered himself an artist, I can see the problem people may have with him. I just don’t care enough to hate him myself. Sorry, I got sidetracked.).

English is one of the official languages in SA so there were no problems with communication. You don’t really appreciate the ability to communicate until you go to a place where you don’t have it. Failures to communicate can be hilarious, though, like that time in Georgia when a guy said hanging out with his friends included a lot of drinking and fisting when he meant to say feasting, but it’s very relaxing to be able to speak without restrictions when you go somewhere.

It was hot here, beach weather. Nothing like the winter we left back home. We got a hotel, left our stuff and went into the city.

The waterfront. Tons of people walking, packed restaurants, view of a huge statue made of beer cases, the cute clock tower. As you walk you get offered all sorts of things, from helicopter rides and safaris to diving with the sharks. I was interested in the sharks thing but we opted against it because it took all day (there’s a boat ride to where you dive). I was really interested in this helicopter ride in an old Vietnam war helicopter, a war zone simulation. So, basically, Apocalypse now without the napalm. But it was outrageously expensive, some 200€ per person for half an hour. I was torn but finally decided it was too much to spend. I still kinda regret not doing it.

We sat down to have lunch and checked the menus. I found my dish: crocodile, kudu, ostrich and warthog (it was one of the mean bastards that used to pick on Pumba so it was ok). Ostrich meat was nothing like poultry (which is how I imagined it to be, for some reason), it was red and looked and tasted more like veal. The crocodile tasted kinda like hake.

A group of dancing street performers grabbed our attention, one does not simply walk by such an exotic act.

A lot of walking later we decided we’d had enough and went back to the hotel. That’s when we were introduced to the minibus taxis. It’s a sort of crossover between a bus and a taxi. There’s the driver and the yelling guy (he’s the fare collector but his main job it to yell the van’s destination at pedestrians). There’s a starting stop and an end stop and all the other stops in between are on demand. Where ever someone inside the van wants to get out or someone outside raises their hand, the van stops. The yelling guy is in charge of opening and closing the door which he doesn’t always do (he leaves them open while you drive, he never keeps it closed when people want to get in or out 🙂 ).
They won’t hesitate to overload the van and they drive like maniacs but it still feels quite safe, you get the feeling they know what they’re doing. And it’s cheap. You pay once you’re inside, if your seat is in the back you just pass the money to the person in front of you and it finds its way to the yelling guy or the driver.

There was a store near the hotel where we bought some pâté. We didn’t go in to with pâté in mind, we just couldn’t resist when we saw that they were crocodile, zebra and… can’t remember the third kind. Something exotic. Anyway, in my experience there are three flavors of pâté in the world and, regardless of what the can says, the stuff inside will be one of those three (this was the case here as well). I guess hoofs are hoofs and they add the same chemicals to them anywhere.
We also bought some fruit. Now, this was incredible! So much scent and flavor! Comparing a banana I had there to one I can get in Europe is like comparing a HD photo to a pencil drawing. And I don’t mean those ninja artists who can do miracles with a pencil, either, I mean me picking up a pencil and drawing.

Over the next couple of days we saw most of the city’s sites. I didn’t enjoy the historical sites all that much because, well, of the history. And even though apartheid had ended 18 years ago I still couldn’t help but notice that at any bar or restaurant, 99% of the guests were white and 99% of the staff were black. Not just bars, almost anywhere you looked it was black people stuck with the less desirable job and the white enjoying the more elite positions. I don’t like thinking about that so I’ll stop talking about it.

I enjoyed the company’s garden, a big park with all sorts of plants. I entered a gazebo but I didn’t get +1000 exp, that was disappointing. 🙂 (if you’re not part nerd ignore that, if you are, you’ll enjoy the Heroes of might and magic reference). There were squirrels there too, we spent entirely too much time watching one of them who looked like she had stumbled upon somebody’s stash of amphetamines, darting all over the place and jumping high into the air for no apparent reason.

Greenmarket square is probably the best place to look for a souvenir, there’s all sorts of stuff there including, but not limited to, handbags made out of old records and working radios made out of wire and bottle caps.

We were at the castle of good hope on Sunday, at 9AM. It was empty, not even the bar had opened yet. Not only did we have the place to ourselves, we got the tickets at half price too. 🙂
It was near the castle that we met a con artist (my first ever real life con artist, yay!). And he was quite the actor! He had this elaborate story about his car being stuck inside a parking garage or something, his wallet… him… doctor… rich…paying us back… buying us dinner… (the details are fuzzy in my memory but you get the gist of it) and he delivered it with such conviction that he actually had me going for a while! We ended up giving him some money, not because we actually expected to get it back but because of the entertainment value of the performance! We were in too good of a mood not to, really. 🙂

Speaking of money, they have animals printed on theirs instead of dead politicians, I was thrilled!

At Nobel square I learned that SA had four Nobel laureates. I learned that there was a  suburb of Cape Town called Woodstock from a traffic sign. I learned nothing at the aquarium but it was fun. 🙂

All the guide books say you have to make reservations to buy tickets to Robben island because they’re sold out for weeks in advance. The reason I know this is because she liked to plan ahead and read up on things to see before she went somewhere (I don’t, for me that spoils the fun). Even though we knew this, we still hadn’t made reservations, instead we came to the ticket office hoping for the best.
We got tickets for that day. So we got to the island and took a tour of the prison (the one where Mandela was incarcerated) and the quarry. The quarry really is incredibly bright, no wonder the prisoners had eye damage from working there.
It’s kinda cool, in a really bizarre way, that the current guide at the prison is actually a former inmate who had served a seven year sentence there. I always have to put in an effort to detach myself emotionally when I go to such places so they don’t bring me down.
Apart from being a prison, the island was also used as a leper colony. Did you know that two people with leprosy can have a healthy baby? Neither did I but there had been healthy babies born at the colony. The fact that they had babies at all puts unspeakable images in one’s mind, doesn’t it? Uhh.

By far the most epic thing to do in Cape Town, in my book, is take the cable car up to Table mountain. We took the bus to the base of the cable line. There’s a “friendly reminder sign” there which reminded you to check whether you had your camera, tickets, clothes, whether you remembered to lock you car and things of the sort. Cute. We got into the car and soon discovered that it rotated as it moved and that it didn’t have glass all around, parts were open. This really comes into play once you find yourself near the top, some 1000 meters up, and reach an open section, nothing between you and the drop but a waist-high rail. My knees turned to jello.

I have a weird relationship with heights, I’m very much afraid of them but find myself irresistibly drawn to them at the same time, so, even though standing near the edge of a high drop fills me with dread, I never miss an opportunity to do so (and even if going over the edge is even more dreadful, I still went paragliding a couple of times). And I got my fill of the dread-joy up on Table mountain, there are some really scary view points. Also, amazing beyond words.
The photo features the side that faces away from Cape Town and I chose that one because a) there are a bunch of better photos of the more popular side than the ones I took available on google, and, more importantly, b) because this side had a model advertising it. I don’t really know what kind of bird it was but it was quite happy to jump around hardly a meter away from me and pose for photos. In return, I shared a biscuit with it (left in my pocket from a coffee somewhere).

There’s was an ATM at the top cable car station and on the side of it it said “ain’t no mountain high enough to keep FNB from helping you”. Now, I don’t know how many people actually use it since there is not much to spend money on up there, but I’m sure the sheer advertising value is well worth the upkeep.

Not Cape Town

If we had gone home after Table Mountain, we would have gone home having seen plenty.
But we were not done yet.

We rented a car. It was a ’91 Toyota (remember, it was 2012) with a four gear manual transmission (hey, at least it wasn’t an automatic!). But the lack of fifth gear paled in comparison to the other issue: the steering wheel was on the wrong side! I had never driven a right hand drive car before! I did have some experience with changing gears with my left hand as I often did it for my friends from the passenger seat (while they were on the phone or lighting a cigarette), and this came in handy, but this was a whole new experience. The first left curve ( with me driving on the left side of the road) felt incredibly wrong and every fiber of me was screaming “we’re all gonna dieeee!”. It got better over time. It’s not just that you drive on the wrong side, intersections work differently too, cars keep coming from places you don’t expect them to come from! 🙂

We drove by a slum and the size (and state) of it amazed me. And yet, in spite of the state of the place, the people did not look unhappy, they even looked quite cheerful (or that’s what I made myself believe so to not ruin my holiday).
I was glad to discover that South Africa was not that Africa, the one you see in documentaries, the thin-child-with-a-fly Africa. I realize I might come of as ignorant for even having thought that it would be and, well, I can’t really claim not to have been. I know better now. 🙂

There were street vendors at every intersection, selling anything from water and fruit to tissues, sunglasses and toys.

We drove south through various towns in various bays, each more beautiful than the other.

We drove through Chapman’s peak drive, where the road is carved into the side of the mountain.
We drove past a sign warning us to be on the lookout for baboons (we actually saw a couple and the existence of signs started to make sense. They’re really big and have huge fangs, not at all as harmless as I had imagined them!).
We drove down south until there was no south left.

Cape of Good Hope. The sun was relentless but the hike was worth it. The scenic walk was wonderful but walking all the way up to the Cape Point lighthouse was too much in that heat so we took the funicular (the car had “Flying ducthman” written on the side of it). The view from the lighthouse was breathtaking! I kept imagining great sail ships returning form India in the distance.
And yes, I actually wore the hat. Functionality over appearances. It was light, comfortable and did a great job of protecting my face AND neck so back off. 🙂

Once we took enough of the atmosphere in, we headed back north, to Boulders beach, home of the worlds cutest signpost (pointing to the Moon!).

Oh, and the penguins! You get to swim with penguins! It’s amazing, they’re so awkward-looking out on the beach but incredibly elegant once they reach the water. And they’re used to people so they’re quite comfortable swimming right next to you.
The beach would be great even without the birds, but with them, it’s really a unique place!
The most surprising thing about the birds was the noise they made. I would never have connected that noise to that animal had I had to guess based on just hearing it. It sounded like a donkey! Not at all befitting of such a cute little animal.
We checked under our car for penguins before leaving, as the sign asked us to do.

We caught the sunset somewhere in the Hout bay area, the sun dipping into the ocean, casting our shadows on the hill behind us.

The next day we were on the road again, this time going even further south, to L’agulhas, the easternmost point of the continent (Good Hope is the easternmost point of the Cape peninsula, not the whole continent).
We were a little unprepared, we downloaded sat nav maps in a restaurant along the way, while we were having lunch.
There was a part which was painfully boring to drive. Straight road, straight as far as the eye can see. And after an eternity of driving the straight line (and wishing I had 5th gear) we get to a saddle, get to the top and there’s a straight line as far as the eye can see ahead. Another saddle, another straight line. But we got to L’agulhas eventually. 🙂
The Atlantic and the Indian oceans meet there. We went for a swim and stayed in for hours, having so much fun in the 2 meter waves we didn’t want to get out (we don’t have those in Croatia).

Thinking about it now, I wonder if we were in any danger swimming there. When we were on the beach in Muizenberg there was a black shark flag up. I know the two places are not near or anything and I wasn’t worried at the time, remembering about the flag now is just putting sharks in my head. I know nothing about sharks (except for that swimming to breathe thing) or where they like to live (whether there are ever any there). I guess if there were some there, they weren’t hungry. 🙂
Btw, the old wooden houses at the beach in Muizenberg are cute, they remind me of that island in Venice, the one with all the houses painted in different, bright colors (can’t remember the name, too lazy to google it… 🙂 ).

To make up for the boring roads, SA offered some really fun ones as well! Gravel roads, but wide and incredibly smooth, you could hardly tell you weren’t on asphalt (until you pulled the handbrake, then you got all the benefits of gravel). They actually looked like they do in video games, all red and with weird trees growing alongside of them. Granted, I didn’t really do much epic driving with the handbrake and gear lever being on my left, but I managed to have a little fun.

We devoted two days to seeing animals. The world of birds, monkey town and Fairy Glen (big 5 safaris).
The world of birds had all sorts of incredible birds, some fancy chicken (they really were, with long, white, dandy feathers and a bitch I’m fabulous stance), even some monkeys and an alpaca (not a lama).
Monkey town has a great concept, it’s not actually monkeys in cages, it’s more like visitors in tunnels. Feeding time was a great show. And the people in an estate near by, where we stopped to ask for directions, had a couple of hell hounds. Or great danes. Either way, they were huge and sounded like a thunderstorm in a well.

The big 5 was the most impressive of the bunch. It’s a hundred-and-something km east of Cape Town but the drive is it’s own reward, some beautiful mountains to see.
The estate is very pretty, the buildings nicely decorated. We had a drink while we waited for our tour, I had a Fanta (orange) and it actually tasted like oranges!

I was thrilled to see the contraption that was to be our tour bus! It proved to be a remarkable off-road vehicle. Our guide was a charming guy, always making jokes. We were the only ones on the tour so we chatted the whole time.
There were tons of animals running around, enjoying all the protection of captivity (since the area is closed off) along with all the joys of freedom (since it was so huge that they didn’t even feel they were in captivity).

There’s a type of antelope that has a white ring in the back, the story is it was the first one on Noah’s ark to go to the toilet, before the paint was dry.
Standing a couple of meters from an elephant reaffirmed my decision to have a pet elephant once I’m all grown up and rich.
We didn’t get off the…umm…bus(?) when we got to the lion part of the estate (they’re separated from the antelopes and such). Even from the bus, being 3 meters from a grown lion was a bit unsettling since, as you can see, the bus doesn’t really provide much shelter, but the guide assured us we were safe because the lion knew him and the bus and because the bus was positioned so that we had the sun behind our back so the lion couldn’t even see us unless we moved. So we didn’t move.

The bisons looked really pissed off all the time (“They won’t just kill you, they’ll kill you 6-7 times!”, said the guide).
There was a sad part of the tour. They had a couple of rhinos and a couple of months earlier somebody had broken into the estate, drugged the animals and sawed off their horns to sell on the black market, leaving them nearly dead. The sight of the poor mutilated animals was heart wrenching. But, they were making progress toward recovery and would survive.
Btw, have you ever seen a rhino pee? Wow. It looks like it’s trying to flood a small village!
At the end of the tour we pulled up to a turtle. A big one. The guide told us we coul sit on it but we wouldn’t harass the animal (we were surprised he’d even suggest it). It turns out that it wouldn’t be torturing it since the turtle’s hobby was crawling under cars and lifting them! I know, I still have doubts myself, but I figure he had no reason to lie.
Speaking of cars, they had two old-timers, I think they we’re 50’s Cadillacs, but you couldn’t rent them, I asked. Not even for a short drive.
We took a slightly different route back to keep it new and exciting.

Watching the sunset from Table View is a big thing, you have to get there earlier if you want a chance of getting a table at one of the numerous bars/restaurants at the beach. I guess my expectations were raised too high. Not that it wasn’t nice, I just liked the Hout bay one, with no islands in sight, better. Maybe it had something to do with there not being any people around to spoil it too (there were legions watching it a Table View).

We ended up doing 1500 km with our rental so we had to pay something extra for exceeding the limit but it still wasn’t that expensive. Way less than what we would have payed for a serious car. And by serious I don’t mean better, this one had character and I loved it! 🙂
And I loved SA. I’d go there again! I probably won’t, though, unless on business, because there are too many places left that I have to see for the first time, but it really is an extraordinary place! If you get a chance to go there – go there!