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The Story

I spent the later half of November 1998 on vacation in South Africa and thoroughly enjoyed it.

The main purpose of the trip was to see my dad. He moved to the city of Durban in the Province of Natal (now called KwaZulu Natal, or KZN for short) in 1982 to play violin in the Natal Philharmonic Orchestra. Although he's come back to the U.S. to visit several times over this period, Durban is his home now. He's bought a house, remarried & established himself there. This is the first time I've gone there (indeed, it's the first time I've had my passport stamped). We spent an entire two weeks together for the first time in sixteen years, giving us new memories and a new closeness to each other that is priceless.

I also spent a week on my own in Capetown, one of the most beautiful cities in the world. November is their start of summer and is usually their rainy season, but fortunately it hardly rained at all. The weather was just about perfect.

I flew on South African Airways (SAA) direct from Kennedy (JFK in N.Y.) to Johannesburg, in the spirit of "the shortest distance between two points is a straight line". SAA is the only carried traveling that route, they do it every day, and they have specials from time to time. Passport is required, but not a Visa. You don't need any vaccinations to go to the city areas, but if you're going to the big game reserves you probably need anti-malaria pills. The $1500 (round trip) 16 hour flight (each way) is just a long, miserable flight, with anxious passengers vying for the 3-seat and 4-seat spaces to stretch out in, and drafts & some turbulence making it hard to get comfortable enough to go to sleep. The airline food was surprisingly good. So you suffer through it along with everyone else & try to relax. Drinks & food are free.

Some travelers warn you not to drink anything alcoholic because it dehydrates you too fast. I agree with that in general, however, in actual practice it's so hard to get comfortable & sleep that you almost have to get bombed to relax. So I drank about four little bottles of wine & champagne, and slept relatively peacefully. I also drank mineral water like it was going out of style & peed a lot. It's a trade off. They hand out eyeshades, cabin socks, toothbrush & toothpaste, a headset to listen to the in-flight movies and music stations. No CD players allowed! (No connection between CD radio emissions and aircraft communications gear has ever been proven, but rules are rules.) The flight east to Joberg is nonstop and the return west stops in the Cape Verdi islands off the coast of West Africa to refuel. While stopped there I got off and tried the duty-free shop, where I got a 1L bottle of Bailey's Irish Cream for $15. A 700ml bottle here costs $18 - such a deal!

Well, on with the trip. Like I said, spent the first two weeks in Durban, where dad & his wife run the Playhouse coffee shop. We went to Hluhluwe ("shlu-SHLU-way") game reserve, Howick Falls, the Hifolzi Dam, Pietermaritzberg, 1000 Hills, Umhlanga Rocks, and more. Hluhluwe isn't as large as Kreuger National park, but it's more densely packed, with about 20,000 animals. We saw several herds of giraffe, wildebeest, hyenas, some water buffaloes, and were just 20 meters away from a white rhino on a walking tour (the guide had a gun). Zebras walked everywhere, right up to our rondaval! My dad drove me all over the greater Durban area, which is basically a busy, hectic, rough, dangerous and gritty city. I refused to drive there! Pictures of all this stuff are here for you to see for yourself.

I'm happy to say that I've now performed electrical work on TWO continents! Dad had several electrical jobs set aside for my pleasure (I just love electrical work). I installed 5 new outside light fixtures in his backyard, including a lamppost set in a concrete slab. It amounted to about 3 solid days of wiring. Despite roasting under the blazing hot African sun, I enjoyed it and everyone was happy with the results. Everything's different there: here the neutral wire is white, there it's black; here the earth ground is green or bare, there it's white. And it's 220VAC 50 Hz, not 110 60Hz. Strange.

I bought some nice little things (don't buy a lot of big stuff, how you gonna get it back on the plane?). While driving near a Zulu village, we spotted a little store that sold wooden sculpture and puzzles. I collect wooden and metal puzzles. I also got a beautiful 11-foot wide hand-painted wall-hanging fabric from Zimbabwe; it's hanging over the couch. When you travel, keep your eyes open for very large hand-painted fabrics (my friend brought back a stunning colorful one from Bali). They go great on those wide open wall spaces; they fold up & pack easily, and rook mahvelous. Stone hippos, "African Art" wire-sculpture, and tons and tons of masks are also popular. I got a way-cool chrome-wire wound motorcycle the size of a telephone, it's real shiny.

A few words about the ever-popular African wooden giraffes. I saw them ranging from 6 inches ($5) all the way up 10 feet ($600). The most popular is the 1 foot. It's a giraffe carved from a single block of wood and painted to look, well, like a giraffe. I brought back a few 1'-ers for friends and myself. Some people brought 3' ers back on the plane (yes, I was tempted, but you should see the specially colored 1' giraffe I got!). The 3' giraffe is $50 to $500 depending on the quality of the carving. Just bundle it up for the trip home or simply ship it 3rd class.

Time for a little history lesson to help explain the incongruities one sees in this country. South Africa is the quintessential example of exploitation-style colonization. Maybe you know the story of Cecil Rhodes, or saw Ghosts in the Darkness (excellent movie) and know a little bit about this. The white-led government made apartheid the law of the land in the 1940's. Although the country's economy and infrastructure grew, apartheid caused sanctions to be placed against S.A., prevented many (not all) American companies from doing business there, preventing their athletes from participating in the Olympics, and so on. Everything changed in the early 90's. The apartheid laws are now totally gone. When my dad moved there in 1982, the neighborhood he lived in, the beaches he visited, and restaurants he went to had "Whites Only" signs, and of course that's all history too. The political racial classification systems are too complicated to begin to describe, but suffice to say that South Africans are typically white, of British, Dutch and Indian descent. Most Africans are black and indigenous.

Now, this storyline might sound familiar to Americans. But it's actually a very different situation. When the U.S. abolished slavery and gave blacks the right to live free & vote, it impacted a minority (a small percentage of the total) of the American population. When S.A. abolished apartheid and gave blacks (Africans) the right to live free and vote, it impacted the VAST majority of the population of South Africa. Blacks outnumber whites ten to one. Now there are millions of mostly-uneducated, virtually unskilled citizens to bring into the 20^th century. Needless to say, there's a lot of work ahead, and that it's time to start paying the price of fifty years of neglect and unfair treatment. It will take several generations to solve the problems. They have already started implementing Affirmative Action, to the chagrin of many white South Africans who lost their jobs to less-qualified Africans in the process.

Crime is extremely bad in South Africa. You may have heard about the pipe bombs going off in Capetown. Among many Africans, there's an almost culturally ingrained sense of disregard for personal liberties and the rule of law. Unemployment is high, and inflation and white-flight is up. The African National Congress (ANC), a socialist organization, is proving to be thoroughly incapable of figuring out ways to stimulate employment, rebuild infrastructure, and encourage secondary industries vital to the growth of the country. President Nelson Mandela, a respectable lawyer who spent years in prisons during apartheid, lacks any real political experience, and was heavily criticized for letting thousands of prisoners out of prison 6 months early as a good will gesture. Some of them went right back to crime & murder. Then there are the white farmers getting killed... maybe you saw the 60 Minutes episode about that... tragic...

Tourism is doing fairly well though, when tourists aren't being attacked & killed by African gangs. Some portions, like Lesotho, are totally out of control with inter-tribal violence and tourists simply don't set foot there. Other portions, like Capetown, Joberg & Durban, have horrible crime problems but also have thriving business, investment and tourist attractions. The public transportation system is pathetic by American big-city standards. Africans use the major highways as through they were pedestrian walkways, even to sell fruits & veggies as motorists whiz past @120kph. It's extremely dangerous and something has to be done about it. People routinely drive through red stoplights ("robots"), make right turns from left lanes, cut each other off, and so on. Practically every house has a ten foot high brick wall around it (an unnerving sight for an American). The major intersections have automatic cameras to catch people running red lights (they get about 60,000 A MONTH) and on the highways for speeding. And the South African police have one of the highest mortality rates in the world.

This may be hard to believe, but it's actually a super choice for an American or English tourist anyway, because the dollar and pound are exceptionally well against the South African Rand (about $1 = R5), almost everyone speaks English, and there are great things to see & do.

Many South Africans speak both English and Afrikaans, a language that developed from 17th-century Dutch and is an official language of South Africa. If you understand German you might be able to get a rough idea what they're talking about.

I spent my last day in Durban at the University of Natal. They were having an Electrical Engineers Open House, so naturally I had to see that. I was impressed. Many of the student projects involved fields of study that have great important and practicality to South Africa. For example, students were working on capacitor sizing algorithms for cogeneration plants, large three-phase motor design, industrial control SCADA systems, & welder design. South Africa needs these things, it's time to wire up the remote provinces and African villages, it's time to build factories to support secondary industries. I didn't see as much cutting-edge highly-theoretical stuff, such as design of optical waveguides for fiber-optic computer chips, like you would see at MIT or even my own Alma Mater, University of Pittsburgh. Indeed, I wasn't expecting to, it wouldn't be practical.

I spent my last week in Capetown to hike up Table Mountain, went out to the very tip of the Cape of Good Hope, Stellenbosch, the WaterFront, and a couple vineyards. Capetown is a wine town, hundreds of vineyards everywhere. Capetown's scenery, oceans, vineyards and modern civilization makes it the most amazingly beautiful place I've ever been in my life. It's a nice place to visit and you WOULD want to live there. The scenery is astonishing. Take the rotating cablecar up to the 3000' peak of Table Mountain to overlook downtown Capetown, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Indian Ocean, and on a clear day see all the way down to the Cape of Good Hope. It's simply breathtaking.

I stayed with friends of my dad, Stuart Scott, who runs a bed & breakfast in Clairmont. The people were very friendly, inviting me to parties and to go out clubbing, I met lots of people and will keep in touch with many of them. I had no trouble driving (on the "wrong" side of the road) in Capetown. The crime problems and drivers who break every rule in the book is a nuisance everywhere, but fortunately the only bad thing that happened to me was someone stole the antenna off my AVIS rental car ($35 deductible).

Other Discoveries & Observations

Music. A band called Coleske. It's like a light South African contemporary folk music. You can order it here as an import.

Wine. Klein Constantia Via de Constance, a semi-sweet dry, five-start wine. My favorite wine in the world is still Honey Nut Apple from the Haight Vineyard right here in Connecticut.

Photos. I used a Minolta Maxxum 330si RZ with Quantaray lenses and Kodak Premium film. I am barely even an amateur photographer and haven't taken any classes on the subject. However, many of them turned out fairly well, particularly the Capetown ones. One reason for this is the perfect weather. Another is that I made it a point to be on the correct side of Table Mountain for the optimum sunlight conditions. I planned my days with picture-taking in mind.

PC's. PC's here and PC's in S.A. are virtually identical. What we call a 3.5" floppy drive, they call a stiffy drive. Makes sense, it is stiff, not floppy, sexual innuendo notwithstanding. Of course their power supply is sized for twice the voltage and has a very different-looking plug. The QWERTY keyboard layout is the same, except the CAPS LOCK, TAB & SHIFT keys are slightly rearranged. Internet service is there, but slow and unreliable. Technology is playing catch-up, and will no doubt grow very quickly over the years to come. There were Internet cafes in Durban, Capetown, and Stellenbosh, for a couple $ per hour. There was a free one in the huge computer store in Durban, across from the Macro. The reason they offer it for free is to stimulate more interest in PC's, and sell more of 'em. Of course, the PC store locks you out of SMTP & POP (so be prepared to use Hotmail), but still, it's nice.

Television. In America, anyone can buy a TV, plug it in & raise an antennae. TV reception is free, because the broadcasters are paying for licenses to transmit. It doesn't work that way in S.A. The consumers are required to pay a yearly fee for the license to use an antenna to receive TV signals. It sounded strange to me too (someone told me they do that in Britian as well). You'll get 4 or 5 channels that way. Cable TV is not widely available. Digital satellite TV is the common way to get lots of stations in S.A. I saw a 36" diagonal flat-panel plasma HDTV ($10K) in an electronics store in the Waterfront mall.

Currency, phone calls, rentals. ABSA banks were easy to find, make currency conversion a breeze. I bought R20 and R50 TELKOM cards routinely to make calls, but in retrospect should have simply rented a cellular phone at the airport. I rented an automatic for about $70/day, a pretty good price.