Making the Great Trek

One thousand, four hundred kilometres is one hell of a long way.

 

So like any sane British person would, my Beloved and I decided to spread the epic drive from the Cape to Johannesburg over two days and break the journey by staying overnight at Gariep Dam in the Free State, which is just over half way up.

 

But it appears that such laxness puts us in a minority here. Even though we found it trashing – and that was sharing the driving between the two of us – it seems that the majority of South Africans just keep on going, relentlessly, all day and all night until they get there – and very often riding solo too.

 

I simply don’t know how they do it, but apparently it’s a mere trifle. “Oh, so you’re taking it easy then” was one remark about our proposed plans, made without the tiniest scrap of discernable irony.

 

Another kindly-meant comment in relation to our obvious feebleness was “well, being English, you’re not used to big distances”.

 

Which I guess is true. After all, how often does the average Brit drive the equivalent of from London to Rome, even for their annual holiday?

 

But it’s only when you start making your way through South Africa that you get an inkling of just how vast the country really is. I guess if you’re born and bred in a land of infinite panoramas and limitless skies, you’re bound to get a bit cavalier about distance. You’d have to or you’d never go anywhere.

 

But coming from a tiny island, it does take a bit of getting used to – although undoubtedly you do. When we lived in San Francisco, for instance, we’d think nothing of driving the four hours or so on a Friday night after work to get to our lovely ski lodge, jointly rented by six of us for the winter on the shores of Lake Tahoe.

 

Huge, open expanses

 

Can’t imagine such expeditions ever becoming part of the regular routine back home in Blighty though. It would definitely be an occasional, possibly long weekend thing that you psyched yourself up for in advance.

 

One of the things, as a Brit, that you do notice, however, is, despite the huge open expanses laid out before you in South Africa, there is a comparative lack of variety in the types of landscape on display.

 

While the UK may be teeny, it has an amazing amount of scenic variety packed into its compact shores. But South Africa – or the bit along the N1 that we saw anyway – doesn’t.

 

As you leave the verdant, green, mountainous grandeur of the Cape Winelands behind, you very quickly enter into the apparently endless, brownish, semi-desert emptiness of the Karoo.

 

It’s all about scrubby bushes, the occasional lonely farmstead, and small towns and settlements 100km or so apart sitting in immense plains and surrounded by distant grey mountains that you never actually seem to ever go through.

 

What I did see that got me quite excited after having read a novel about them though was a couple of families of San karretjiemense (the Afrikaans word for ‘Cart People’) driving along the back roads in their donkey-driven carts.

 

And there was also an incongruous sighting that made me laugh at the hotel in which we stayed near the Gariep Dam. Described in the tourist brochures as ‘The Karoo’s Oasis’, it’s actually a huge man-made lake that was completed in 1971 and has since enabled hundreds of farms to flourish in an area that was previously too arid.

 

Anyway, as I was leaving our hotel room in the morning, I was greeted by a glam-looking Afrikaner woman searching for her cute, handbag-sized terrier that had wandered off. All big blond hair, red nails and lipstick, I was expecting her to jump into her Porsche and make off to the local spa or whatever for a bit of pampering.

 

Pleasant surprise

 

But, no. She ended up clambering into a huge, tarpaulin-covered old truck laden down with hay bales and disappearing in a cloud of exhaust fumes instead. Which just goes to show that you should never make assumptions about people.

 

Once out of the Karoo though, the scenery changes to one of vast acres of grassland, some brown and some green, obviously depending on rainfall or maybe irrigation from the Gariep Dam. Until you hit the immense urban metropolis of Johannesburg, that is.

 

And boy – what a pleasant surprise. With the spring rains, the harsh, ugly, grey skyline of winter has been transformed into a lush tree-filled vista. The northern suburbs, where we’ll be living, are leafier and more open than I remembered, while our ultimate destination, Parkhurst, is as hip and happening as I recalled.

 

To add to its charm, on our first evening here, we were befriended by a tipsy group of six, which included a former rugby international, and invited for dinner later in the week to celebrate an evening of late-night opening in the run-up to Christmas. Any excuse – but a good one nonetheless.

 

The only dark spot on the horizon has been the veritable shambles that the removal people managed to make of our transfer. Stuff broken, valuables gone, clothes thrown carelessly into boxes rather than being hung properly and so looking like they’d been wrung through a mangle.

 

I’ve never experienced anything quite like it, and it wasn’t like the service – or lack of it, I should say – was cheap. So the next job is to wend our weary way to a police station in order to get ourselves a crime number.

 

At that point, apparently, a union-blessed internal investigation can begin, complete with polygraph, or lie detector, tests in order to try and establish exactly what it was that happened.

 

Not good. It’s at times like this when you really do feel as if you’re a long way from home.

 

 

 

Moving on…..

This last week or so has been all about goodbyes. Goodbye to friends and acquaintances, goodbye to favourite haunts, goodbye to lovely, leafy Stellenbosch and the Cape.

 

Because this weekend, we’ll be jumping in the car with our suitcases and making the 1,200km Great Trek through the heart of South Africa to Johannesburg, as so many have done before us.

 

Although I have as yet to see our new place as there simply wasn’t time for me to haul my carcass up there if we wanted to secure the property, my one consolation, given my reluctance to leave our current home, is that at least it’s in our desired location, Parkhurst.

 

I’m looking forward to being able to walk five minutes down the street from there to Fourth Avenue to have a cup of fruit tea, or a refreshing alcoholic beverage of an evening should the fancy take me, instead of having to drive everywhere – or plan in advance to guarantee a tuk-tuk courtesy of the hard-working and enthusiastic guys at Tuk-Tuk Stellies, which finally opened its doors for business a couple of months ago.

 

And I’m also looking forward to seeing more of my Beloved who’ll now be coming home to me every night rather than just on a Friday.

 

Although he may not be quite so enthusiastic after he’s got a day’s work behind him, I’m keen to use our new-found time together productively – we’ve talked about learning to horse-ride, for instance, which could be fun, and should help our latest proposed new healthy eating/fitness regimen as well.

 

But I’ll miss my life in Stellenbosch too. I’ll miss sitting out on our shady patio, gaining inspiration from my lovely white and purple garden and the canopy of trees beyond it, as I write my blog or edit content from the Vision AfriKa team, the educational charity for which I do voluntary work.

 

I’ll miss my thrice-weekly routine of going to the gym in town, followed by a bit of food and life’s-little-necessities shopping in the Eikestad Mall.

 

Moving on

 

And then there’s my always-entertaining weekly Afrikaans lesson in the Food Lover’s Market café and/or a wander around the genteel, oak-lined boulevards with their whitewashed buildings as I work down my to-do list.

 

But I’ll also miss our little weekend trips to beautiful and interesting places – to the coast for a spot of whale-watching, into Cape Town for a touch of urban fun or to a wine farm for a fabulous Sunday lunch with stunning views over the surrounding countryside.

 

While that’s not to say that Jozi won’t have its own delights, it inevitably won’t be the same – and nor should it be. Change happens for a reason, as they say, and it’s pointless getting bogged down in nostalgia. Life moves on.

 

Nonetheless, I’ll look back at my time in Stellenbosch with pleasure – and with gratitude. It’s been a time where I’ve learned a lot.

 

I’ve learned much more about South Africa’s troubled history, which, always lurking in the shadows, still seems so extant in many ways. I’ve learned some of the quirks and foibles of the country’s many and varied cultures – and what “Africa time” really means.

 

But at a more personal level, I’ve also learned to be less afraid. Less afraid of new encounters, less afraid of taking risks, less afraid, even, of my old bugbear, driving.

 

Because as life has opened up leaving my former stress-filled, work-filled, computer-filled days behind, I too have opened up, becoming happier and less anxious in the process.

 

The great secret, of course, will be remembering how to maintain this state of honeyed calm once I re-enter the workforce. Nevertheless, it’s taken some effort to get here.

 

Still, quiet voice

 

It’s not surprising really, but once your life slows down drastically and the potential-filled days stretch ahead to do with as you will, all that you’re really left with is yourself and the still, quiet voice within.

 

And so it is that you hear it, perhaps even for the first time. But it doesn’t always make for easy listening. In my case, it was all about self-criticism and duty, all the ‘I should/I ought/I really must do this and that’ – an internal dialogue that had presumably been going on for years.

 

But I found it was making me miserable and so I stopped it. As simple as that. I just refused to listen and focused instead on doing something that I had a yen to do at that moment.

 

So rather than beat myself up because I wasn’t working on the novel that I started years ago but never had time to complete, I wrote a children’s book instead.

 

Rather than worry in case I wasn’t doing enough regular journalism to keep my hand in, I developed an editorial strategy and became content editor for Vision AfriKa.

 

Which leads me to another salient point. If ever you find yourself moving to a foreign country minus a work visa, it’s definitely worth at least having some idea of how you might like spend your time.

 

The danger is that life can start feeling pretty pointless pretty quickly if you have no routine and drift around without any positive idea of how to fill your days.

 

In my case though, I’m happy to say that, some 10 months on and bar finishing that novel, I’ve pretty much managed to do everything that I wanted to do. And, excitingly, given the amusements that our new locale should have to offer, we still have just over a year to go.

The Secret Side of the Cape

Most tourists pursue pretty much a set route when they come to the Cape.

 

They’ll spend a couple of days in Cape Town, followed by a day or two’s tour of Stellenbosch and the Cape Winelands in order to indulge in a bit of wine-tasting and maybe even some superlative cuisine at a local wine farm.

 

Then there’s the inevitable mad dash along the world-renowned, heavily-touristed – especially during high season which is November to February – but undoubtedly scenic Garden Route.

 

This expedition comprises a good 750km or 12 hours of solid driving from the Mother City to Port Elizabeth, from where people generally fly back to Cape Town before departing for home.

 

All very lovely, with lots of dramatic mountains covered in forest sweeping down to azure seas, but unless you’ve got enough time to amble off the main drag and explore a bit, it can all seem a bit relentless.

 

Hence the possibly controversial decision when my parents were visiting here to take a somewhat different tack.

 

In a bid to offer them a broad overview of what the Cape has to offer as well as lessen the car fatigue, I plumped for exploring the more gentle beauty of the Overberg and its environs, a mountainous region between Stellenbosch and the Garden Route that most people simply sail through without stopping.

 

First on the list of adventures was Aquila, a private game reserve about two hour’s drive north west of Cape Town in the lower reaches of the Klein Karoo. The Karoo, which is a Khoi-san word meaning ‘land of thirst’, is a vast, scrubby, semi-arid area that covers about a third of South Africa’s total land mass.

 

Karoo adventures

 

But while everyone will tell you that the game reserves in the Western Cape are not a patch on those elsewhere in the country – most particularly the Kruger National Park on the Zimbabwean and Mozambique border – we loved it nonetheless.

 

As the trip involved an overnight stay, we were lucky enough to be taken out on a couple of two-hour game drives to see the Big Five – elephants, leopards, lions, rhino and water buffalo – plus a goodly number of zebras, springbok, hippos and eland by head warden, Timothy.

 

Timothy had not only trained at Kruger and knew his stuff, but was also a first-class entertainer, which all added to the fascinating experience.

 

But he did, quite rightly, become incensed by the new depths that the ‘canned hunting’ industry is currently plumbing – rather than having to be physically present to shoot drugged animals in an enclosure these days, so-called hunters can now opt to do it virtually over the internet in a games format.

 

All they have to do is point and click from their computer and some paid lackey will perform the deed on their behalf before couriering the head to them as a trophy. Sick.

 

Anyway, still staying on the Karoo theme, another worthwhile stop was the Karoo Desert National Botanical Gardens near Worcester, which is a sister site to the vast and rather more famous Kirstenbosch Gardens in Cape Town.

 

Divided up into separate themed rooms housing plants from different arid and semi-arid regions across southern Africa, the delights on show range from weird and wonderful tree- and cactus-like structures to vibrantly colourful displays of wild flowers.

 

Enchanting. You don’t realise just how much variety there is in what often appears to be uniform, scrubby old brown and green terrain until you get up close and personal.

 

A bit of culture

 

On the more historical and cultural side of things, meanwhile, the area also offered an abundance of delights.

 

For example, there’s the Kleinplasie museum, again near Worcester, which is like a smaller version of the Beamish open air, ‘living’ museum back home in County Durham – except that the former focuses on Boer heritage and the latter on life in the North East of England at the apex of industrialisation in the early 20^th century.

 

But there’s also the tranquil and charming village of Greyton to have a nice relaxing coffee in as well as nearby Genadendal or ‘Valley of Grace’ – the first and oldest mission station in South Africa, which was founded in 1737 by Moravian missionaries from the Czech Republic.

 

The Moravians happened to be among Europe’s first Protestants, rebelling against Rome some 50 years before Martin Luther – and they continued their non-conformist ways in South Africa, providing education and vocational training to the indigeneous Khoi and local coloured communities in the face of opposition from white farmers and the Dutch Reformed Church.

 

In fact, in recognition of the good works performed there, Nelson Mandela even renamed his official residence in Cape Town after the village in 1995.

 

And it must be said that the tourist information office and café adjacent to Church Square at the heart of the village do know how to do a mean bran muffin. They also offer iced honeybush tea in various flavours ranging from pineapple to vanilla, which was a new one on me.

 

A bit sweeter than the more famous rooibos, honeybush tea is only grown in the Cape’s more mountainous regions and, being packed full of immune system-boosting vitamins and anti-oxidants, is supposed to be good for all manner of coughs, colds and allergies.

 

Also good for you – unless, like my mam, you happen to slip and cut your legs to ribbons, poor thing – are the hot springs in Caledon. Located in a spa next to the casino, there are five pools of natural, hot brown water, created as the waters cascade down a small hillside.

 

Although they scald progressively more flesh from your bones as you scale the heights, the views over the surrounding farmland are lovely. Despite a dead frog in one pool and painful scarring from another, it was, in fact, an altogether relaxing and rejuvenating experience. Which is, after all, what holidays are all about.

 

Seeing the Cape through new eyes

It’s amazing how quickly you get used to a place and, therefore, stop noticing things that originally struck you or made an initial impression for whatever reason.

 

So when my parents arrived from the UK for a couple of weeks holiday, it was fascinating to see the Cape through their eyes and get a fresh perspective on it all.

 

My dad, for example, made the point that tourist guide books are simply unable to get across the sheer grandeur and scale of the mountains that are not only integral to the Cape Winelands, but also encircle and dominate Cape Town – Table Mountain being the most famous and iconic, of course.

 

He was also charmed by the courteousness and laid-back amiability of the locals who, even in the Mother City, never seem too busy or rushed to give a friendly smile or take time for a chat.

 

Quite a change from the UK, where life’s stresses and strains mean that all too many people appear to have forgotten how to indulge in those niceties that make being alive just that bit more pleasant.

 

My mam, on the other hand, was struck by the huge disparities between rich and poor and the desperate levels of poverty in this country.

 

And it hits you like a hammer as soon as you arrive. Even as you drive from the airport to Stellenbosch, or Cape Town for that matter, you can’t fail to notice the vast, ramshackle townships of the Cape Flats lining the road for miles.

 

The corrugated iron-roofed shacks, some painted in bright, cheery colours and others constructed from barely-holding-together bits of this and that, really do make you wonder how people can survive in those conditions.

 

Amazing dignity

 

But they do, nonetheless, and with amazing dignity. As part of one of the excellent hop-on, hop-off City Sightseeing bus tours in Cape Town, for instance, we stopped at Hout Bay for a 40-minute guided tour of the Imizano Yethu township.

 

I’m never quite sure about the ethics of these things as I’m always torn between a fear of making people into a kind of Victorian peep show spectacle versus providing the community with some form of income from tourism.

 

But such considerations aside, what did become clear was just how hard the majority of inhabitants were trying to make the most of what little they had.

 

Despite the poor conditions, which included the provision of only four communal toilets for every 2,000 residents, most people’s clothes, including those of the children, were spotless.

 

The same was also true of the house that we invaded of one very sweet and very pregnant woman, who was cooking chicken’s feet and pap, or polenta made from mielie meal (ground maize), for her husband’s evening meal when we arrived.

 

Another thing that we noticed though was the politeness expected of even the smallest children. One couple from Durban bought a plastic bag full of tangerines from a Spaza shop – or small, informal township store that is often run out of someone’s home – for the guide to hand out to the kids.

 

Inevitably the news spread like wildfire and children immediately started materialising out of nowhere. But what the guide insisted was that, rather than grab the spoils with one hand, each child had to hold out both of them together in a cup shape so that they could receive rather than take.

 

It’s a gesture that you’ll notice among people begging or taking money when selling goods on the street in South Africa and, now that I know the symbolism, it strikes me as extremely courteous.

 

The Bo-Kaap

 

Another guided tour worth doing, meanwhile, was the one we took around the Bo-Kaap. Bo-Kaap, which translates from Afrikaans into ‘Upper Cape’, is the former ‘Cape Malay’ slave area. Located on the side of Signal Hill, within walking distance of Cape Town’s Parliament buildings, it affords stupendous views over the city.

 

Ironically though, despite its humble origins, the small, brightly-coloured, nineteenth century Dutch and Georgian terraced houses of this predominantly Muslim community now go for as much as R3 million (£200,000) a pop – an awful lot of money by South African standards.

 

But the high prices are at least partially due to the fact that the neighbourhood is one of Cape Town’s oldest and most unique.

 

Unlike the infamous inner city District Six, with which it had much in common but which was flattened under the apartheid regime in the 1960s and 1970s after being designated a ‘White Group Area’, the Bo-Kaap managed to remain intact.

 

Because it was considered far enough out of town to retain a ‘Coloured’ designation, its residents were lucky enough to escape forced removal to the Cape Flats.

 

Occupants of District Six, a poverty-stricken but lively and culturally-rich community of some 60,000 mainly coloured people, were not spared the same fate, however, and it is said that the soul was ripped out of Cape Town when they went.

 

In fact, after a huge international and domestic outcry over the demolition, which took 15 years to complete, redevelopment never actually took place, beyond the building of the ugly Cape Technikon college, that is – or the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, as it’s now known.

 

As a result, the only thing that remains of this formerly vibrant cultural heartland is a few churches, a couple of mosques and a lot of grassland that is to be kept as it is indefinitely and significantly, lest we do stop noticing and, therefore, start to forget.

 

 

 

 

Home Sweet Home in Stellenbosch

Stellenbosch found itself at the centre of a public art controversy lately.

A new statue of former president, Nelson Mandela, has caused ructions in the heartland of conservative Afrikanerdom, but not for the reasons you might think.

The artwork, which was created by Afrikaans landscape artist, Strijdom van der Merwe, and approved by the Nelson Mandela Foundation, was unveiled outside of the Town Hall on Plein Street last Wednesday to great fanfare.

Consisting of a concrete block clad with white marble and etched with areas of the South African map that have played a key role in Madiba’s life, a laser-cut steel silhouette of his face has been placed on either side – to great effect.

Along the ground in front of the statue, one of his most famous quotes is also displayed. It reads: “Never, never and never again will this beautiful country of ours be oppressed by one over another.”

Very apt for a town that has the dubious honour of being the birthplace of apartheid, with academics at the university here having dreamt up the philosophy in the first place.

But it isn’t the Afrikaner community that’s up in arms over the presence of the new statue. Oh no. It is instead members of the ANC Youth League who are seriously disgruntled about it.

They accuse the municipality, which is controlled by arch-rivals, the Democratic Alliance (DA), of wasting R800,000 (£72,000) on the artwork when the money could have been better spent on catering to the needs of the local population living in informal housing settlements.

For the sake of clarity, the DA is also the governing party in the Western Cape and the ANC’s official opposition at a national level. Although somewhat complicated in lineage terms, it traces its roots back to the anti-apartheid movement of the 1970s and 1980s.

Anyway, while it seems to me that the DA’s argument that it is trying to honour Mandela as an international statesman and the country’s first democratically-elected president seems reasonable, I also sympathise with the point made by the ANC, no matter how political.

Kayamandi

A similar kind of debate took place in the North East of England, where I come from, following the erection of Anthony Gormley’s Angel of the North statue on a hill near Gateshead.

While everyone outside of the region seemed to rave about it, a lot of local people were somewhat less enamoured. In a deprived post-industrial area, which in the 1990s was in desperate need of regeneration, many felt that the £1m in Lottery Funding would have been better spent on activities such as job creation.

But the living conditions in Stellenbosch’s Kayamandi township, particularly in its Enkanini informal settlement area, have nothing on Gateshead.

Kayamandi, which means “sweet home” in the Xhosa language, would seem, on the surface anyway, to be anything but.

To illustrate the point, a local charity, Prochorus, indicates that a huge 70% of the population still don’t yet live in the promised government-built Reconstruction and Development Programme houses, but instead dwell in shacks made from anything serviceable that can be found.

To make matters worse, the infrastructure, which includes sanitation and running water, is widely reported to be inadequate.

But to upgrade and extend it would cost a huge R3 billion over the next seven years, according to estimates put forward in a book called “Sustainable Stellenbosch – Opening Dialogues” by Lauren Taverner-Smith of Stellenbosch University’s School of Public Leadership.

Unfortunately however, she believes that there is currently a funding shortfall of at least R1 billion.

And this already difficult situation is not exactly being helped by the huge influx of migrant workers from the poorer, more rural Eastern Cape.

Although this migration has been going on to a greater or lesser extent for nearly 100 years mainly due to the employment opportunities offered by the local wine industry, there has nonetheless been a veritable population explosion over the last few.

Vision AfriKa

In fact, the number of Kayamandi residents has now nearly tripled from 12,000 to 33,000, only adding to already high rates of unemployment (30%). Other problems include high levels of malnutrition and HIV/AIDS infection as well as low levels of literacy.

But within this challenging environment, there are beacons of hope. One of them takes the form of a non-governmental organisation (NGO) called Vision AfriKa [www.VisionAfriKa.com], with which I’ve been working on a voluntary basis over the last few months after a friend mentioned them to me.

The charity’s aim is to support the personal growth and development of selected 13-to-18 year olds in order to complement and enhance their standard education and help them to become the success stories of tomorrow.

A key issue for many children from deprived backgrounds is that they have deeply-ingrained negative perceptions of themselves, their communities and their ability to succeed.

So the goal is to help them reframe their views, acquire vital life and leadership skills, which include critical thinking, and encourage them to take responsibility for fulfilling their own dreams.

To its credit as only a small organisation with nine full-time staff, Vision AfriKa assists nearly 400 young people each year. While the majority are based in Kayamandi, there is also a secondary site in the nearby rural settlement of Vlottenberg about 8km away.

As for my role in all this though, I’ve developed an editorial strategy to help the NGO raise its profile, not least in a bid to try and boost its fundraising activity.

I’m also acting as content editor, which means helping a busy team of youth leaders to write informative and interesting news stories for the web site as well as internal reports and the like.

And, it must be said that they do amazingly well seeing as none of them are trained writers and nor do they have English as their first language. I’m not sure I’d fancy it.

But they really are proof of their own pudding, which is that just about anything becomes possible if you’re prepared to give it a go.

Educational drama: Where Abba and Breaking Bad collide

One of the things that’s really impressed me about a good number of the South Africans that I’ve come across is their resourcefulness.

Whether it’s selling goods to people stuck in their cars at traffic lights, coming up with gap-in-the-market ideas for making a few extra rand as a supplement to low pay, or networking like fury in order to get last minute donations to keep an event on track, people always seem to have ideas aplenty.

And just as well in the case of our ‘Too Smart to Start’ educational drama on substance misuse, which finally took place, because our expected funding never materialised.

Various unexpected, last minute demands by our hoped-for sponsors resulted in a busted flush, which led to Lisette and Muriel, two hard-working social workers from Abba, the NGO hosting the event, having to work their contacts in short order to provide everything from money to donated snacks for attendees.

Abba, which means ‘riding piggy-back’ or ‘support’ in Afrikaans, specialises in helping people involved in drug and alcohol abuse within various disadvantaged local Stellenbosch communities.

As a result, the event was considered an important health education project to try and raise awareness of the key issues, which includes the vital role that family and friends have to play in helping their loved ones to stay clean post-rehab.

Although meant for everyone, one of the main target audiences was young people, increasing numbers of whom are now turning to ‘tik’ rather than the more traditional alcohol favoured by their elders.

Awareness-raising

Otherwise known as crystal meth, tik is a cheap, if dangerous-to-make, and take, amphetamine that gives people a euphoric rush, but which can lead to psychosis and brain damage among long-term users.

For further information about the whole scene though, be sure to watch ‘Breaking Bad’, the excellent US TV serial about a chemistry teacher who turns to crystal meth production, which has just added an Emmy for outstanding drama to its raft of other awards.

Anyway, the awareness-raising event in Stellenbosch was Lisette and Muriel’s brainchild and had a key aim of communicating with people on their own terms and in their own language rather than just bombarding them with the often-impenetrable jargon used by many in the caring professions.

Another thing seen to be crucial was ensuring that the event was nice and lively, visual, engaging, and, if possible, even funny, so that the core messages would stick in people’s heads more easily without seeming preachy.

So with that in mind and, after a few false starts, we finally came across the wonderful Educational Theatre Company of the Africa Centre for HIV/AIDS Management at Stellenbosch University.

The Centre undertakes education and research and also operates a number of subsidised community service projects, which meant that we could avail ourselves of its services for free.

And as it happened, they’d just written their own 30-minute production on the very subject of substance abuse, which, with a few minor changes, fitted in perfectly with our needs.

It was, in fact, the second play in their mini-musical repertoire, being a sequel to ‘Lucky the Hero & Lucky Fish’, an educational drama on the issues surrounding HIV and AIDS based around the same characters.

Touching a nerve

Although initially aimed at workers on wine farms in the greater Stellenbosch area, where awareness of such matters has historically been low due to poor literacy levels and geographic isolation, ‘Lucky’ has now been seen by as many as 250,000 people across the country, with similar plans for this one.

And it was fab. Although performed in, what was for me anyway difficult-to-understand, vernacular Afrikaans to 17 year old school children at a local high school in the Idas Valley and to the wider community in Cloetesville’s Eikestad Hall, even I could see that it was a hit.

Amazingly, even the teenagers seemed engaged, listening where they should and laughing in all of the right places – and even taking part in the discussion at the end. They also seemed to really enjoy the fruit juice and snacks on offer too.

The second showing in Cloetesville, despite not benefiting from as much publicity in the shape of fliers and the like as we’d have hoped due to our funds shortage, was packed to the rafters as well – particularly with little ones towards the end when the word got out that there were treats to be had at the close.

But the whole event definitely touched a nerve with some. One local resident, who does a lot of voluntary work in the community herself in the area of substance abuse, said that it brought back her own problematic youth and made her feel grateful that she had found the strength to overcome her own issues so that she could help others.

Her friend, meanwhile, whose daughter is expecting a baby but who has been drinking heavily during the pregnancy, said that she had resolved to sit down and talk to her. Her hope was that she could encourage the teenager to get in touch with Abba in order to get the help she needed.

And that’s great because it would seem to me that, if the events could help to change the life of just one person for the better, then all of the effort would totally have been worth it.

Spring Floral Tributes in the Cape

Apart from marking the end of a seemingly endless rain-drenched winter each year, one of the lovely things about Spring in the Cape is the amazing display of colourful wild flowers that appear.

 

While you’ll see little clumps of them in fields out in the countryside and even by the roadside, you’ll need to do a bit of driving if you want to see them in all of their glory though.

 

If you can spare the time, the seven or so hour trek up to the semi-desert Namaqualand region near Namibia or the four-hour hike to the scrubby veld of the Tankwa Karoo National Park are apparently well worth it.

 

The shock of those lush carpets of bright, vibrant colour pulsating at the heart of apparently otherwise barren expanses under vast empty skies has to be seen to be believed, apparently.

 

But at about an hour and a half’s drive from Stellenbosch, there’s also a more than adequate option much closer to home in the shape of the Langebaan Postberg section of the West Coast National Park.

 

Only open from August to September during flower season, it’s subject to staggering queues of visitors from Cape Town and its environs on those weekends when the weather’s good. So the usual advice is to go during the week if at all possible.

 

Moreover, although the flowers start making an appearance from the end of July, another rule for seeing them at their best is to visit during either the last two weeks of August or the first two weeks of September.

 

Oh, and go on a sunny day because they’re fussy and won’t come out unless they can feel the sun on their faces – cloudy won’t cut it. But then I can’t say that I blame them.

 

And so it was that, one sunny day, after carefully checking the local weather forecast and scanning the sky for any rogue black clouds, my Beloved and I leapt into the car and made off.

 

Dodging tortoises

 

On arrival at the Park, however, we noticed that foreigners were charged literally twice as much each (R96 or £6) to enter as South African citizens.

 

While such an approach may be fair enough in some ways, the reason that I mention it is that it’s not the usual way of things. Or certainly the situation isn’t generally that blatant – although our friends in the northern suburbs have warned us before that our English accents, and their associations with comparative wealth, could well add a few rand to the bill here and there.

 

Perhaps because my Beloved let the attendant know that we lived here, citizenship notwithstanding, we managed to make it through at the local rate, however.

 

Anyway, after driving for another half hour or so along a remarkably well-surfaced road, dodging tortoises that can’t half move at some lick when they have to, we noticed that the flower-to-scrub ratio was mounting.

 

And by the time we glimpsed the Atlantic, meadows full of beautiful white, yellow, orange and purple blooms were laid out before us in their full floral splendour, while being delicately picked through by eland, gemsbok and kudu. Stunning.

 

Another truly beautiful, although again heavily touristed, spot if you ever get the chance to go is Cape Point in the Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve in Table Mountain National Park.

 

Although widely believed to be the southernmost tip of Africa and the spot where the cold Atlantic and warm Indian oceans meet, it is, in fact, neither.

 

That accolade goes instead to Cape Agulhas, which is about 220km or so away further east on the Whale Coast and one of South Africa’s most treacherous, counting 250 or so shipwrecks to its name.

 

In fact, the spot was named ‘Capo das Agulhas’ or ‘Cape of Needles’ by Portugese navigator, Bartholomew Dias, in 1488 for two very pertinent reasons related to this fact.

 

Cape stories

 

And never being one to pass up on a good story, here they are: On the one hand, Dias was being all artistic as the coastline is marked by jagged, needle-like rock formations.

 

On the other, he was referring to the strange behaviour of his compass needle. The issue was that, when rounding the Cape in a boat in the 15^th century, you’d see your needle start swinging in a worrying fashion, incapable of distinguishing between true and magnetic north.

 

Hence the goodly number of shipwrecks, not helped by the fact that, for about 250km out to sea, the ocean is a ship-shatteringly shallow 60 fathoms deep, before dropping off sharply to a vast 180,000 fathoms until it hits Antartica.

 

Anyway, back to Cape Point. While it may not be all its cracked up to be in mythical terms, it certainly doesn’t disappoint in terms of dramatic vistas.

 

A windy sandstone promontory at the south-eastern corner of the Cape Peninsula, its sheer cliffs plunge down steeply into the pounding Atlantic with its dangerous swells, tides and localised currents generating lethal whirlpools.

 

Although too dangerous for swimming, or even fishing, with scores of unlucky anglers having been swept out to sea for their art, there are nonetheless safe tidal pools to amble through at Buffels Bay and Bordjiesrif, only about 10km to the north and complete with nice braai areas if you’re feeling a bit peckish.

 

From the Cape Point car park though, it’s only a short, if steep, 1km trot to the site’s most famous viewing point, the original lighthouse, which was built in 1860 – although there is always the Flying Dutchman Funicular for the less energetic amongst us.

 

From the spectacular ridgeway path, however, you can also see the second, newer lighthouse. This was built lower down and closer to the Point itself in 1914 because the original one was all too often shrouded in fog, making it somewhat less than effective.

 

But despite the unpredictability of the weather here – as in the rest of the Cape – I can truly say that I’m just delighted that Spring has finally arrived and, with it, the hope of more sun.

 

 

 

Browsing Stellenbosch’s weekend markets

One of the things that I really like about living in Stellenbosch is the number of fabulous weekend markets that there are right on our doorstep.

 

Of all of them though, my particular favourite has to be the Stellenbosch Slow Market. It’s based at the Oude Libertas wine farm just a hop, skip and a jump from the town centre on the R310 and sells everything from locally-produced fruit and veg, some even with the dirt still on them, to scrumptious artisanal food and wines.

 

Throwing open its doors every Saturday morning at 9am to the sound of an old slave bell and closing after lunch at around 2pm, it’s located on the side of the Pappagaaiberg (‘Parrot Mountain’ in Afrikaans), is surrounded by vineyards and oak trees and offers stunning views over the Stellenbosch mountain range.

 

So if we’re not going away for an adventure, what myself and my Beloved love to do is to pop along just before lunchtime, despite the inherent dangers of such an approach, in order to amble around and browse the delights on offer.

 

On the one hand, there’s a range of fine cheeses, of which the mature Boerekas (Gouda) is particularly tasty. These are sold by a lovely chatty women who always seems to have a glass of sparkling wine in the vicinity – no doubt purchased from one of the numerous stalls offering wine-tasting, one of which generally offers local Saldhana Bay oysters too.

 

On the other hand, there are home-made breads and quiches to sample, freshly-made fruit smoothies and a guy selling waffles that have to be seen to be believed – vast structures bound together with as much cream and fresh berries as it’s possible to pile up in one go.

 

Then you’ve also got cuisine with a somewhat more international flavour – Alsace-style Flammkuchen/Tarte Flambee, which is like a crispy, thin-crust pizza but comes with a crème fraiche rather than tomato sauce base, and Arabic chicken or lamb schawarmas, which are a more authentic, tasty and less greasy version of the Great British Kebab.

 

The Slow Food movement

 

And all of this to the sound of either live performers singing and playing guitars in true Afrikaner fashion, or piped tunes coming from a music stall that’s always bang smack in the middle of the proceedings and has an impressive collection of CDs, and even old-fashioned vinyl on offer. Great stuff.

 

But food isn’t the only thing to pick up here. There’s also a great selection of little stalls that I’ve had my eye on for a while now for gift-giving purposes.

 

These include fabulous hand-crafted jewellery as well as various kinds of African arts and crafts plus clothing of varying quality and styles. Among my favourites are the flamboyant, furry Peruvian hats with earflaps in myriad colours including purple, which, unfortunately, my Beloved has banned me from purchasing due to the embarrassment factor.

 

The market itself though – along with its sister, the Willowbridge Slow Market up near the vast Tyger Valley shopping mall near Belville in Cape Town’s northern suburbs – is a member of the now internationally renowned Slow Food movement, which was set up in 1989 to try and counteract the impact of fast-food and the ‘fast lifestyle’ to which it is linked.

 

The aim was to revive people’s interest in the food that they eat, where it comes from and its impact on the environment as well as to maintain local food traditions and practices.

 

As a result, as a stallholder, you have to agree not to use chemicals in your food production. You can also only sell it locally when it’s in season so that you don’t generate excessive food miles and you have to promise not to use long-term cold storage methods for food preservation purposes.

 

Another thing that Oude Libertas is known for, however, is its Greek-style amphitheatre, which has been putting on productions from each November to March for the last 35 years or so – although these days, the focus appears to be more on live music than drama, dance or anything else.

 

Young Pretenders

 

Should you happen to miss the Slow Market on Saturday morning for whatever reason though, there’s no need to despair. Each Sunday between 10am and 3pm, and only 10 minutes or so by car out of Stellenbosch on the R44, Blaauwklippen (‘Blue cliffs’ in Afrikaans) hosts its own equivalent in the shape of a ‘Family Market’.

 

One of Stellenbosch’s oldest wine farms, it works its heritage by hosting a restaurant and wine-tasting facilities in charming Cape Dutch homestead-style buildings.

 

It also offers horse-drawn carriage rides around its vineyards in summer and has even set up an antique carriage museum, where you can see excellently-preserved landaus, barouches and the like on non-market days.

 

The market itself though is a relatively modern edition. It only opened its doors in early 2011, but again sells everything from fresh, local produce to home-made fare and hand-made crafts.

 

And should you decide to sample your culinary purchases on site, you won’t find any shortage of tables, hay bales and makeshift ‘bankies’, otherwise known as planks of wood balancing on a couple of crates, to rest your weary carcass upon. Either that or bring your own blanket and, weather permitting, you can have a nice picnic on the grass.

 

Another young pretender that’s just a couple of minutes away, meanwhile, is the Root 44 Market at the Audacia Winery. It’s only been around since the start of 2013, but is open all weekend from 9am until 3.30pm and is housed in a couple of huge marquees.

 

While it’s more of a place to concentrate on your gift and clothes shopping than food and beverages, it does have the distinction of playing host to a goodly number of craft beer stalls – a relatively uncommon sight in the Cape Winelands, for obvious reasons – and of serving my Beloved the best burger, bar none, that he’s ever had the good fortune to taste. Praise indeed.

 

 

Feeling sick in South Africa

I’m not very good at being ill. I can’t say it’s something that happens very often and so I don’t have much experience of it. And practice makes perfect, as they say.

 

However, when I do it, I do it in style, if I do say so myself. Not for me any of your trifling colds, stomach upsets or pulled ligaments. Oh no. My ailments are of A&E quality. I don’t mess around.

 

And so it is that, I, a woman whose only experience of a UK emergency room has been to have my chin sewn up after skidding off my motorbike years ago or to be a sympathetic accompanist to some other poor soul, have found myself in a South African hospital not once, but twice in the mere seven months that we’ve been here.

 

In the interests of truth and justice, I’ll confess that my Beloved and I haven’t got round to registering with a GP, although undoubtedly they exist. But even so.

 

And I must admit that we’ve both been impressed by the standard of care available. Because we’re lucky enough to have private health insurance, we can access the services of one of South Africa’s network of private hospitals and primary care providers, the two biggest of which are Netcare and Medi-Clinic.

 

While Medi-Clinic seems to be most prevalent in the Cape area, Netcare is actually the larger of the two nationwide, and even operates in the UK, having set up a number of private acute care hospitals that also offer services to the NHS.

 

Once you get yourself through those sanitised doors though, the first thing you’ll need to do is register, which includes flashing your medical insurance card and passport for ID purposes.

 

And when the prodding and poking is complete, it will, of course, be time to pay. Unless you happen to require an operation, that is, and then, depending on your policy type, you’ll need to get on that phone to the insurance company.

 

They’ll check that everything’s legit, (hopefully) sanction the procedure and agree to fork out directly as the whole thing costs a veritable bomb.

 

For example, simply availing myself of the hospital facilities, which included using the operating theatre for half an hour, a bed for a few hours and a bit of food when it was all over, came to the grand total of R7,800 (£483). All of which had to be paid upfront before they’d admit me.

 

Public versus private healthcare

 

Next came the rather dour anaesthetist who charged R,1,700 (£105), followed by the poor old consultant surgeon, who only requested the comparatively measly fee of R990 (£61).

 

And mine was only a relatively minor operation. You certainly wouldn’t want anything big to happen over here if you didn’t have your insurance all present and correct. It would bankrupt you.

 

And it’s with that thought in mind that, every time I’ve lived abroad, I’ve learned to truly appreciate just how lucky we Brits are to have our free-at-the-point-of-delivery, no-matter-who-you-are-or-what-your-income-bracket-is NHS.

 

Because the quality of the healthcare that you can expect in South Africa is based purely on your ability to pay and plummets from high quality first world to overstretched third world provision in the blink of an eye.

 

To give you an idea of the disparity, here are some figures: While the country invested a huge 8.3% of GDP or R248.6 billion on health in 2011 (compared with World Health Organisation recommendations of 5%), some 48.5% of this money was spent within the private sector.

 

This is despite the fact that it provides services to only 16.2% of the population, the equivalent of just over 8 million people, most of whom have medical insurance in the form of Medical Aid, a fund into which they pay monthly.

 

A further 49.2% of GDP, some R122.4 billion, on the other hand, was spent within the government-funded public health sector, which caters to the needs of 84% of the population, or about 44 million people.

 

This means that, although the government spends about 11% of its total budget on healthcare each year, facilities tend to be very overcrowded and staff extremely overworked.

 

For instance, because a massive 73% of GPs choose to work in the private sector, there is a huge and longstanding shortage of doctors.

 

To try and alleviate the situation, the government has now made it compulsory for newly-qualified practitioners to undertake a year of community service and has also made it easier for foreign doctors to practice in the country. But the issue is still acute.

 

Plans for change 

 

Moreover, because the amount of funds allocated to South Africa’s nine provinces and the efficiency with which they are administered vary widely, healthcare standards tend to be lower in poorer areas such as the rural Eastern Cape than in richer ones such as the Western Cape.

 

Nonetheless, as a foreign national, whether treated at a state or private hospital, you will be required to pay as South Africa has no reciprocal agreements with other countries.

 

Citizens/residents using public services, however, are charged based on their salary and how many dependents they have, with hospitals using a rating system to calculate the amount owed in a bid to make care affordable. The state contributes about 40% of total public healthcare expenditure.

 

Nonetheless, there are plans for change. The government is currently in the process of introducing its NHS-equivalent ‘National Health Insurance’ scheme.

 

This is intended to ensure that all South Africans have access to affordable, quality healthcare, regardless of their employment status and ability to pay directly into the NHI Fund that will underpin it.

 

The NHI is likely to be financed by general taxation and some sort of health insurance contribution, which includes the diversion of current Medical Aid funds.

 

New hospitals and nursing colleges are already being upgraded and rebuilt to pave the way, but one of the biggest long-term challenges undoubtedly continues to be a lack of trained personnel.

 

While already subject to delays, the scheme is, nevertheless, due to be rolled out over the next decade or so, becoming fully operational by 2026.

 

And good luck to them, I say. It just seems a tad ironic that, even as South Africa attempts to move towards a more socially responsible model a la NHS, we seem to be dismantling our much-loved system and privatising it by the backdoor a la South Africa.

 

Now that does make me sick.

Hermanus: South Africa’s whale-watching capital

To cheer ourselves up following the misery of the ‘eight-day rain’, my Beloved and I made a spur-of-the-moment decision on Saturday to take ourselves off to our favourite place in the whole of South Africa (so far) – the lovely little, whitewashed town of Hermanus.

 

The ‘eight-day rain’, as it’s known locally, is a Cape phenomenon that takes place every winter in August and, as its title intimates, consists of eight depressing days of relentless, torrential downpours.

 

It’s desperate – the UK’s got nothing on this, particularly because, despite having three months of winter each year, Cape houses really aren’t set up to cope with the cold.

 

As a result, you freeze your bits off in a way that central heating makes unthinkable at home. I’ve never worn so many layers in my life. In fact, I can barely get through the front door at times.

 

Anyway, having spotted a break in the clouds, we zoomed into the car and took off on the hour and a quarter journey from Stellenbosch to our lovely, whale-watching destination extraordinaire.

 

Hermanus prides itself on offering what it claims is the best shore-based cetacean-spotting in South Africa. It even employs an official whale crier, allegedly the only one in the world, to blow his curly, dried kelp horn in a series of Morse code-like sounds to alert passers by to the whales’ location.

 

A dash and a dot for New Harbour, two dashes for Fick’s Pool, three dots for Roman Rock, that kind of thing – all of which are spelled out for easy understanding on the sandwich board that sits over his navy blue raincoat (at this time of year anyway).

 

The present whale crier, Wilson Salakusana, does the rounds along the town’s coastline between 10am and 4pm from June to December and, somewhat gruesomely, wears a hat with a bit of whale’s tail stuck in it too.

 

Happy whale-watching

 

But the crying tradition was actually started in 1992 by one Pieter Claasens, who used to dress up as a parrot, but retired in 1998 and, sadly, died two years later.

 

Such was his reputation, however, that by 1996 he was apparently invited to star as guest of honour at the UK’s annual Town Crier’s competition, which that year was held in Topsham, a suburb of Exeter in Devon. He also was made an honorary ‘Town Crier of Britain’ to boot.

 

As to the whales being cried about, of the nine southern hemisphere species that pass by South African shores, the ones that you’re most likely to see in the Walker Bay area are the southern rights.

 

Southern rights were given their name because, rather ghouslishly, they were said to be the “right” ones to kill – they were slow enough for rowing boats to approach, floated when dead, which made them easy to handle and process, and yielded large amounts of oil and baleen, or the so-called whalebone used in old-fashioned corsets and the like.

 

Thankfully, as it’s been illegal to cull them since 1935 when they were given the dubious honour of being the first large whales to gain special protection, their numbers have risen to the tune of about 7% per year.

 

And the safeguarding appears to have paid off. As we checked into our charming, if rather over-priced, ‘Misty Waves’ boutique hotel and went to gaze out of the window of our sea-view room, what should we see but a whale wafting its tail at us, not once but twice. To be swiftly followed by a full-on breach as she leapt out of the water to say hello.

 

We were stunned. And delighted. Over-the-moon in fact. And even though we only had a few spouts and the odd tail-sighting to show for our trouble after that, we simply couldn’t tear ourselves away until the sun went down.

 

At which point, it was time for an amble along the seafront to the old harbour to treat ourselves to a triumphant dinner at what both of us consider to be the best restaurant in Hermanus – the Burgundy.

 

Unexpected finds

 

Housed in a couple of the original village’s oldest stone-and-clay fishermen’s cottages, which now comprise a National Monument, it’s a cosy spot and comes complete with open fires, tasteful French-style décor and relaxed and friendly service. The cuisine itself is of a predominantly seafood bent and, just to gain even more brownie points, most of the ingredients and wines are sourced locally.

 

At the other end of the spectrum, however, and certainly not what we expected to find in a well-heeled, upmarket place like Hermanus was Bo Jangles, the upstairs hostelry that we were directed to on deciding to go for a post-prandial bevvie.

 

Although as I found out later, it’s considered more of a late night bar/club than anything, it’s also the only option in the vicinity and reminded me very much of the smoky, old pool dives that you come across in the US.

 

Full of men in leather jackets drinking beer, pie-eyed kids in denim showing off – and six-packs of ‘Choice’ condoms in the ladies loos. All very sensible, it must be said, in a country where one in 10 of the population is HIV positive.

 

Another unexpected-for-Hermanus find, and regular haunt of ours, however, is the ‘Funky Vibes’ music shop. Situated right on Main Road, you really can’t miss it – not only do the vibrant sounds of reggae, dub and ska fill the air as you stroll on by, but its frontage is chokka with all kinds of tie-died T-shirts, brightly-coloured Indian cotton trousers and bags in Rasta shades with Ganja plants on them.

 

And its owner, David Lowe, is just as flamboyant. A regular twice-a-week fixture on ‘Whale Coast 96 FM’ (7-9pm on Mondays and 8-9.30pm on Fridays), he very patently loves his sounds and has sold us some great stuff, our fav to date being the eponymous debut album of Hollie Cook, daughter of Sex Pistols’ drummer, Paul Cook.

 

It really is amazing what you can find when, and even where, you least expect it. Weather notwithstanding.