Category Archives: South Africa

Layover, OR Tambo, Joburg

Airports, South Africa

Joburg airport. This place still feels a little like home. Not Joburg, just the airport. I have some time to kill, so I take it easy – wander through the food court in the domestic terminal, pop into CNA to buy a replacement for the highlighter I accidentally left at home, then head up to the third level, to my favourite spot in the airport.

Up the escalator, past the first of those tantalising international destinations boards – Amsterdam, Gabarone, Ouagadougou, Rome. Ok, not Ouagadougou, but wouldn’t it be fun to have the option of hopping a plane to a place called Ouagadougou?

I spend some time at the railing overlooking the huge, circular international arrivals area. I could spend ages in this spot. It is peaceful yet still in the midst of the business and there is no better spot for people-watching, even in the midst of the generally people-watching-friendly setting of an airport. People arriving, meeting, passing, chatting. A common point in a web of so many separate lives. A glimpse of what Hugh Grant’s character talks about at the start of Love Actually.

After a while, I head down to Cappello for some lunch. It’s four in the afternoon but it’s the only familiar stop between in-flight meals, so I take the chance for real food. This has become one of my staples at OR Tambo. It has a little outside area – next to the road, so not exactly quiet but without the air-conditioned, pop-music overlaid commercialism of the inside noise. I normally keep my headphones on in airports – they’re prettier with my own choice of soundtrack. But before a long flight some real noise is welcome. And real, unfiltered air. Even if it is the hazy, late-winter air of Joburg. Actually, especially the hazy, late-winter air of Joburg.

From where I sit, I can see the Gautrain station. I still find it strange, still somewhat disconcerting, that when I left for Korea – before my own first discovery of high-speed, high-tech train travel, South Africa’s first high-tech train system was only a promise. As I watch, a shiny Gautrain glides into the station. It’s gleamingly metallic shape is so similar to the Korail trains I got to know in South Korea.

In the pause between flights, I relax a little and remember all the other times I’ve been here in the past few months and years. Funny, I don’t think I’ve ever sat here with anyone else. A reminder, I guess, that the nature of my travelling has so often been solo. A hazy, half-remembered collection of precious memories never truly shared with anyone else.

As the Joburg sun edges towards the concrete horizon, I pay my bill and move off to the Delta desk to check in. Time to add another international carrier to my repertoire of experience and brace for a long, long flight. Perhaps that is the real reason I love this airport so much – it represents the gateway to the experiences of travel, good and bad, that are to come and to all the possible, exotic, much-anticipated places in the world where I have not yet travelled.

Limpopo in a week

Limpopo, rural areas, Travel,

A month or so back, I spent a week in Limpopo, South Africa’s northern-most and possibly most complex province, at least in terms of the number and diversity of languages and cultures, and the diversity of vegetation and environments.

We began the week leaving from Johannesburg (after a much-delayed flight from Durban). We headed north, past Bela-Bela, towards Mokopane. Through Mokopane and, just as we leave town, a sign for Mahwelereng. I’ve visited this province so seldom, but I have a lasting memory of roses in Mawhelereng.

The landscape is dry grassland. More trees than in the Eastern Cape, but still dry and wintery. Rocky hills seem disconnected from the flat land around them. The sweeps of distance are broken by these boulder-like extrusions.

A day or two later, we are driving through that part of the world where the farms give way to plantations. I always think of this as the edge of colonial Africa. It’s a strange and historically inaccurate thought. Colonialism extended right to the tip of the Cape of Good Hope and cattle farming and mining was just as much colonial occupation as anything else. But somehow, in my mind, rows and rows of banana and avocado trees, places to vast and sweeping and green to be the farms of my childhood, are more colonial. Perhaps because I grew up with the ordinariness of modern commercial farming but this, so far, so different, is a world away from my experience.

It is quite beautiful, actually. Mountains rising above sweeping fields of trees. So green, so lush, even in mid-winter. As we drive, I try to guess what each kind of tree is. The bananas are easy. Avocado, I can figure out. Eventually I ask about one I just cannot guess: Litchi. Welcome to the tropics. At some point during the week, we pass a sign indicating that we have now crossed the Tropic of Capricorn.

Further north, beyond Thoyandou, the world is even more foreign. We travel beyond the Red Line – the animal control boundry near the border with Zimbabwe. The soil is rusty red, dusty and bare and scattered with rocks. The chilly wind whirls the dust around us. Dark green trees, taller than people, scatter homesteads. In between, along the roads, in the middle of homesteads, are baobabs. Ancient, giant upside-down trees. The people who live here eat the flesh of the fruit, grinding it to a powder and mixing it with water to make a sweet paste. Some of them eat the fruit raw.

Beyond the village, we drive even further north. We stop at a shop on the edge of a mine and buy lunch. And then we head off to see the Big Tree – not the largest, now a pub, but a wild baobab in a nature park. I didn’t even know there was a big tree in Limpopo. There is another in the Tsitsikama forest that fairly well known. This one lies off a minor road somewhere in the north of Limpopo. We turn off the road into a park area, pay the entrance fee and follow a dirt track through thick vegetation. Around a corner we stop in front of a giant baobab tree. Along the road there have been many large baobabs. They all seem ancient and immense. There don’t seem to be any young trees. What does a baobab sapling look like?

This is a monster of a tree. The trunk is so huge that there is a cave in the middle of it, large enough for two or three people to stand up comfortably. The roots stretch out in all directions, their upper surface visible for metres along the ground. The trunk is carved with graffiti. Some branches are so huge, people could picnic on them. One branch has stretched out and reaches its fingers towards the ground, maybe 10 or 20m away from the trunk. We take pictures in front of the tree. Just the trunk dwarfs two adults standing finger-tip to finger-tip. It is an incredible tree. Some baobabs are thought to be over 3000 years old. Most are only 200 to 500 years old. This must be one of the older trees.

As we travel back south and east, the vegetation becomes more familiar, more like home. I start to see signs of the Highveld vegetation I’m used to. Even the language is more familiar – Tsonga closer to the Xhosa of the Eastern Cape, instead of the Venda further north. I think this is closer to where my maternal grandmother grew up. I am reminded of how little I know about my own history, my personal history, not the history of the country.

We fly home from Johannesburg on a Friday night, exhausted from a week of constant travel and project visits. The province has never been my favourite, perhaps because it is so different to the beauty I have grown up with, but this trip has reminded me of the diversity and difference of Limpopo. So many different places and sights and peoples all in one place. Such strange, foreign worlds.

Chasing Waterfalls

Adventures, Friends, KZN, , ,

I’ve spent so much time living and travelling alone in the past few years that it seems odd to share a place with another person. A new place. Places that anchor me, like Grahamstown and Stutt, Stellenbosch and the Southern Suburbs of Cape Town, are shared places. In some ways that is what makes them so precious. But new places are alone. This past weekend I had the opportunity to share a new place with an old friend. It was lovely.

After spending Friday evening catching up – we haven’t seen each other for months – we set off on Saturday morning to do something tourist-y. We’d done some research. Well, we’d taken a quick look at the tourism websites on KZN. For the record, the KZN tourism websites suck. But a waterfall north of Howick did catch our attention.

GPS all set up, we headed off. The road was familiar. The first part at least is the road I’ve taken numerous times when headed out to visit projects near Ixopo. Three months in KZN and the sum total of the exploration I’ve done so far is traveling for work. It was quite nice to have an opportunity to travel for a different reason.

After a while, and several GPS mis-directions later, we followed the signs directing us to “Falls”. We stopped in Howick, not two blocks from a shopping centre (including Woolworths Food – which is only a thing if you spent years in the much larger Grahamstown lamenting the lack of one). The directions to the falls had ended here, but we didn’t see any falls, so we were searching for an information centre. Across the road was the Howick Falls Hotel, with a row of little shops on the ground floor – curios, healthy lifestyle, a bookshop. We wandered through the main, larger curio shop. Curio shops in South Africa make me a little sad because they’re so generic. As commercialised and kitsch as tourist money-traps can be, at least they should be unique. There is something that feels a little like cheating about selling “I love Cape Town” t-shirts in KZN.

Beyond the generic curio shop was the equally generic tea garden/restaurant of the type that will rip you off for toasted cheese or slightly stale cake. We didn’t stop to try it but moved on to the next building. This turned out to be the museum. Outside the front entrance, on the path, lay a lazy, old dog. The glass doors were dark. The museum looked gloomy. We nervously pushed open the door. Just inside, to the left of the door, an old lady sat at a table looking through some papers. She fitted the part. She and her dog were obviously fixtures, a firm part of the museum experience. When she spoke, her voice was crotchety and her accent recalled a different time.

Her directions took us further along the road past the musuem. We stopped at the street stalls and picked up a few beaded animals and trinkets. And there, across the road, were the Howick Falls. It’s strange to have falls in town. Quite beautiful, and fascinating to see the people doing their laundry in the pool at the top of the falls. Women, children, laughing voices. The viewing area was crowded. Plenty of other people had also come to see these falls. We wander for a bit, looking at the different restaurants and businesses.

Back in the car, we headed off in the direction of what we thought would be the Karkloof Falls – the falls we were originally looking for. We realised as we were leaving town that we had never actually found the info centre and our GPS didn’t seem to know where we were going. We followed the road for a while anyway, not sure if we were heading in the right direction, until we were distracted by signs to a Mandela Monument. As we drove, we almost missed a sign for Belgian Chocolates. Mmmm… Belgian Chocolates… We drove on to the monument, which turned out to be a brick wall, with plaque, on the side of the road and then returned to the wonder of the Belgian Chocolates. Shops like that are bad for me, especially if I have money on me. The variety was impressive for a little shop on a country road. Everything looked good. I was tempted to gifts for family and friends, until I remembered that I won’t see most of them for months and months. In the end, we each bought on small selection and went away before we couldn’t restrain ourselves any longer. I am slowly, ever so slowly, working my way through a beautiful little box of cherry chocolate delights.

Chocolates stowed in car boot, we went back to Howick and found the right road – the road to Karkloof. The road had no signs for the falls, however. We kept wondering if we were on the right track. And then, with no warning, a small, unobtrusive sign on the right directed us off the main road. We saw it just in time and turned into the plantation.

The road was winding and long and not in the best condition. It was still manageable, after recent rains, in a small rental car, though. A while along the road sat a collection of houses and some sheep. Closest to the road, the ruins of a house with no roof and a sign warning visitors not to get to close to the edge of the falls. The Karkloof Falls are rumoured to have taken the lives of more than 30 people.

Further along the winding road and eventually we arrived. The falls are magnificent. The recent rains probably made them even more impressive. The water drops 105m or more. It crashes and cascades down the rock face, leaping and splashing and thundering. It sounds like a cross between a rushing river and a plane taking off. It is so beautiful and a little awe-inspiring. We walked down and crossed the little stream that flows past the picnic area and shoots out across the gorge, falling in a single stream to meet the rushing, swirling waters below. Through the picnic area and onto the path between the pines. The smell of pines always makes me think of Cape Town and feel a little nostalgic.

Sadly, there was no other spot from which we could see the falls clearly. I’d been hoping to find a place to look down from above, but the brush was too thick. Perhaps if the falls were in a more built up area but here in the middle of a plantation, there is no-one to cut back the brush and clear more viewpoints for. The viewpoints that do exist, and the picnic area and facilities are all well maintained. It would be a lovely place to spend a whole day.

After a while we moved on. We’d headed out that morning, on a whim, to find a waterfall and ended up finding two, the tourist attraction Howick Falls, with all the restaurants and curios a visitor could want and the majestic Karkloof Falls, hidden away in a beautiful, deserted clearing in the middle of a plantation forest. Karkloof is my favourite of the two – a hidden gem well worth the dirt road and the less than ideal directions. A precious moment of thundering water, blue sky, a sparkling stream far below and forest clinging to the edges of a far-away gorge. In the distance a bird floated on the air and the breeze rusted the far-away trees.