Category Archives: Travel

Still cruising after all of these years

Travel

“I watched the coast. Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you – smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, Come and find out” Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

A friend and I once had a long debate about whether or not cruise-ship holidays really qualified as travel in the ‘learn more about yourself and the place you’re visiting’ kind of understanding of travel. At the time I had just returned from a 5-day cruise in the Caribbean where I fell in love with cruising. I was reminded of the conversation last weekend when, randomly paging through the travel section of the Sunday papers, I came across an ad for a cruise from Cape Town to Namibia which sounds gorgeous.

The disadvantages of a cruise is that you spend most of your time in what is basically a floating luxury hotel. Which may not sound like a disadvantage to most people. The thing about spending all your time on a luxury floating hotel is that you never really get to meet the local people and really understand their lives. Or at least, that is the argument.

This, believe it or not, is where I differ with many other people. I disagree on two points. Firstly, I think the suggestion that riding public transport and staying in low-cost accommodation brings you closer to understanding the local people than the few hours of visiting a place – perhaps including museums and tourist-friendly cultural packages – is probably wishful thinking. The argument basically goes that you need to get closer to the local people and experience some of the way they live in order to understand them. I don’t think you do understand them. I don’t think that taking a few local taxis or walking through poor areas allows any real insight into the realities of these people’s lives. Perhaps I am jaded as a result of watching foreigners come to South Africa, spend a few days or sometimes even a few weeks travelling from backpackers to backpackers, popping into townships and talking with all the poor people they can find and heading back to their cosy reality in the belief that they truly understand how local people live and the complex challenges of culture, race, socio-economic status and a rapidly changing reality. I don’t think that they have any more real understanding than tourists who stay in hotels and only visit safe and pre-packaged ‘culture’ and ‘reality’. Reading books and researching a place is probably a far more efficient way of learning about the reality of ordinary people and has the added advantage of often including some of the social and political and cultural history which has shaped the place and which the poor locals who are visited by tourists are unlikely to talk about, even if they are aware of it.

Which brings me to my second point: when I visit a new place to learn about it, I’m not there primarily to understand the plight of the poor people living in shacks. That is not intended to sound callous. It’s just that there seems to be a general perception that everyone who has money, everyone who is wealthy (relative to those around them), is the same in every country, that all rich people are really the same everywhere and it is only the poor who really still retain the difference from other countries and that they are therefore the really interesting people in a country. In support of this, there are lots of arguments about how more wealthy people (generally meaning everyone who lives in a brick house and above the poverty line) all just buy into the American cultural hegemony, so you can see them at home.

I’d argue that, in fact, poor people are the same everywhere. That may sound horrible but it’s true. People who live in informal settlements in shacks have fairly similarly dreary, deprived lives everywhere. Sometimes there are interesting variations in how they build their shacks based on variations in locally available materials. Sometimes the meagre diet of mielie-meal is replaced by one of rice or plantain or cassava. But on the whole there isn’t much difference. The voices of opposition would come back that they don’t have access to modern technology so aren’t as strongly affected by western cultural hegemony. Which is a nice idea but is completely blasted out of the water by the fact that cellphone technology is almost more prevalent in these areas than in areas with higher general socio-economic status. Cellphone technology which brings with it modern music and culture and the latest games and social networking technology. They may be poor but they’re not primitive.

In fact, it is often those with a little more access to money who are able to maintain and care about their cultural roots. The only poor people who really live according to their traditional ways of life are the rural poor who live in places where tourists very, very seldom venture. A tourist who comes to South Africa and visits Kayalitsha and thinks he/she now understands traditional Xhosa life would be shocked to visit the actual Xhosa heartland and see how differently rural people live.

All of which basically comes down to arguing that there are poor people everywhere and the ‘realities’ (which tourists are trying to understand) of those who are accessible to tourists don’t differ that much from country to country. That’s probably why it doesn’t sit right with me to spend my time in another country finding out about the lives of the poor living in ghettos/informal settlements. I feel somewhat hypocritical going to another country to find out about what I could have seen just as easily – and probably more easily because there is a common language and heritage – in Joburg or Cape Town.

I’m not saying that I want to avoid the poor. I just have a problem with what feels like sentimentalizing poverty and focusing exclusively on how the poor are living when learning about the country. I find it equally interesting to see how the ordinary, middle-class people and the rich and famous in other lands live. One of my favourite places in Mozambique was Inhambane because I felt like it was one of the few places where I got a sense of how ordinary people – not extremely poor, not extremely rich – went about their everyday lives. Not that I understand. It would take so much longer to understand. But I got a sense. I think it’s possible to get a sense of a place, to get a basic impression, in a few hours or a few days.

Which is one of the reasons that I’m okay with cruising. It does not allow, as backpacking does, the freedom to spend many days getting to know a place, but you still get a sense of it. After spending just a day or so in each place, I can tell you that Cozumel is fascinating, fun, full of life and relatively poor and Key West is heavily touristed and trying very hard to sanitize it’s history and pretend that it is part of the unitary American past, which I find annoying.

The other joy of cruising is that you get to meet other people. They’re not necessarily the people of the place you’re visiting. In fact, they’re almost never locals. But they’re, frankly, often far more interesting people than many of the locals. If you get lucky, they’re the kind of people who have travelled widely and are interested in people and places and politics and history. So, the time spent on the floating luxury hotel is not wasted time, as some would imagine.

I suppose, ultimately, when travelling, I’m interested in all people, not just the ones who come from the country I am visiting and certainly not only those whose stories are exclusively about overcoming adversity. A friend has argued that part of the value of travel is that it forces you to face and live in unfamiliar situations. Having grown up in small town Eastern Cape, floating through an unknown sea on a luxury hotel is actually less familiar to me than visiting real traditional people who are still living in huts in villages. Perhaps that is why going on a Cruise actually has as much meaning, and as many opportunities for growth, for me as a backpacking holiday.

Unfortunately, I have a feeling that I’m unlikely ever to convince my favourite travel companions of this, which would be a significant disadvantage to cruising as opposed to backpacking, so I imagine backpacking will probably be the preferred travel style, at least for the next few years.

Vagabonds

Travel

“A man who leaves home to mend himself an others is a philosopher, but he who goes from country to country guided by blind impulses of curiosity is only a vagabond” Oliver Goldsmith, quoted by James A Michener in The Drifters

One of the things I love about Michener is that he uses his novels as a space – in between narrative and prose – to steal a few moments of the reader’s time and give voice (or pen) to some of the beautiful places in the world. This particular book is propvol of descriptions like that. The reader is swept along on his voyage through Spain and Portugal, Mozambique and Morocco. At one point, he stops to describe increadibly evocatively a beautiful bridge and two ancient red towers that stand like sentinels on the approach to the white spires of Pamplona. He is the only writer who has ever raised in me any interest in witnessing the running of the bulls. Although I imagine I’d have to find new travel companions for that – I can’t see any of my current collection of fabulous travel-hungry friends being keen.

People leave home and visit new places for different reasons. During my recent foray into the wonderful world of the tourism industry, I found myself sitting in an SA tourism seminar where they talked about research suggesting that the primary driver for South Africans to get off their assess, to break out of their comfort zones and head for new places, is the strong recommendation of friends and family. In some countries in the world they decide to go on holiday, then go online or visit a travel agent to find a place they like the look of to visit. South Africans tend to work the other way around. Once someone tells us about an amazing place they think we should go, we’ll start looking into getting time off work and planning the possibility of taking a holiday and going there. By the time we got to the internet and the travel agent we’ve already decided and are ready to book.

In both cases, however, people tend to travel because they like the sound of the destination based on referrals, brochures or the word of someone who has been there. There are not that many people who will pack up and set off – with just a backpack and a guidebook – simply because they’re curious about a new place. I know a few of them – and they’re the most fantastic and sometimes the most frustrating travel companions. I’d travel anywhere with them and often be reasonably happy to set off on a whim at a moments notice.

For myself, when I travel by myself – and partly because  I come from a country where it’s really not that safe for a woman to go anywhere by herself – I’m unlikely to embark on such an adventure. Which is perhaps a bad thing. I generally prefer to have a few specific goals in mind – things and places I’m determined to do and see – and to build the rest of the trip around these as I go along.

Predictably with me, they tend to be historical. I’m drawn to places that I’ve read and learnt about. I had difficulty explaining this when I was applying for work in Russia last year. “Why do you want to come to Russia?” “The reason I’m keen to come to Russia in particular is because you have a fascinating, long history but particularly with respect to the 20th century history of the country and the manner in which the Bolshevik period has been overlaid on the Tsarist era – especially in big cities and very rural areas – and how the transition to a managed democracy has affected this as well as how that transition differs from South Africa’s transition to democracy.” No. People are not generally that overjoyed to hear that you’d like to visit their country because you think they’d make fascinating subjects of historical and socio-political research.

It was The Drifters that first sparked my interest in Mozambique. Some of Michener’s descriptions are exquisite and he particularly aroused a longing to see – and which I still plan to return and see – Ilha de Mozambique. But it also excited in my an interest in Mozambique (and quite a lot of the rest of South Eastern Africa) as the site of conflict but also of mingling and integration of three of the world’s great modern cultural forces – Western, African and Arab. It was in the back of my mind, something I spent hours thinking about, the whole time I was in Mozambique. I’d love to return to Mozambique and explore that theme in context and produce research and writing which would add to the world’s store of knowledge and ideas.

But for now my trips are not journeys of intellectual discovery except in a very limited and very personal sense. For now I’m just another vagabond, soaking up the wonder and joy of new places and new experiences without giving anything back or contributing anything of much significance as a result of my travels. Perhaps that’s not really the point. Perhaps my longing to contribute is really more symptomatic of my desperate desire to return to the warm embrace, the challenges and hardships and the welcome distance of analysis that make academia so appealing. Perhaps one day I will find a way to combine the two.

Being South African

Ideas, Travel

Dis ‘n bitterbessie dagbreek, dis ‘n uitroep komma-punt
Mabalel is huistoe, want sy mis haar eie kind
Ek wens ek kon jou teken met ‘n koukie of ‘n kwas
Ek wens ek kon onthou hoekom ek so bewerig was
Ek wens ek kon jou oopskryf, met my balpunt pen behaag
Ek wens ons kon saam wakker word in ‘n youth hostel in Praag

Liefde uit die Oudedoos, Koos Kombuis

Ek lewe
Gemaak om na liefde te strewe
Op vlerke van vriendskap to swewe
Sonder vra, sonder sorge
Dag vir dag dreun ritme om my heen
Voel die ure vol, en tog alleen
Maar jou blik verslaan my vrese
Son, saffier, lag in jou wese
Bring geluk wat lank verlore was

Ek lewe, Karen Zoid

South Africa is a beautiful country. A kaleidescope of different beauties.

Like frost on the veld on a winter morning, icy-white on the dry, pale grass, in a valley surrounded by sweeping mountains dotted with trees and blood-red aloes.

In Autumn, the winelands of the Western Cape are spashed with colour: the yellow and orange and brown of the Autumn vines, darker evergreens on the slopes, the blues and browns of dams thirsting for the rainy season, empty blue skies and changing-colour oaks.

The moon rising over the Cape Town city bowl, the mountain rising from a haze of pinks and purples and blues, from where we sit on a gently swaying boat in the bay, the chilly breeze off the atlantic, the spray salty, the bubbly sweet

So many beauties. Grahamstown sunsets and cold beer. Highveld storms. The empty freedom of the Karoo. Evenings in De Akker and Springbok. The soaring Drakensberg. Mangroves in KZN. Long stretches of untouched Wild Coast beach.

Last week, the ANC presidential candidate said that Afrikaaners are the only whites who are truly South African. At the time, I didn’t pay too much attention; just another outlandish comment from someone who will say anything to please the audience to whom he is speaking. Today, reflecting on the NPA decision, I found myself retreating into music that I realised how angry his comment made me.

My comfort-music, the music that makes me feel whole again, is Koos Kombuis (with the fading echoes of ‘n SoutPaddy), Chris Chameleon, Klopjag, Karen Zoid, etc., etc. It’s ironic: the only subject I have ever failed was Afrikaans (in Std 2). My soul is Afrikaans. Die ‘taal van my hart’ is Afrikaans. But I’m not Afrikaans. I’m an English-speaking white South African.

I am angry, offended, impotently raging at the idea that anyone, anyone, questions my identity as a South African. When white South Africans go overseas they are often asked how they can be white and still come from Africa. We put up with it and laugh it off because they’re foreigners. It stops being funny when it happens at home. People joke and laugh about it but so many of us who were born here and who lived through the the transition and were part of the emergence of this new democracy remain fiercely attached to this country. No matter where we go, and many of my generation, many of my friends, are scattered across the globe, we remain fiercely, devotedly South African. And none of us is comfortably with anyone questioning that identity. I suppose heightened by the recent happenings just across the border in Zim with the strong suggestion that white Zimbabweans are not welcome.

It is not okay to me – and to many others I know – for anyone to question or throw doubt on my identity as a South African. I don’t care whose parents’ parents’ parents’ came from somewhere else (and everyone’s did), this is home –

There is a saying in Zulu: ‘If you were in my flesh, I could tear you out, But you are in my blood, which cannot be divided.’ Recessional for Grace, Margeurite Poland

I am an African. I am a South African. Wherever I happen to wander, on the earth and intellectually, I carry with me the red soil of the karoo, the soaring Drakensberg, the snow on the mountains around Worcester, the winelands in Autumn, Table Mountain from the bay at sunset, bright red aloes in winter-white grass and a million other moments that are my anchor. My identity is complex and multiple and complicated and no-one, particularly not someone who purports to be a leader of all South Africans, has a right to question the South African-ness of it. I’m not much of a fan of fighting but I would fight for this.