first lot of photos from SA

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Cape Town

"I am not particularly religious or spiritual; I am just an ordinary person trying to make sense of the mysteries of life" - Nelson Mandela.

I think I had expected South Africa to be like the Australia of Africa. A mix of white people descended from colonists, local native inhabitants and immigrants from all walks of life. The 'Rainbow Nation', they call it. I guess I didn't realise how recent the whole apartheid saga was, how very much attached to Africa this nation is and despite being informed of the poverty and crime rates here I guess I just didn't get it until I saw it for myself. South Africa is a part of Africa in ways Australia will never be a part of Asia or the Pacific Islands. White South Africans consider themselves African, I wonder how many white Australians consider themselves Asian. I'd never seriously thought about it.

On our first morning in Cape Town we looked out the window of our expensive guest house and looked straight at Table Mountain. I was pretty stoked, ever since I'd seen The Endless Summer I'd wanted to lay eyes on that mountain. During that day I learned that, in Cape Town, you can't really escape a view of the mountain. We'd arrived in Cape Town after dark the night before and caught a taxi to the guest house, which we chose due to its close proximity to our hire car depot, but it ended up being a nice place to stay after three weeks of camping. Our taxi driver was pretty cool, he had heaps of tips for driving in South Africa and about 700 methods for avoiding speed cameras; but he reckons he doesn't speed.

We're in a Wicked van. If you don't know what one looks like then go for a drive in Port Campbell and you're guaranteed to see one. Ours is adorned with a landscape straight out of the cartoon South Park. There is a sign painted on the side which asks 'Who Killed Kenny?' and Kenny is impaled on said sign. The slogan on the back reads 'HIPPIES WANNA SAVE EARTH BUT ALL THEY DO IS SMOKE POT AND STINK'. Wicked vans aren't nearly as numerous in South Africa as they are in Australia, so the van gets a lot of looks, and a lot of photos taken.

The second thing we learned about Cape Town is that there isn't really anywhere to sleep in a Wicked van. So we headed off down the coast towards the Cape of Good Hope through seaside towns in search of a caravan park and a few surfboards. Although we were pretty focused on finding a destination, the journey really was quite incredible; like the Great Ocean Road but better, but only because it was new to us. They even have their own set of rock formations called the 12 Apostles. That first night we stayed in an odd little place called the Caravan Farm. There were bible verses scattered around (in the ablutions block, on the receipt etc) and geese everywhere. We'd been told that the tap water in Cape Town is ok to drink, we then read that South Africa has the third best tap water in the world. That night we drank tap water that tasted like goose poo. The next morning we found out that the Caravan Farm uses tank water and the tank doubles as a goose pond. Nice. Actual tap water in Cape Town smells like urine and tastes like chlorine, but it beats buying bottled water.

I once went six weeks without surfing. That's the longest stint I can remember since the family holiday in the Northern Territory a bit over a decade ago. The six weeks was spent knowing that the two weeks following would be spent surfing with a group of mates in Indonesia and every time I got too stressed out I'd go for a skate or a swim or pull out my surfboard and carry it around for a while. In East Africa I went five weeks without surf and without those luxuries, I think I handled the separation alright, but I was frothing for waves by the time we got to South Africa. I had figured I'd probably buy myself a couple of second-hand boards when I got to Cape Town, or if I found one really nice new board I'd just get that one and no back-up. After a bit of searching we found some surf shops in a town/suburb called Muizenburg, in the North-West of False Bay on the Cape Peninsula. It was a horrible day when we arrived. Wind and rain to rival July in Port Campbell. We pulled up at a place called Surfer's Corner and peered through the rain at the little, wind-swept waves dribbling along the sand. Not exactly inspiring. But there was a row of surf shops with a good selection of boards. And as a new board over here costs half as much as it does at home I bought two brand-newies off the rack. If I twist my own words a bit, this is what I'd planned to do from the start, that's what I'll tell Mum when she gets my credit card bill anyway. The guy in the shop reckoned there were good waves coming too. Stoked.

Surfers Corner has really good waves for long boards. As I'd just bought myself a pair of short boards, after I'd washed out the cobwebs, I was keen to sink my teeth into something a little more exciting. Mon was frothing, she bought her first surfboard ever after years of borrowing and she was surfing better than ever, and we'd found a caravan park which keeps the geese out of the drinking water, so we stuck around for a few days.

I thought sharks were an issue in Australia, I even saw one once. But in South Africa they're actually a problem. There are regular sightings and not irregular attacks. Around Cape Town they have a kind of shark patrol team which consists of spotters sitting in the mountains above the more popular beaches and a warning system with different coloured flags and sirens and stuff. If the beach hasn't got a patrol team it at least has a few signs with some handy safety tips. To attract the sharks for the cage diving trips they run just off shore they chuck a whole bunch of fish guts and other wonderful stuff in the water; 'chumming' they call it. There's a bit of an ongoing debate as to whether this practice makes sharks keener to hang around in the area and try out human hunting. I'm not sure how often someone gets taken, but a body boarder was killed not long before we arrived. The hype about sharks and the cloudy water has made me a bit edgy when surfing, but so far I've still got both legs.

Living out of our van meant we had to make a few dietary changes. We can't really keep things cold, and we only have a tiny gas burner for cooking. Our experiments with canned food and seeing how long things last unrefrigerated have been mildly successful. Let's just say that meatballs in a can are comparable to dog food and long-life milk actual does need to be refrigerated after opening. Things like pre-cut veggie mixes and two-minute noodles are pretty handy.

South Africa's road toll is atrociously high. Within a few minutes on the highway you can see why. The speed limit is 120km/h but that's sort of minimum speed for a lot of people, and the roads are mostly quite good, so you can drive really, really fast. If you get caught by a remote speed camera you get fined, but don't get penalised with demerit points or anything like that. So if you can afford the ticket, you can pretty much speed all day every day. If you're driving slower than the car behind you you're expected to pull into the emergency lane to let them pass. This leads to some incredibly sketchy high-speed overtaking manoeuvres. We put in a bit of highway time on the way up the West Coast to a place called Eland's Bay.

Eland's Bay is home to one of the best left-hand point breaks in South Africa, about a million empty mussel shells, heaps of kelp, rocks, an unkempt camp ground, foggy mornings, cold nights, really cold water and a train line for very long trains; I timed one that took around five minutes to pass. There was no one at the camp ground office for the first two days, so we got a really cheap campsite. The surf was really good the whole time we were there, both on the point and at the beach right out the front of the camp ground, but kind of crowded because it's within day-trip distance of Cape Town and we were there in the middle of school holidays. For those keeping track of the Endless Summer theme of our trip, we saw the restaurant with the phone number 17, but didn't know what it was so we drove right by.

On our third day in Eland's Bay a Boer family set up camp beside us and became the only other camp ground residents. Then the office opened and camping suddenly got a lot more expensive. At Eland's Bay camping is paid by site, not by the amount of people. So we paid the same amount for the two of us as the whole of the extended Boer family (there were too many to count, around 20). They invited us for dinner, and we took them up on the offer. In South Africa they don't barbeque, they braai, which is just a wood-fire barbeque. Boers are the best braai-ers around, or so they told us, and although we couldn't quite understand what was on the menu, due to their poor English and our non-existent Afrikaans, we could tell it was chicken. And it was good. This particular group of Boers like to drink a lot, eat a lot and insist their guests do the same. Then when everyone's had enough to eat and drink they like to lecture their guests on the dangers of accepting food and drink from strangers in South Africa. The head of the family; a boisterous, loud man whose name I could never quite pronounce adequately, just couldn't comprehend why we'd come to Eland's Bay. It's a non-surfer thing, I think, to not understand the need for surfers to travel ridiculous distances just to surf. So we let him give us a list of wineries, casinos, game reserves and other boring crap to keep him happy.

Another little Endless Summer dream I had was to take the cable car up Table Mountain and look down the Cape Peninsula to the Cape of Good Hope. The views are epic, and the walks and stuff are set up really well with interesting info boards and things of that nature. You can look down on Cape Town and see all along the coast and out to Robben Island. It's cold up the top too, that was annoying.

Robben Island was a prison island for many years during the apartheid era in South Africa. And a leper colony. These days it's famous for being the prison that held a lot of political prisoners for being outspoken against apartheid legislation. The most famous prisoner was Nelson Mandela. They run tours out to the island and you get a tour of the prison guided by an ex-prisoner. I didn't really know much about apartheid before that tour, it's a lot more complex that just 'apartheid'. It was a pretty complicated set of laws and legislation that discouraged and prohibited the mixing of different races in South Africa, and favoured whites over pretty much anyone else. There were some very derogatory laws which affected Bantu people and other coloured South Africans. The prison is a pretty depressing place, but at the same time the success story of the downfall of apartheid is inspiring. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for something like 27 years by the country that he ended up president of. Top job Nels. The museum at the waterfront is well worth a look if you find yourself in Cape Town but don't do the tour.

We spent a few nights in a backpackers in Cape Town while we did these Cape Town activities. There was a guy staying there who's done a lot of travelling, some travel writing, set up backpackers around the place and is clearly quite crazy. He was the first person to hitchhike from Cape Town to Cairo. He did it in 1982, I don't think I need to tell you what an amazing experience that would have been, nor what an incredibly stupid thing it was to do. Apart from being a God-fearing gentleman with a marijuana dependency who was a bit lost in the world, he liked to be charitable to the needy. His thesis was that charity should be done in person, not through a donation to an organisation. I'm not sure how much of what he told us was utter bullshit, but he's done some pretty impressive work including paying the rent for an orphanage in Uganda and working with very sick people in the DRC. He doesn't understand how someone could just give a dollar to Oxfam without seeing what comes from it.

At present he works with an organisation, I think it's called Rainbow PUSH. They do some good work to do with breaking down race/religion/economic/education barriers. They also have big peace events in weird places. Our friend organised a peace rally in the desert in Egypt for 600 people. He reckoned it was a huge success. A few weeks later there was a car bombing in a city close to where the rally was held, he says it was a response to the event. People died. I think the money invested in this event would have been better given to Oxfam. Rather than 600 peaceful-minded people being peaceful together, then a car bomb, a reputable organisation could have done something real to help out a person or persons in need. But each to their own. I guess what I'm wondering is how do you know that doing something you feel is right is actually doing good? There are brochures in Cape Town asking tourists not to give to street beggars. By giving them a free hand out, it says, you are condemning them to a life of begging. If it proves to be a lucrative industry, why would they stop? The brochure encourages tourists to donate to a local NGO working to give beggars and homeless people a bed, a meal and a chance at earning an honest living. There are a selection of NGOs provided so that tourists can choose one that most represents how they want their money used. All good and well until you see a three-year-old homeless kid sitting on the footpath asking for money. Pretty hard to say no.

Pat