Swaziland & Mozambique

Chris and I leave Josey (Johannesburg) to go east to Swaziland. Along the way we stop in Nelspruit. Nelspruit is a city also, much smaller than Josey, but still a real city. The feel is much better, though. It feels safer and nicer? Why? The people seem more relaxed, but how can you perceive that when you're just driving through the city, before you even stop? Then we realize: Buildings in Josey all have electric fences, gates, razor wire, guards. There is none of that here. Here in Nelspruit the businesses have advertisements on the windows to get more people to come in. In Josey they're trying to keep people out.

The King of Swaziland is "the Great Lion Mswati the 2nd", and his mother is "the Great She-Elephant". He is the king, but his mother is the head of state; She can overrule any of his decisions. (Liberal friends take note: It would require a constitutional change in the US to allow Barbara Bush to override George W Bush's decisions.)

Chris: "Places like Swaziland make me optimistic about the future of Africa. In 20 years they've pulled themselves up from grinding poverty, closer to the level of SA."
You see farming, agriculture, timber development (logging yes, but also many, many areas with tree farms that were replanted many years ago to maintain the forests).

Red ocher cliffs, with naturally red soil from iron in the soil. They grind it up and use it as a natural pigment in traditional ceremonies.

The Mountain Kingdom. Swaziland, not Switzerland. Mountain lakes, steep, lush green hills, significant forest cover interspersed with farming, communities, rocky areas, grassy areas. Swaziland, the Jamaica of southern Africa.

Chris: "Wow, this is even cooler than I remember."

Swaziland Backpackers was very hippy. Everyone there was hippy, even the people that ran it, with fire dancing, reggae music, Indian clothing, dreadlocks, and the other things that hippies do. The backpacker itself was very hippy, but you get the impression that the rest of Swaziland is hippy also. You can smell it in the air.

We go on a game drive at Hlane, the King's Royal Game Park. For lunch I have an "Hlane Burger". What's an hlane burger? It's game meat. It depends on the day, but it's usually impala. On the drive we see the usual assortment of elephants, rhinos, lions, a group of 30 impalas. One of the elephants gets angry at the truck and charges at us, forcing the driver to speed away. When he spots a few lions resting in the shade of some bushes, he pulls the truck to within 2 or 3 feet of them. A little disconcerting since this is an open air truck, with just rope netting between humans and lions. The lions look mildly annoyed that we've disturbed their nap. In the Lion Park near Josey they fed the animals with store meat. Here in Hlane, and in Chobe too, the animals hunt for their food.

Driving east from Swaziland you go into Mozambique. Why did we go to Mozambique? Because we were on a road trip and it was there. We only had enough time to get to Maputo, the capitol. The northern beach areas are supposedly much nicer, but we didn't have time to go that far. Maputo was dirty and gritty. It was ghetto. The backpackers hotel in Maputo was not worth staying in. Mozambique, or at least Maputo, is the Mexico of southern Africa.

The waterfront area is the "Beverly Hills" of Maputo. Many nice haciendas with gates and private guards 24 hours per day. Along the waterfront they had a few nice looking restaurants and bars, and then we saw the nicest looking building in Maputo: A Casino.

Why are casinos always the nicest looking buildings around? Please don't answer that, I do understand the answer. It's because they generate the the money to pay for a fancy-looking building. But it seems a sad statement that in rich and poor countries alike, people are so drawn to gambling, will spend so much money on it, that casinos have some of the nicest, most interesting architecture of any modern buildings.

We pass a minor traffic accident along the waterfront in Maputo. The police come and 4 guys get out, each carrying an automatic weapon. I hope they have their insurance card.

From what I hear Mozambique went through civil war between a western-backed side and a communist-backed side for about 20 years. It's unclear to me who won. The streets in Maputo bear odd testament to their ideological past: Mao Tse Tung Ave, Av Karl Marx, Av Vladimer Lenine, Av Guerra Populari ("the people's war"), but also Mohamed Siad Barre (I think he was the top warlord in Somalia for a while) and Av Robert Mugabe (the head guy in Zimbabwe). Ideologically, it seems an odd mixture. The only common thread I can find is that they are all leaders that caused or justified the mass killings of people.

Cape Town

Chris and I fly to Capetown for a few days. Capetown--The Jewel of Africa. In other words, it's all down hill from here.

It seems like a Caribbean town, influenced by the first world, economically attached to it, and yet not fully participating in it. You wouldn't be surprised to see pirates or ne'er-do-wells around the corner. Think Key West, Gibraltar, an updated version of Tortuga as presented in Pirates of the Caribbean. The people here can't decide if they want to get ahead, or if they just want to relax and enjoy life. To do both at the same time, they find new and innovative ways to steal from tourists.

The Strand is only a few blocks from the hotel. It's one of the main areas with restaurants and bars along the road. Even on a Monday night the bars are full around midnight until 3 in the morning.

We drive south from Capetown towards the Cape of Good Hope. Beautiful scenery, waves crashing into rocks that soon climb into mountains. Earthy Mediterranean feel. Lunch along the water, view of the rocks, old Dutch guys drinking beer.

Johannesburg feels like the New York of Africa. Capetown is the Amsterdam of Africa.

Along the drive they have a penguin sanctuary. You can see the penguins up close, and they have a beach where you can swim with the penguins. The penguins usually steer clear of where the people swim, but they sit on the rocks nearby. Occasionally you'll see a penguin swimming past people, much faster than a human could follow.

Penguin lust.

We drive down to the Cape of Good Hope, the south-westernmost tip of Africa. No, it's not the southernmost tip. That is called Cape Agulhas, about 100km away, where the Atlantic and the Indian oceans meet. Look on a map. But this cape, the Cape of Good Hope, is what the sailors of old worried about, where they began the dangerous passage across the southern tip of Africa. The wind is strong and gusty. Wild baboons and ostriches are in the preserve along the road.

Drive back along the western side of the cape peninsula. It's mountainous. Think "Lord of the Rings".

We get a late dinner and get out late. We go to one place with mostly local people, and talk to a woman with a wonderful laugh. She doesn't appear South African to me, so I ask where she is from. She finds the question funny, and says that she IS from South Africa, and she is "colored". I am a little confused by the term. South Africans still conventionally group themselves & other by the racial groups defined during the Apartheid regime: white, black, Indian, and "colored". Colored meant any mixture of any group, but was and still is looked down on by many white South Africans. She said she was actually primarily of Malay descent; Most Americans would probably call her white, although maybe guess that she was Spanish or European. The racial groupings that many people use, including the ones that we use in America, are somewhat arbitrary and confusing, but they can influence our self-identity, and how we perceive others.

Later, much too late, we meet another woman at a wonderful Irish pub who is South African, of Xhosa & Namibian descent. Wonderful to talk to, smart and well-read. Since it's so late we suggest meeting for dinner the next night.

The next day Chris and I go to "table mountain", the small mountain near Cape Town with a relatively flat top. We take the cable car to the top. It's largely shrouded by clouds today, but you can sometimes see Cape Town below you through the clouds. When we're ready to leave they say the cable car has a problem, and we'll have to wait until they fix it. About 45 minutes later it's working again and we board, then get stuck about 1/3rd of the way down. Chris notices that the "high wind danger" lights are blinking on the control panel. They take us part of the way back up, then finally fix the problem and take us all the way to the bottom.

We meet Sharon, the Xhosa/Namibian woman, out for dinner much later than we were supposed to. She is originally from Cape Town, but she's been living in Namibia for the last year. She flew back to Cape Town for a few days to visit family. Chris is tired after dinner and goes back to the hotel. Sharon and I go to a bar called "Mama Africa" with a wonderful live African drum band that everybody is dancing to. That bar closes early for Cape Town, but the group of people we're with want to go to a dance club that is open later called FTV.

FTV is the LA scene of Cape Town. All of the beautiful people are there, dressed to kill. Crowded dancing to club music, bottle service at roped off tables, several groups at the bar have bottles of champagne in coolers. We're dancing and having fun, but it's getting late. The club is hitting it's peak, but I'm tired and thinking I will leave soon. One of the girls in our group gets in some argument with some other girl there. One or two people from our group intervene to separate them, and Sharon tries to calm each of the two girls down. The two girls, and a friend of their's on each side are still being aggressive. I position myself to help separate the two groups, but Sharon grabs me and pushes me out of the way. She doesn't say anything to me, but the message is clear: You're not from here, you don't know how things work here, stay out of the way.

Sharon has largely succeeded in calming down the two groups, and we warily return to dancing. A few minutes later, the two girls start up again. Sharon is trying to calm them down again; I'm standing back and to the side; A few of the other guys are standing close in, ready to intervene if they start pushing and shoving again. A minute or two pass with some angry words on both sides. I can't hear what any of them are saying, but I assume that Sharon is being successful again in reducing the tension.

Then one of the girls leaps at the other girl, purposefully smashing her champagne flute on the other girl's head. Within a second the two girls are locked in vicious combat. I spend a quarter of a second trying to decide if I should try to stop them; I decide I should try to pull one of them away. One of the other guys is trying to grab one of them, and he falls into me, pushing me out of the way before I can act. I later realize that this is probably good for me. One huge bouncer rushes in and is trying to separate them and pushing them towards the door. One girl is holding tightly and pulling on the other girls hair, while the other girl is thrashing wildly at her with the broken champagne flute. The bouncer and another door guy carry the girls out the nearby door, trying but unable to separate them.

It's about 5 seconds since the altercation started. There is blood and broken glass on the bar and floor. The bartenders tell me and others to stand back while they wipe the blood and glass off the bar. It's so loud and dark in there that most people in the club didn't even realize anything happened. Sharon hands me her purse and jacket, and another girl's, and tells me to stay there while she and another girl and one of the guys go outside.

Ten minutes pass. I'm holding two purses and two girls jackets plus my own. A group of guys eagerly come up to talk to me. They think I am one of the star players on the South African rugby team. Apparently I look like him, or he looks like me. I try to tell them that I'm not him, but they don't believe me, or they're too drunk to understand my denial. They congratulate me and tell me how great I am for a few minutes, then leave me alone.

Sharon and the other girl finally come back in. The club manager hadn't wanted them to come back in, but Sharon bribed one of the bouncers to let her back in. Sharon is visibly shaken and upset. The girl who got attacked had lacerations on her forehead and both of her cheeks. She had reduced the bleeding with a towel, then got in her car and drove off by herself. The other girl, the one wielding the champagne flute, had left in a taxi. Didn't the club call an ambulance, and the police, and hold the girls there? No; Sharon says they would have if the girls were white, but they don't want to get involved in black-on-black violence. The club just wants the situation to go away. Neither of them will get in there again, but that's about the extent of enforcement.

Chobe National Park

We go to Chobe National Park in Botswana for a safari. It's about an hour mini-bus ride, then crossing a ferry where Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia meet on the Chobe River. On the ride there we meet one group of people who are with an adventure-volunteer group. They arrange trips from 6 weeks to 6 months for people to help out at schools, orphanages and small villages. They also arrange certain outings like this safari for them. You have to pay for everything, but you get a much different experience than if you stayed in a hotel the whole time.

One of the people in the group is a woman that works customs interdiction in England. Not at the border or the airport; She works with a group that tries to stop smuggling rings. Drugs, diamonds? Drugs, Yes, and human smuggling. There isn't much diamond smuggling. Oh, and tax smuggling, people bringing in cigarettes or alcohol without paying the VAT tax, or taking cigs or alcohol for export and redirecting it back into the country.

Chris says "Welcome to the safest country in Africa: Botswana". It has high HIV, but it's also one of the wealthier countries, market oriented although largely rural, good public health services funded by a fair amount of diamond wealth. Botswana is peaceful: Peace from strife, and also peace in person, of the people we meet there.

As we go through the Botswana immigration station I overhear one person jokingly say to another "I'll kill you, man, trust me, I will". He says it in a joking way, and I'm pretty sure he is joking, but it's the type of joke that people make here in Africa.

They drive us around in a bush jeep looking for animals. We don't find that many: a few giraffes, a herd of 20 or 30 zebras, some different gazelles and kudu. Wild pigs like in "The Lion King", hyenas, eagles of different kinds. After the jeep tour, we go on a pontoon boat down the river. Hippos, several groupings of 30 each. Unlike at DisneyWorld, they don't charge the boat, although they do say they are dangerous. Crocodiles. Two elephants swimming across the river. I take a lot of pictures. Chris says I'm "shutter happy".

Going back we drive through herd of cattle crossing the road.

That final evening in Livingstone, I walk out to "Pub & Grill" twice, with two different groups, at night, in the dark. It's a bar in Livingstone that is only about two blocks away from the youth hostel, and there is some lighting along the way. A band there is doing great covers of The Rolling Stones and James Brown. Afterwards a group of us sit & talk in the pillow pit. The previous night while sitting here I had magically produced avocado that I had bought in the market earlier. Some of the Norwegians had never tasted avocado before, so it was a fun treat, and helped sooth their drunken stomachs.

Victoria Falls

In the morning we take the shuttle bus to the falls. I've been trying to upload to the blog yesterday, but the internet connection is so slow as to make it useless.

The patch: in america the patch would mean a nicotine patch. My friend Chris got some patches for us to wear in Zambia. The patches you wear here are mosquito patches. Well, I guess they are mosquito-repellent patches. They secrete some chemical into your skin which causes your body to secrete some pheremone in your sweat which is unpleasant to mosquitos, so they will bite you less.

There is a $10 entrance fee for the falls. Monkeys and baboons block many of the trails. One baboon seems to want to show us a fresh wound on his forhead. The waterfalls give off a mist that falls on us like rain and forms a vail that shrouds part of the falls from our site. Beyond walking around to see the falls and across the smaller "knife bridge", we decide to walk down to the "boiling pot" near the bottom of the falls where it forms a whirlpool. Halfway down the trail we hear gunshots, though, and decide to head back up.

There is no food that we can find there, so after playing xolyphone with a local old guy, we head back to town to get lunch. We'll go to the bridge that crosses the gorge later.

I stop on the way back at the Ocean Basket restaurant, talking to the taxi driver on the way about the economy. Zambia seems pretty nice, pretty safe compared to South Africa. People have a positive attitude here. Yes, he says, it's gotten better since the newer president was elected in 1991. He allowed in foreigners more and foreign investment. And it's also gotten better in Livingston because of the problems in Zimbabwe. The problems in Zim have caused a flight of many of the white, educated people there across the border to Livingston. Most of the houses on the main road have been bought by Zim refugees and used as houses or turned into restaurants or stores.

The Ocean Basket has surprisingly good, fresh seafood. The even have lobster, and sushi. Well, tuna, salmon & prawn nigiri and maki. This is the third place I've noticed in Zambia that has greek salad on the menu. And they had feta cheese at the grocery store. Why?

As I'm walking back to the hotel, a nicely dressed guy in a nice SUV asks me if I want to buy any "stones". Stones? Oh, diamonds. Those kind of diamonds. No, thank you, I don't have anyone special right now ;-)

Then I arrange to go on a gorge swing near the bridge. Chris and I go, although only I'm interested in "doing it." Somehow I convince myself to do all three (zip line, gorge swing and bungi jump). I don't really like the thrill of danger like I used to, but I do like pleasurable experiences, especially uncommon pleasures. I know that these things aren't really that dangerous, even if they are pretty scary.

I do the zipline first, which goes from the Zambian side of the gorge to the Zim (Zimbabwean) side, looking down from the bridge. Even though I'm going to the Zim side, I'm not really going into Zim proper. I'm staying in the "international zone" in the middle. I didn't need a Zim visa to go, just a free ticket from the Zambian side proving that I had come from Zambia and would be going back there. The zip line is fine, a little scary, but really all you do is lift your legs up while the guy is holding you, and then he lets go. You don't "jump" yourself. Since you're leaning back in the harness the whole time, though, you can't really see much, since you're always facing up towards the sky.

I walk back across the bridge half way towards the Zambian side. I had imagined the swing to be something where you start with tension on the line on one side of the gorge and swing over to the other. Oh, I was wrong: You stand on the edge of the bridge, in a safety harness, connected to a thick cable that loops way down then back up & connects about 200 feet away from you to the middle of another cable strung across the gorge. You jump from the bridge, in free fall for about 5 seconds, until the cable grabs tension and swings you out and away from the bridge. Now, I know that sounds really scary, but it was surprisingly pleasant. Stepping off the platform is, well, SCARY. But after you do it's pleasant free fall. Don't forget to breathe! When the cable grabs there is a jerking motion, but not too bad, and then you're sailing pleasantly and smoothly through the gorge, back and forth, easily able to see everything around you. The gorge is much more pleasant from this position than from the bridge or anywhere else. You're alone, it's peaceful, and it's beautiful.

Once you stop swinging they reel you towards the bridge with a pull cable attached near the top of the cable supporting you, then some guy repels down from the bridge, hooks on to you, and a winch pulls you both up.

I was not very enthused about the bungie part. I kept joking with the staff to distract my mind. "Hey man," the guy said, "you already paid for it, you have to do it!" "Hey, can I pay you $20 extra NOT to do it?" My favorite joke was "Don't worry, no body has died here this week." (They've been doing it over 10 years and no one has died.) You can just fall off if you want, but it's better to hold your arms wide, like Jesus on the cross, and jump up and out. It's surprisingly hard to command your legs to jump "up and out" like that. I jumped more out than up. The free fall was nice, a little longer than the swing. Remember to breathe! When the bungie catches, though, it jerks you and bounces you around, you're looking at everything upside down, and you're randomly spinning around. The swing was much nicer. Eventually you stop bouncing and some guy lowers down, hooks on to you, and they winch both of you up.

I have enough time when we get back to swim in the pool, shower, and send the previous blog entry & upload pictures. It takes about 30 minutes to upload a few pictures.

Dinner at a "traditional Zambian restaurant" that caters to westerners. Good, and probably the closest thing we're going to find to authentic Zambian food in this touristy town. They do a "dance show" at the end of dinner that looks surprisingly like the electric slide. Susan does it with them and says that it IS the electric slide, there is only one step different. Did they get this from America, or did America import it from here? I can't believe in the cultural convergence of line dancing.

After dinner we go to Rhapsody, a trendy bar that caters to well-off locals. We meet one guy (lighter-skinned black) who has lived his whole life in various parts of Africa (Liberia, Tanzania, Zim, Zambia). He's obviously international in education and outlook, although completely comfortable and "at home" here. Another girl is working here who is from Northern Ireland. She wants to go to the Congo to see what a real warzone is like. "I grew up in the troubles in Northern Ireland, which was a low intensity conflict. I want to go see what a real conflict is like, how it changes the people. I'd like to go to Iraq too, or better yet Afganistan. I tried getting a job in an NGO in those places, but I don't have any skills they're looking for. If I go to Congo and start writing about it, maybe I can get work as a war correspondent from conflict areas."

In the morning, while we're waiting for the day trip to Chobe, I meet a guy who leads "walking safaris." We talk while he's waiting for his daily wards. He's from UK, but he's lived in Zambia for 10 years, and in Africa for 25. He used to drive trucks down through Africa when he started. From Zambia to SA? No, all the way down from Europe. Through Morocco? Yah, through Morocco, west africa, and on. Don't they bring goods up on truck from Capetown through Africa? Yah, but they used to truck them down from Europe, when they wouldn't allow trucks from SA because of apartheid. But I didn't truck goods. We would take people. People? Yeah, we'd take about 20 people down all the way through Africa. How long did that take? About 6 to 9 months. In a bus, you mean? No, in the back of a big 4WD pickup truck. You'd stay in hotels along the way? No, we'd just camp along the way, mostly in the bush.

Zambia Arrival

We left early this morning to go to the airport to fly to Victoria Falls, on the Zambia/Zimbabwe border. It was a 2 hour affair at the aiport to get our tickets and check in. While we're waiting, we read the local newspaper, "The Star". It's left leaning, but it's not considered tabloid. Headlines:
"Heist Gang Bail Shock": 5 guys with AK-47s were killed by police while attempting to rob a casino. One of them was out on bail from 5 separate charges of armed robbery.
"Zuma honours Tyson, the convicted rapist": ANC president Jacob Zuma, the almost-definite next president of SA, will honour Tyson at a charity banquet. Zuma himself was charged but acquited for rape.

The convenience store at the airport sells raw meat.

The airport in Zambia, in Livingstone, looks like those movies from the 1950's.


Taking the van in Zambia from the airport to the backpacker's hotel, named Jollyboys. We have private rooms, but most people staying there are in dorm rooms, or are camping. Several people we meet there are westerners that are living in Zambia for a few months; they are hanging out at Jollyboys because it is the place to meet other westerners during the day.

Signs on trees at the hotel:
"Beware of falling mangos"
"If Noah had been smart he would have swatted those two mosquitos"

Walking around Livingstone. It is a good replica of the animal kingdom park in disneyworld.

I'm going to a store in a different part of town to pick up a few things. Some girls from Norway are going too, so we share a cab. They are afraid of eating local food, and they are on a budget. They say they want to buy groceries and make the food themselves. They buy mostly beer and snack food.

On the way back I talk to the taxi driver about education. He says most people in Zambia go to school from age 7 to 14. Recently they've started some private schools that start at age 5, but you have to pay for them. They do also have school that goes from 14 to 18, but not for everyone; you have to do well in lower school and apply to get in.

There was a guard with an air-cooled machine gun at the grocery store.

Tomorrow we will go to the falls, the maybe on a zipline/swing over the falls, or bungee jumping over the falls. On saturday we will go to Chobe Park in Botswana. They have a place here where you can interact with lions and pet them. Adult lions, not baby ones. They say that they are safe. Should I go? Would you go?

Dinner at the hotel. Pasta with meat sauce. People hang around and drink afterwards. One of the guys who is staying there is having a birthday today, so more people gather to drink. It's safer here than SA, but it's still not advisable to go out after dark, unless you take a taxi.

I wasn't able to upload this until the next day.

South Africa-Lion Park

Chris's hot water heater hasn't been working for a few days. We're waiting for the repairman to come. They've come twice already to fix it, but each time the fix only lasted a few days. They were supposed to be here at 10:30, but it's already 11:30 and they haven't come. The power is out again (load-shedding), so even if they got here now they couldn't do anything until the power comes back on. "Africa is where you come to wait": Paul Theroux while he was in Cairo waiting for his Sudanese visa.

We're supposed to go to the Lion Park today. We may not make it because of waiting for the repairman. Chris shows me pictures from last time he was in Swaziland. He was the old man and his fiancee was the aunt. Why? Do the adults go somewhere else to work? No, it's because of HIV. They have a 40% HIV rate. The life expectancy in Swaziland right now is about 40 years old.

Chris and I got into several varied conversations while waiting for the water heater repairman, including democratic party convention superdelegates, 1970's South African-Israeli cooperation on nuclear weapons, international politics and islam, and african development. Several interesting books he had:

The Shackled Continent: Africa's Past, Present and Future by Robert Guest
Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town by Paul Theroux
The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign Aid isn't Working by Robert Calderisi
The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics by Eric Beinhocker
(the last one, I think, has nothing specifically to do with Africa)

1:45pm. We give up on the repairman and leave for the lion park.
2:20pm. We're almost to Lion Country Safari. Chris wouldn't let me have the laptop out to take notes while we were in city traffic because he didn't want some to do a "smash and grab" to get it.

In the last few minutes we've gone from city to rural, without any real suburbs in the middle.

Chris thinks his friends from here will all probably leave within 5 years, if things keep going how they are going. And the country will go down hill further. Does that mean that they shouldn't have ended apartheid like they did? No, I'm not sure of any better way they could have done it. At least it was peaceful. But it may have a lesson for Israel: They cannot end their "apartheid" without losing their own life also.

How much do white South African's make? Chris guesses about $25,000 per year on average. Cost of many things are low in SA, so you can live quite well here on that. But if you want to travel abroad beyond Africa, that can't buy much. Before Apartheid the exchange rate was different and they earned about double that in dollars. Their purchasing power of whites in SA has actually increased since apartheid stopped, but the purchasing power of blacks has gone down since apartheid. I'm not sure if I understand that.

In the Lion Park we look at the baby lions & feed the giraffes. I've fed giraffes in Florida before, so I'm not too impressed by that. Then we get to go in and pet the baby lions. They're indifferent to our presence, perhaps annoyed. But where can you do this in the states?


Jackals & hyenas. Antelope. Lioness jumping into a tree. Lazy lions. Lion just a few inches from the car window. It's great, and yet it's amazing how quickly it becomes ordinary.

We drive back and stop at the shopping mall. We both need to buy mosquito-impregnated clothes for Zambia. I am exhausted because of the time zone change.

A friend asked via email: "Have you spotted any 'flame throwers' on the local transportation? Would like to confirm that bit of information with the locals while you're there." I asked Susan, Chris's fiancee: "South African's say it's bullshit. I've never seen one. But I've also never seen a carjacking, and I know they happen."

Jeff & his father Greg and Sean showed up after dinner for some food & drinks.

What about the flamethrower in the car legend? "There was one guy who manually did that to his own car, and he was convicted of murder and is in jail now. There was another guy who electrified his car so he zapped and killed a guy who was carjacking him. He's in jail too." The power is out, so I take his word on it. Later, when the power comes back on, I check the web. A few CNN and other news articles that report on it, but don't provide any verifiable information. But wikipedia provides more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaster_(flamethrower)

Jeff is white but not afrikanner. He's german/irish/other ethnic descent. He's into acting and wants to move to London or the US to go to school, study and try to get into acting. He was asking about schools, cities, living in the states, visas, green cards. It's amazing how much you can make up or guess about to answer someone when you don't really know what you're saying.

Jeff and Greg are leaving. Sean already left. Jeff and Greg are going to Brady's, but Chris is tired and doesn't want to go. I borrow Chris's car and his cellphone and go out with them, but Brady's is closed. The power came back on, and their computer wouldn't start properly, so they were closing. (They were while the power was out, but they close when the power turns back on?). So I drive back to Chris's.

Tomorrow we're going to Zambia near Victoria Falls. We're going to stay at a backpacker hotel named Jollyboys. Chris and Susan are looking forward to this as a luxury, because at least they should have hot water.

South Africa Arrival

Chris says I'll be happy when I leave in two weeks, because of the difficulty of living here. That's a bold statement for a man in my position, although he may not realize it. So far SA (South Africa) reminds me of many third world countries I've visited, although on it's way to progress. It reminds me of South Korea 10 years ago; perhaps not quite that well. Is SA on it's way up economically, or on it's way down?

Jacob Zuma might get elected; Chris says he's corrupt, with Stalinist leanings. If he get's elected and starts nationalizing industries, it's all over for SA economy.

Brain drain is a big problem here. Everyone who has a degree, scientists & engineers especially, has left or is already planning to leave.

They can't even keep the power on all the time anymore. They have roving blackouts for a few hours a day. Any engineer that's any good has left.

"SA is like a great white shark: beautiful, but also very dangerous."
"South Africa is a third world country with first world cities."

SA'ers use the word "robot" (pronounced RO-bit) for traffic lights. Odd.

Why do South African's drink so much? Because if you get kidnapped & tortured on the way home, it hurts a lot less if you're drunk. That's a joke. I think.

The CBD (central business district) is so dangerous that you can't go there at night, and there's no point of going there during the day. It's not really a business district anymore; all of the businesses have moved out, and the office buildings are lived in by Nigerian squatters, and controlled by Nigerian drug lords who control various blocks and occasionally have turf wars.

"South Africa is the only hope for Africa. It's the key to improving Africa, but it's on the ropes itself. South Africa might fail, and then there would be no hope for Africa."

The HIV rate among white SAers is 5%; among the black population it's about 40%; among colored it's about 20%. Is it really 40% among the black people that are driving cars around us on the highway? No, it's probably much lower among the economic class that can drive cars; Maybe 10%.

Howsit? Sharp Sharp, bru. (translation: How are you? Doing fine.)

Street signs are in Afrikaaner & English. Local people speak Zulu here in Johannesburg (other languages in other areas in SA), and also speak English, and maybe a little Afrikans.

People walking along the highway.

"The Whiteboy Shebeen; A restaurant & bar". Shebeen means speakeasy, although it's really more of a restaurant than a bar. Are there only white people that go there? No, mixed, mostly black people; It's owned by a white guy, though. In america it would be considered racists. Here, it's a joke, a pun.

My friends don't have a SA bank account. They're rip-offs: they charge you money to put money in, they charge you money to take money out. So they don't have a local SA bank account. They keep their cash in the freezer, under the broccoli. Shhh. Don't tell anyone.

Kun-JAN-ee means hello/goodbye
EE-a-bong-a means thank-you

I got the cigarettes you asked for from Duty Free. "Mmm, delicious," says Susan.

What was the biggest shock for you when you moved here, Susan? "It's not that different. People talk a little funny, and the money has funny colors. I still get homesick, but for funny things, like salsa, and watching football at not 3 o'clock in the morning."

The power went out at 8:25pm, for the third time today. We're eating dinner by candlelight. Very romantic. Welcome to Africa.

We went to Brady's, the local pub near Chris's place. We met three of Chris's friends there, three bru, Afrikanners (white south african's descended from Dutch settlers in the 1800's). They talked fast and with an Afrikanner accent. I understood about half of what they said.