Happiness

Quick update.

We are back in South Africa for now. After the Okavango Delta we visited the Khama Rhino Sanctuary for a night where we saw quite a few white rhino up close and then moved on to the capital of Botswana which isn't anything special.

With quite a bit of time left on our car rental we are doing some sight seeing of South Africa knocking of the Pilansberg National Park (fantastic little park with all the big animals), Sun City (SA's bad attempt at Vegas), and the Drakensberg escarpment area (an amazing very green wet place between the highlands and the lowlands with huge waterfalls and amazing rock formations).

We are now heading towards the Drakensberg Mountains until we return the car in J'burg. Tonight we are staying in a lovely hostel with the most unhelpful, angry staff member who epitomises service in South Africa... called Happiness.

Photos

Link on the right hand side to the photos we have put up on flickr nicely organised into sets :) Enjoy.

Zambia and Botswana

After several days in Windhoek Namibia we headed north into Zambia via the Caprivi Strip which is this narrow bit of land hundreds of km's long boarded by Angola, Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Open now without the need of an armed escort we drove through hundreds of villages strewn along the road. Signs everywhere warned of elephants and to drive carefully, so we kept our eyes peeled, when we weren't trying to keep the car on the road due to extremely localised torrential downpours. The only elephant we saw was when we came across a whole village out on the road yelling and screaming. We slowed down and some kids pointed out a movement in the bush. Next minute there was a trumpeting and a whole heap of crashing noises followed by a huge male elephant running out of the bush. All the kids turned and ran but as soon as the elephant stopped they were straight back into their yelling and screaming. We discovered this was the way villages stop elephants entering their village and knocking everything down... houses, crops etc. Eventually the elephant tired of the village protection squad and sauntered off back into the bush.

Anyway, orderly Namibia turned into disorderly Zambia with a drive across a bridge. After over an hour filling in forms and getting papers stamped in broken down caravans we were back on the road to Livingstone. Swerving to avoid people, cattle, goats and chameleons we arrived at Faulty Towers backpackers and signed up for a white water rafting trip down the Zambezi and a booze cruise for the following day. Joining us on the activities were our next door neighbours from Australia. As it's high water at the moment the rapids on the Zambezi are rather tame but still a lot of fun. Dani chose to go in the "easy" raft and I was forced to go in the "hard" raft which meant the guide tried to flip us as much as possible. Given the size of the rapids he only managed to flip us once much to his dismay. The booze cruise was more of a civilised affair compared to the last one I went on over here and we saw hippo and crocs as we drifted along as the sun set. The Aussies, Dan a South African we met on the rafting, another SA and a kiwi who flew oil prospecting planes were on our cruise. We were to run into Dan everywhere we went over the following days around Victoria Falls and ended up sitting out a massive rain storm in the Vic Falls bridge bungee cafe whilst having lunch.

Zambia is a massive country with not much between points of interest. Given it being the rainy season and advice from other travellers we turned around and headed to Botswana after 3 nights in Livingstone. Approaching the boarder we were confronted by a queue of trucks about 1 km long parked up on the side of the road waiting for the pontoon that takes vehicles across the river to Botswana. We pulled up at the boarder post and after fighting our way through the crowd of touts we then began the weird and wonderfully complicated process of Zambian boarder control. The touts followed us to the river edge we we waited for 2 hours for a place on the pontoon. The pontoon carried one truck and three cars at a time. Given the number of trucks, some of these guys must wait for several days as the pontoon takes just over 30 minutes to make a there and back trip across a 60 meter wide river. African efficiency!

Hitting up a small town called Kasane in Botswana where we spent two nights we did a game drive in Chobe NP followed by a sunset cruise. Elephants are everywhere here and so are hippos so we can safely say we've well and truly ticked those two off. Now we are in Maun where we undertook an overnight Makoro (dug out canoe) trip into the Okavango Delta. It was just Dani, myself and the guide/poler and we had to carry in everything we'd need ourselves. Our guide (Kaiser) was caught off guard by our last minute booking so ended up leaving all his food behind. He said he was happy not to eat for the 24 hour trip much to Dani's disgust, so Dani forced him to eat the muck we made for lunch, dinner and breakfast. I think he was pleased to see the end of us poor guy. The delta was quiet in terms of the big animals, not surprising given the time of year, but was full of birds and insects. We still heard hippo and saw zebra however.

So that brings you up to date. Tomorrow we head out towards a rhino sanctuary and then who knows where to from there. Hope everyone at home is well and we'll update again when we get a chance.

Issues

So since we have a day of nothing today we're going to update the blog with several entries. This one is about the stuff i'm getting frustrated about here in Africa:

1. Fuel: It's rubbish! Well at least the kerosene. You can't buy white spirits here but luckily my cooker runs on kerosene and unleaded fuel. Kerosene is sold everywhere and is used by everyone for cooking (when they're not braai'ing (BBQ'ing)). I don't know how the locals manage to cook with this rubbish though. What would take us 5 minutes for boiling water at home takes me 45 minutes after fighting with the cooker. A dutch couple are having more success with petrol so will give that a try next.
2. Mosquitoes: No matter how hard you try and keep them away they still get you. 
3. Roads: Actually they're very good but there is one in particular that was rubbish and as this is a complaining post I better pad this post out with complaints. The road running between Kasane and Nata in Botswana is the worst tarred road in the world. It would be better to rip it up and leave it untarred given that the road is one big pothole.

Well that's all. We're having an awesome time so next post will be an update.

School in Katutura, Windhoek

Through a connection with a family from Wadestown School (the Harris Family) who also live across the road from my father, we were able to go and help out at an afternoon school. Cathy, the Harris's aunt is the lovely kiwi woman in the photo. It was in a township area of Windhoek called Katutura. Apparently, Namibian public schools aren't great, especially in township areas. Teachers often don't have higher than year 10 qualifications themselves, classes can be 40 or more, there is a lot of rote learning and of course behaviour management is a whack. So this school is run by expats and relies on volunteers (not always teachers) to teach the children. They have seen improved results from the Namibian school for lots of the children who attend the afternoon school and therefore have a large waiting list for children to come to the school. We ended up staying for 3 days - not a significant time in terms of the children's learning, but as the woman (a Norwegian social worker) was sick, the year one class was without a teacher so I was able to help out none the less.

I perhaps should have been warned when Cathy said, "They were wild when I took them yesterday." Basically there were around 20 year 1 children who had had about 5 days of school so far and no preschool education and the room was about 3x3 metres. It was reminiscent of some of my decile 1 relieving days. You pull on all your resources to survive. Pretty much on day one, we turned up and were taken to the class and I was left to do my thing. I.e. fly by the seat of my pants. Karl stayed and they children enjoyed any opportunity they had to climb on him, and were fascinated by the hair on his legs, arms and especially fingers. They were absolutely gorgeous and a good number of them keen to learn and attentive. Of course there were the obligatory scally-wags. 3 of them who pulled a couple more along at times. In terms of education, most could not write their names (I discovered on the second day when I tried to learn them all), they could sing ABC and count to 10 and that's about it. Well, enough of them could to make it sound like they all were. With Julie Roberts numeracy advisor's voice in my head we spent lots of time counting backwards from 10 (backwards is as important as forwards and is needed for subtraction!). We also did lots of activities using the letter b. (Forgive me if that wasn't a good place to start junior teachers!) We also sang a lot.

By Day three we were functioning much better. Of

course that was until the grasshopper entered the classroom. Hysteria reigned and I had to stop

several children from whacking it with their shoes. They calmed down and we did some maths with the bottle tops. There was a bag of about 500. When the kids were packing up the bag was tipped all over the floor. Metal tops on a tiled floor caused enough noise, but this was added to as children started sliding around on them and the throwing them in the air. It was loud and took a while to sort out. Heads, shoulders, knees and toes helped to get their focus back! Spot scally-wag number one in front of me! Because we had been learning about the letter b, we ended our time with the kids by giving them balloons. So lovely to see their excitement.

You can't see, but as this photo was being taken, I had children's hands playing with my hair ! They loved touching it!

We were able to donate some money to the school raised by the year 7 and 8s from Wadestown School.

Mention should also be made of the fact that Karl was dragged into teaching too. On day 2, the year 7 class was without a teacher so he was asked to step in. The lesson that he was given was quite open and so he ended up discussing climate change with them and making outfits out of plastic bags. He was exhausted by the end of it and had developed his respect for teachers somewhat. he wasn't keen for a repeat performance!

So, if anyone is keen, especially teachers, we can hook you up with some delightful children in Windhoek!

Namibia... so far

We're now in Windhoek, Namibia and the rain has started to set in. It's been dry and hot up until about Sossusvlei when the dark clouds started rolling in and we had a bit of spitting rain. This has meant that areas of the desert that I remember being actual desert are now green and lush with growth. Even some of the famous sand dunes here are starting to sprout grasses. Great in some ways that here we are seeing something that not many other tourists get to see, but this also means it's harder to spot wildlife (the reason why tourists come to Namibia). Anyway, I'll give a bit of a run down on what we've seen and done so far.

We left Cape Town and drove to the Cederberg mountains some time over a week ago spotting meercats along the side of the road. Once we made it to the Orange River which defines the boarder between SA and Namibia my dreams of camping beside the river which is surrounded by a weird dry moon like landscape, were dashed when we discovered the river was in flood, basically swamping ALL the campgrounds. Left with nothing else to do we headed across the boarder to Namibia a day early and ended up in a flash as Cabana overlooking the swollen river drinking beers and watching all the rubbish from the eastern side of South Africa float past (where the rains were).

Since then we've been driving a lot of dirt roads which are slowly destroying our almost new beloved faux 4WD. Hot and dry landscapes with some life were replaced with deserts with almost no life. Fish River Canyon for my second time was a bit of a disappointment as it's hyped as one of Africa's greatest sights... it's not, the red dunes and pans around Sossusvlei are way more impressive. As Namibia was once under German control, a lot of the architecture is essentially German. German is still a popular language and we've spent time torturing ourselves with some of the worst music I've ever heard (all in German) due there being only one radio station we can pick up. We visited an old German diamond mining town that was abandoned in the desert called Kolmanskop just outside an old German town on the coast called Luderwitz. These houses are preserved in the dry desert air and make for an eire experience. Surrounded by German tourists we made our escape to campsite in the middle of no where by some old German castle just to meet some Swiss Germans (these guys were fantastic though and we ended up meeting up a few times).

 
 

After visiting the dunes and walking into some old dry pans we headed to Swakopmund to check out these crazy plants belonging to the genus Welwitschia. These plants live for thousands of years and are related to pine trees but only grow two leaves which get battered by the wind and shredded to make these long flax like leaves. Pretty exciting for me, I don't know how Dani truly felt.

Drivers in southern Africa are pretty shocking with in SA alone something like almost 2000 killed on the road over the holiday season. This is mainly due to, in my opinion, poor driver training. On the way to Swakopmund we came across a flash 4WD overturned on the side of the road with the whole front caved in. It had just happened and stuff was strewn all over the side of the road. Essentially this douch decided to hit all the puddles on the road as fast as he could only to loose control and flip across the road. Luckily neither he or his wife were hurt except for cuts and bruises. Some one else drove his wife to nearest town to get them towed. This sort of behaviour has so far been demonstrated in SA as well as Namibia with drivers never following the speed limits and passing on blind corners.... mostly flash fast cars.
  

Anyway, rant over. We hit Etosha NP a couple of days ago. Spotted a pride of about 6 lions with two males the first afternoon we were there. We had been warned that it would be hard to see animals due to the abundance of water. During the dry season the animals congregate around water holes making it predictable in where to find them. However, we saw plenty of animals with a close encounter with a big bull elephant, hundreds of zebra, wilderbeast, giraffe, jackal, mongoose, only one rhino but millions of springbok and other antelope species. The coolest were the ground squirrels that would hang around camp and you'd almost drive over. You just wanted to pick them up and take them home except for the rabies warning. Second night we had a badger come into camp scavenging from the bins. This was first time I feared for our lives... Badger from Wind in the Willows was never like this guy!

Anyway. That's all I can be bothered writing about. It'll take me an hour to get photo's on here now. We're spending a few days working in a school here in Windhoek so will post up about that later in the week. Dani's got a class of first graders who love my hairy legs.

PS. Sorry about the photos etc. This may be the last photo's we post due to the hours I\ve spent trying to make them work on blogspot.





It begins

Today we leave the comfort of clean sheets, swimming pool, free food and ironed underpants (care of Lydia, one of the house staff). To farewell us on our journey, Cape Town has started with a scorcher of a day and the neighbourhood water main has burst leaving Dani unshowered. Our plan after travelling Africa on scooters was shot down became buying a car in SA and selling in Kenya. This is rather tricky so we flagged that and lowered ourselves to buying a car, travelling as far as Malawi and selling it back in SA. After checking out some dodgy cars we flagged that idea and managed to get a great deal on hiring a car to drive around SA, Namibia, Botswana and Zambia before returning it to SA. Our "car" (Kia Soul) will cause great embarrassment in the camp grounds but at least we're covered if it breaks down in the middle of the desert.

So anyway, we're off to the Cederburg mountains which are about 300km's north for our first night and on Sunday will push on to the boarder between Namibia and South Africa in our faux SUV (photos to come). The Orange River is in flood so fingers crossed we make it across the boarder.

Cape Town has been great. Dad and Libby have been fantastic in showing us around, and trusting us in driving their cars. Too many highlights of this beautiful city (photos to come) but before I'm dragged away one little scare from the other night. Here's the back ground.... The house we are in is surrounded by an electric fence and sensors. The house it self has cages on the doors and windows that get locked at night. We are on a 2 acre block and there are few neighbours near by and there are armed security patrols. It's not actually that scary until you've just finished dinner, it's dark and the alarm suddenly goes off. Dani and I really didn't know what to do so I rushed around locking doors while Dad and Libby open them to wander outside and see what's happening. Long story short, I had a huge adrenaline rush from a gecko who had shorted the electric fence causing bolts of lightning to spark through it's crispy body. This is so far our experience of South Africa's obsession with security.