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Currency: Rand, 14 to the pound
Cost of diesel: 7 rand a litre. Was 6 rand four weeks ago!
27th March
Well, we nearly had to remain in Zim forever. This is because you are expected to pay a 10USD toll to leave the country. However, as we said before we have no US and they won’t accept our Zim. When I explained this to the guy he just shrugged his shoulders. This left us in the lovely position of not having enough money to stay and not enough to leave! Finally we managed to borrow some money from a lovely border official to pay the toll. Once we had cleared immigration and got into SA we went to the ATM by the border post and paid the bloke back. I don’t really know what we would have done had this chap not done that.
The plan now is the head into Kruger Park for a few days.
30th March
We’ve been in Kruger for the last 3 days and have seen lots of game as you would expect. The highlight has been seeing some wild dogs. These are really rare. They are only 350 in the whole park and seeing as the park is the size of Wales it’s pretty special to see them. Apart from that we seen everything you normally see. It is surprising how much of a relief it is being in a place where you can get diesel everywhere, pay for things with card etc. It’s like being at home!!
Tomorrow we are heading into Swaziland on our way to the coast.
4th April
It took 5 of us to lift off the rack this morning. I reckon it weights over 100kgs. We drove across town to get the new one and as is the story of my life it didn’t exactly go according to plan
We arrived at the best shop in the world, at least I reckon so, Amy wasn’t quite so impressed. It sold every conceivable piece of 4x4 accessories you can think of. After I’d salivated over everything for a while I asked to woman about the roof rack. They were on special offer, £100 off, excellent start. They had one in stock, even better. They couldn’t fit it until the 9th. Bugger. This threw a small spanner into the works as we didn’t really want to stay in Jo’burg that long, and if we did it didn’t give us much time to get down to Umtata for teaching. Also I had taken off the old rack and given it to some guy. So we retired to the car park for a hasty discussion. I came up with a plan, plead and beg for them to fit it. So in I went to try all my charm on the woman and plead for her to fit it today. Unsurprisingly my charm failed and she said there was no way any of her guys could help me (this was despite the fact that every time I looked through the window into the factory all of her guys were sitting down reading the paper, obviously rushed off their feet). The car park beckoned again for another conversation and plan coming up with, with Amy. They had a demo rack outside mounted on one their 110. The more I looked at it the more I felt that I would be able to fit it myself then and there in the car park. In I went again to discuss this with the woman. She was seriously unimpressed with the thought of some bearded weirdo struggling to fit a roof-rack in the car park of their swanky shop front and told me that although it wasn’t that complicated it would take at least 3 guys to lift it onto the roof and there was no-way she could spare me those guys even for the 2 minutes I reckoned it world take to lift it up. Chastised I returned to the car-park for a third time. Feeling a little hard done by and fed up with the effort we had put into to get this rack I wasn’t prepared to give up yet and so after looking at the car and working everything out I decided to go for it. In I went and told the woman I was going to buy it and fit it then. She was very non-plussed but couldn’t really refuse the sale and so I bought it. She then rang the factory and told them to put the rack in the dispatch area for collection. She went to great lengths to explain that it didn’t need packaging because the customer (the crazy fool) was going to fit it there and then. With this she told me that should move the car around the back where I would find some space to fit it and then pretty much told me to bugger off!
scalped land rover
I drove around the back, parked up and wandered into the warehouse. Out came this chap pushing a trolley with the rack on it. I told him that I was going to fit it straight away on my own. He said that was madness, besides he wasn’t very busy so he would help me. With this chap helping and Amy handing us nuts and bolts when required we fitted the rack in about 7 minutes! Even without the guy I reckon we could have done it on our own because (this being the reason we bought the rack in the first place) the rack only weight 35kgs and is designed to go together like very simple mechano. I then took great delight in telling the woman that we’d done it and we’d be off.
So now we are resplendant with our new roof rack and I have fitted all the old stuff to it and we plan to leave Jo’burg tomorrow for the Drakensburg mts.
6th April
I know it may be a little early to tell but with the new rack being about 70kgs lighter and much more aerodynamic I managed to get 75km more from the last tank. I know you all be waiting with baited breath to see if this better fuel economy continues so I’ll keep you informed.
Anyway, the journey here was fairly uneventful. The campsite we are in is in the back garden of somebody’s house. It’s great really. The place is run by this woman in her fifties who is a bit of a hippy and backpacker herself. She has basically turned her house in a backpacker’s hostel. This means that you use her kitchen and lounge etc and camp in her garden. It’s a bit weird at first but she’s cool and so we quickly got used to it. She also makes all her own jams and so we’ve been trying all of them on proper toast. (If there is one thing we both miss the most it is proper toast!).
Today we went walking in the Drakensburg. These are yet another range of stunning beautiful mts. We walked to a place called Sentinel Peak. The walk up is fairly hard but not too bad. However, as the top is a shear cliff face you have to climb up a set of chain ladders to get to the top. I’m not a fan of heights and these ladders were seriously scary. Amy got half way up and then came down. I went all the way to the top but it wasn’t a huge amount of fun. Still it was worth it because the views from the top were spectacular.
The Drakensberg. The chain ladders we climbed.
10th April
In a straight line the distance from Roma (where we were last night) and Moulomong (where we are now) is about 125kms. However, driving in Lesotho means that this is actually a journey of 250kms that takes 7 hours. I didn’t know this before and so what was planned to be a nice, leisurely drive to our next campsite turned out to be an all day mission. Still, the countryside is so beautiful that it was worth it, it just meant that by the time we turned up at Moulomong we were knackered.
The campsite is community run thing. This usually means that the people are over joyed to see you. I say usually because at this place, although very ncie and clean etc, the two old women that run the place give you a look that makes you feel like you ran over their dog on the way to get there. It would appear that your arrival has interrupted their obviously very busy schedule and would you please book 10yrs in advance next time. When I went to pay they didn’t have any change and it seriously looked like they were going to say that I couldn’t stay there at all because of that reason. It was totally my fault that they couldn’t give me change and when they begrudgingly agreed to get some for the morning from the nearest shop they were so annoyed that they neither said thank you or good bye when we left. You just can’t beat good customer service.
11th April
We drove down the infamous Sani Pass today. Well, it’s not really infamous but it has got a reputation. The top of the pass is about 2900m. after driving for about 1 km in a straight line and 5km though switchbacks you have descended about 1100ms. This road is where the term hairpins comes from. It has literally been hacked out of the rock face and is only 1 vehicle wide in places. It is also strewn with rocks and has streams flowing over it in numerous places. In winter it is impossible to traverse the pass due to snow and ice. It is also tremendous fun to drive. We had to low range 1st gear it for the whole way down nd if you know much about 4x4ing you’ll realise what that means. There’s a fantastic sign at the bottom that says that it against the law to try and use the passs in any weather in anything other than a premanent 4x4. if you do so you are liable to punishment by law. That’s alone makes it a cool road!
We are now camping a great place at the bottom of the pass. The serve home-made chocolate cake so everyone is very happy. They also keep a jersey cow (random) and so provide you with free fresh milk everyday.
Amy hiking in the Drakensberg
13th april
See ing as it only a couple of days before we start teaching we decided to head down to near Umtata. The town itself is about 90kms from the coast and is in one of the old homelands, the Transkei. The region is now called the Eastern Cape. If you have a map is is about 150kms NE of East London and about 150kms due south of Lesotho. The coastline is known as the Wild Coast and every south African we have met along the way has raved about this coastline. So we thought we spend the last few days of our travelling at a place called Port St John’s on the coast. The campsite we are in is right on the banks of the river, about 2kms form the sea, which we can see down the river valley. The place is run by a yorkshireman who has been out here for 30yrs and his son. They are both really good lads and as soon as we arrived we had a few beers and a few more until it was all rather late and we stumbled back to bed. In our confused state we forgot to lock the front door of the car (you can probably guess what I am about to say) and so about 5 minutes after getting into the tent I hear footsteps around the car. Not a problem, it’s probably the askari (security gurad). We had met this chap and has also been told by Chris (the owners son) that they hads 2 security guards on at all times and had never had any issues. Well, these footsteps didn’t go away and so listening more carefully I thought I heard the door opening but I still wasn’t sure, I then heard the step on Amy’s side twang as it always does when someone steps on it so I knew someone was either in or trying to get in. Out I charged from the tent, unfortunately only attired in a sleeping bag to be conforonted by the bloody security guard rummaging around in our car. I shouted at him and he ran away. As you can guess I was rather annoyed and contuned shouting for a while until this chap appeared at my side. He was sleeping in his caravan on the next pitch and having been woken up came to see what was going on. I hadn’t actually realised it was the security guard at the time because I never saw his face but when I explained to this chap, Barrie, what he was wearing he said staright away that it was the security guard. So we went and woke Chris up and spent the next 30mins looking for him but he’d run. Chris then rang his head of security who was on holiday in Cape Town. This bloke was so annoyed that one of his staff had done this that he got straight in his car and drove the 15hrs back to Port St Johns. The last I heard was that as soon as he arrived he found the bloke and gave him a stern talking to with a big stick! Although nothing was taken from our car this head of security wanted to set a precident with his staff and I shudder to think what has happened to the other chap. Jusice is rough out here. When we were in Jo’Burg this known rapist had finally be cornered and trapped. Not by the police but by a local vigilanty crowd and before the police could arrive the rapist was burned alive in the street. The newspapers also have a less than squeamish attitude to the sorts of pictures they print and the front page photo was of the blackened body. I forget how many times we have seen dead bodies on the front pages of newspapers.
Anyway, the palce is still very ncie and Chris and his dad, Steve, were completely mortified about what happened and we plan to come back as the place is only 90kms from Umtata. The plan is to get out of town at weekends and try to explore as much as we can of the coastline
14th april
Today we drove the final 90kms of this part of the trip to Umtata. It was quite a strange feeling. We pretty much been living out of the truck since the 29th July last year and at any point been completely free to do what we want and go where we please. All that is going to be a little different now. None-the-less we are both excited about it and looking forward to seeing what it is that we are going to be doing.
15th april
Well, it’s not really what I expected. Firstly we are staying with the headmaster, Mr Zembe and his family. They have a lovely home and couldn’t have been any more welcoming or friendly. To say we have fallen on our feet would be an understatement. We also met the lady, Smally, who has been helping to co-ordinate what we are doing. She is really friendly and was really excited and pleased to see us. We haven’t met any of the other teachers yet and we are due to do that tomorrow. However, I am sure that they will be a great as all the other people we have met so far. All our reservations about where are staying and what’s expected of us have gone.
We have talked about what we are going to do and the scale of it seems pretty daunting. The school is apparently really struggling with only a 44% matriculation rate. The government wants this to be up to 70% across the board. Obviously the school have work to do. There is also a scheme by which the school can receive grants from Link Communtiy Development. This is the charity that runs and maintains about 90% of all the links between African and UK schools. However, Nyangilizwe has never met the criteria set by LCD to reiceve a grant and I have the feeling that this the main area they want me to work in. We are only actually programmed to do 22 days of teaching for the 14weeks we are here. The rest of the time is to be spent helping with school development plans. I did have some concerns about this at first but the more I have thought about the more excited I have become. This is a really good opportunity to make a lasting difference. The plans that we can come up with could go a long way to helping the school and that’s pretty cool. Amy has been asked to help with the Health intiative that the school is trying to do and also to re-vamp the library. So it seems that there is a lot for us to do and hopefully things that will last.
Drakensberg chain ladders
20th April
At the end of our first week in the school I don’t really know what to say. It’s pretty difficult to explain. Better be positive first I suppose, so here goes. The staff are great, they are really friendly and have accepted us and totally made us feel at home. Also the kids are great. They are very well behaved, polite, friendly and hard working. Before we had arrived we felt that it would be the kids that would be the problem, what with class sizes of over 70. However, we appear to be wrong. The main problem facing the school is staff apathy.
Teaching here just seems to be another job. You do it because it pays the bills (only just out here to be fair though). Beyond that most of the staff have no commitment to the job. School finished at 3pm and by 3.01pm the staff room is a ghost town. You can almost see the dust trails as they leg it down the road. This is if they bother to come in at all. Today was pay day and at least 50% of the staff never turned up. Those that did decided they wanted to finish early so signed a petition, gave it to the principal and all left. Now, I have to be a little fair here. Apparently whether the staff get paid or not is a bit hit and miss and having loyalty to a system that might not pay you is hard. For us it is just really difficult to see. The kids arrive before the staff and go home after them. The kids have 6 lessons a day and usually have a teacher for 3 or 4 of those lessons.
There are other issues, i.e. lack of resources and money. However, we have sorting out the library this week and honestly if a school in the UK had a library that well stocked they would be chuffed. However, out here it just doesn’t get used. We have found cupboards full of posters, teaching aids, unopened boxes of text books etc. It becomes a little difficult to accept people saying that they have no resources when in one day Amy and I found enough to keep the whole school running. In terms of physical resources they are definitely lacking. The library has no chairs, the classrooms don’t have enough desks etc. These sorts of things aren’t the teachers fault and they are entitled to be annoyed about it. However, in terms of their actual teaching resources they have plenty.
I don’t mean to sound negative but it is quite difficult to be all cheery about it. There is so much work to be done that we feel a bit overwhelmed. We are starting slowly and will see where we get. The principal is a great guy and seems really keen to improve the school. The ideas I am coming up with he seems really pleased with, we just now have to find a way of implementing them. We’ll see what next week brings I suppose.
26th April
Well, this week wasn’t much different. The principal had a death in the family and so has been away from school which means that we haven’t had a chance to talk about anything else. Obviously things like that can’t be helped. However, at school things continue much the same as normal. The only change is that the teachers have no sussed out that I can teach and therefore I have teaching lessons all over the place. I think I’m going to have to knock this on the head. E.g. the head of humanities came into school at8 and asked if I could teach 3 hours of the New Deal in the USA starting at 9am. I’ve never taught the New Deal and don’t know anything about it. However, if I said no then those kids, who are yr13 and doing exams in 10 weeks would then have no teacher for 3 hours and no work to do. So I had to do it. I’m worried that this is going to become a habit. Yesterday I taught period 4 and I was the only teacher the kids had had that day!
Anyway, today we had our official welcoming ceremony and it was amazing. There was loads of singing and traditional dancing and we were made to feel very welcome and special. We did get a bit concerned at one point when it was announced to the kids that we had been sent by god to help them! This weekend is a long weekend and we are going to visit our friend in Port St Johns.
Our welcoming ceremony
1st May
We’ve just got back from Port St Johns and we had a cool time. We met up with Chris, who is the manager had quite a few beers with him. Rather a relief because the family we are living with in Umtata don’t drink! We also met 2 great couples called Tammy and Steve and Di and Pete from Durban and spent most of the weekend with them. On Monday we went about 50kms up the coast to a place called waterfall bluff. You park up and walk about 5km up the coast to a waterfall that falls directly into the sea. Apparently there are only 5 like this is the whole world and it is absolutely beautiful. This coastline is known as the Wild Coast and we can now see why. It is made up of huge rugged cliffs and massive seas. Totally stunning. We have loads of plans to explore all around this area and it is something we are looking forward to. We are also now going to head up to Durban in July to visit our new friends. Steve has rather optimistically said he will be able to teach me to surf in a couple of days. Unless he has a surf-board the size of a barn-door I’m not overly confident it will actually float. Still, it should be rather amusing trying.
Making fire at Cremorne
Hiking along the wild coast.
The waterfall we went to see.
Tammy and Steve.
17th May
Not going to bore you with too many details of the teaching. Things are much the same. However, I have finally got the head to agree that me teaching about 15 hours a day is a little unfair and so this has now been cut. He wants me more involved in management and so that is what I am doing. We have conducted some school questionnaires and got some rather interesting results. One child said they should cancel Saturday lessons because she needs to go to church so that she can pray that she will pass!
Anyway, things are much the same. However, now the teaching has been reduced I actually feel that I am achieving something in helping turn the school around.
Last week we left now and we down to the coast. We went to a place called the Hole in the Wall. This is geographical feature that is best explained by looking at the photos. As you can see the whole coastline is beautiful and we had a cool time. It’s nice to get out of town occasionally. Heading back to our mates in Port St Johns next week to watch the Eng SA game.
Sorry this is a bit brief but we have had neither internet nor electricity for most the last 2 weeks in town and so have a lot to do. Will add more when we get the time!
The hole in the wall. Us at the coast.
23rd May
Paid our 2nd visit to church last Saturday. Rather unfortunately we were asked to lead prayers. Had to mumble something about it not being the done thing in our church and that we wouldn’t want to offend by saying the wrong thing. They were perfectly happy but I feel the religious charade that we have been putting up is under suspicion. The fact that we know none of the prayers, none of the bible references and can’t sing the hymns even when they are in English is starting to give us away!
This last 2 days have been up there with the worst times of the trip. We were invited to have a meeting with the Big Crocodiles (what they call any person in a senior position out here) at the department of education. We agreed and went along to talk about resources and why the school needs more staff. I did want to talk about some of the staffing issues at the school but that wasn’t the main focus of the meeting.
Our concerns about furniture etc were immediately dismissed out of hand. All they wanted to talk about was the staff. So I explained my concerns and some of the behavior I had seen. I also mentioned the pupil questionnaire and when they saw what was written on it they went mad. They admitted that they were aware and had been aware for many years of these problems (begs the question why didn’t they do something about it before, but anyway) and they felt that now was the time to sort them out. They proposed going to the school and talking to the staff straight away. Feeling rather surprised we left with them following us.
When we got the school they called all the staff together and basically said that we had been observing them for 6 weeks had written a report stating that all the staff were crap and if we sorted them out then the school would be fine. You can imagine how well that went down. Talk about wishing for a big hole to appear. No mention was made of the fact that learner’s, learner’s parents, other NGO people, the district manager had all reported the same problems to the DOE, the blame was laid squarely at our door. The district director shouted at them for about 30mins, and then left. The staff were less then friendly as you can imagine. I went straight to the principal and said that I felt really hurt and jeopardized by what had happened and that I wanted to talk to the staff about it.
I was able to talk to the staff the next day and told them that I felt we had been mis-represented and that had been made scapegoats because the DOE didn’t want to face up to the fact that they had know about the problems in the school for, we found out later, over 10 years! The staff kept on going on about the report that we wrote. The simple fact is that we never wrote one, the only written thing we gave to the DOE was a copy of the learner’s answer to the questionnaire. I’m not sure if the staff believed us but after about 45mins of going through everything things seem a little better. I just can’t believe that the DOE did that. It could have generated a situation where we would have had to have left the school. Also, since that meeting nothing has happened. They came in, shouted at the staff like they were children and left. Nothing constructive was mentioned, and also none of the positive things that I talked about to the DOE were brought up. Anyway, things seem a little better but we’ll have to see how they progress.
24th May
Today was another amusing day. We had been asked if we wanted to attend the launch of the Peer Education program. This is a nationwide scheme whereby 10 – 20 learners in each and every school receive extra lessons and skills that they are then expected to share with their peers. The areas that they cover are basically all to do with HIV/AIDS, substance abuse, relationships etc. It’s a bit like PSE at home but the kids teach each other. It has huge support and is a very high-profile thing.
At the district launch a number of outside speakers had been invited to do presentations. These included the DOE, the DOH, the police, the local mayor, the local church and 5 different NGOs. There were about 600 – 700 people there, including the local press. So it was quite a big event. They had asked me if I would like to ‘say a few words’ about the sort of peer education things we do at home. I agreed, only to find out when I arrived that I was being billed as the guest speaker and was expected to talk for about 15 mins! Anyway, I ended up on stage with a microphone addressing these people whilst desperately thinking about how I could stretch out my ‘few words’. Those that know me well, especially my students, know that the ability to talk crap that sounds good for a long time is a specialty of mine and so the time went quickly!
The rest of the day was a complete disaster. You may have heard of the concept of Africa Time. This being the idea that absolutely nothing starts on time (it seems so willful that there must be a law or something that states that it would be illegal for things to start on time). Everyone out here jokes about it and accepts it. However, it is bloody annoying. I have more examples than I can think of to emphasize this, so I will only give a few. This launch we attended, a very prestigious event with media coverage, was due to start at 9am. We had been told that we had to be on time due to large number of things to be covered. Rather stupidly we fell for it and arrived at about 8.50. We were the only people there! Over the next 2 hours people slowly dribbled in, until at about 11.30 we were ready to start. The program then got under way. The thing about meetings out here is that they are ultra-formal. They all start with a prayer, introductions, purpose of the day and then messages of support from prominent local people. This all has to happen before the real business of the day starts. All of the above took 90mins to complete, so by 1pm we were ready to start the day. By this time the 300 kids there were bored to tears and most got up and left. This is another strange thing about meetings and conferences out here. People get up and wander off and then come back, people in the audience chat loudly on their phones, the speakers themselves use their phones whilst sitting at the front on the stage and no-one seems to mind or care. This means that when the speakers actually start their presentation most people can’t hear them because of all the other noise. The speakers themselves don’t seem to mind. It’s almost as if they are happy just to talk and don’t care whether people listen, they have done their bit just by talking. We have noticed this all over. By 4pm there was about 15 people left in the room and one guy was just carrying on like it was still packed, even though some of the kids were actually clearing up the room! When I spoke I asked / told them to be quiet. I got instant silence, mainly because people were so shocked that I expected them to shut up and listen that they were too shocked to speak!
By 4pm we were about a third of the way through the days program and in true African style the program director stood up on stage and said ‘right, that’s it, see you’. They just called it a day. The other people left to talk just had to leave and all the other things on the agenda were ignored. It was actually quite funny but also makes you wonder what the point of doing it at all was. The other mildly irritating thing was that the whole day was in Xhosa. A language that we are just reaching the levels of:
“Hello, my name is Dan.”
“I have 28 years”
“I live in London”
“How are you?”
The clerk at school has taken it upon herself to teach me all the farmyard animals, I can now confidently list dog, cat, duck, goat, pig, horse, cow, chicken (one you have to be slightly careful with because its remarkably similar to the slang for female genitalia, not one you want to be saying out loud in a strongly Christian area), frog (not really farmyard I accept but an easy one to learn).
This varied and comprehensive list, also one I am very proud of, doesn’t help much though in general conversation, especially at an HIV conference. Xhosa is a cool language; they have 11 different clicks that stand in for letters in their speech. When they talk quickly though it is a bit like listening to that character from wacky races though.
Anyway, by the end of the day we were all Xhosa’d out and ready to go home!
29th may
Not going to talk about this weekend’s rugby either. If I thought being in Wales when England lost was bad then I’m really glad I decided to establish what it would be like to be in SA when England loses! Still it was an opportunity to sip a few drinks and catch up with some old friends.
For those of you that know who Romeo Dalliarie is (basically JB only!) you will be interested to know that we met his daughter this weekend. He was the commander of the UN forces during the Rwandan Genocide and someone who I have read a lot about, and respect immensely for what he did (or tried to do), said and what he has tried to do since. So meeting his daughter was a real honor.
Tomorrow we are celebrating Cavendish Day at school. Not entirely sure how the day is going to pan out but it will be a good day none-the-less. To be honest though, not much is going on at school because as of Friday we go on an indefinite strike over wage demands. The teachers want a 12% increase, the government has offered 6%. Seeing as inflation is currently at 6%, the cost of fuel has gone up by 28% in the last month, the teachers have only had about a 3% increase over the last 10 years and the government has just given themselves a 57% increase, the teachers have a point! It is actually all the Public Sector that is demanding this pay increase and if they don’t get it they will all go in strike. So things are looking rather interesting out here at the moment. Will keep you posted.
Us outside church with Vela.
Mr Zembe's daughter and grand daughter pestering me!
The school grounds and main hall
Mrs Bambelo in her Pondo clothes.
Amy and I with some of the teachers on Cavendish day
3 of the Grade 12 girls in cultural clothes.
21st June
We’ve been on strike since the 1st June now and it’s very very boring. There is simply nothing to do in this town. So we’ve spent most of the time visiting our friends along the coast. That has been fun but also not really why we are here. The unions seem quite prepared to compromise so that the strike will end, they have reduced their wage increase demand to 9%. However, the govt has only offered 7.5% and gave them a deadline to accept it or the govt will reduce the offer to 7.25%, enforce the settlement and sack any worker that continues to strike. As you can imagine the unions haven’t responded to this very well and the talks have broken down (again!). We’re basically left in no-mans land and have had enough. We spoke to the charity and to Mr Zembe and have basically agreed that if nothing is sorted out by tomorrow them we are off. If we do go we’ll head north a bit to visit some friends and national parks around Durban. Then we’ll run down the garden route to Cape Town, up the coast to Namibia and head home. It will be a sad way to end our time in the school but we are achieving nothing and I am sick to death of hanging around. Will let you know what happens.
Visiting the Hole in the wall again
The Uzimvubu River in Port St Johns
8th July
We just had an awesome week with our friends Tammy and Steve in Durban. Durban is a really cool place. We went to loads to cool restaurants and bars and generally chilled out for the week. Tammy and Steve really looked after us and have become very good friends of ours. We’re now trying to sort out when they can come over to the UK to visit us. Steve did try to teach me to surf and I can safely say that surfing is not something that I was born to do. I really enjoyed it but my prediction of needing a barn door as a surf board was fairly prophetic. Steve was very polite and kept saying that either the waves weren’t big enough, or it was the board’s fault that I kept stacking it. However, my body shape is probably the main reason that I suck at surfing. Still, it was wicked and being out on the water to watch the sun come up and see dolphins swimming around is pretty cool.
The hospitality and friendship that Tammy and Steve showed us was amazing. They made us feel very welcome and we'll definitely be keeping touch. We were also invited to a proper roast dinner with tammy's mum and tammy's sister is putting us up when we get to Cape Town. Thanks guys, you're amazing!
Sunrise in Durban
Left, surfing with Steve. Right, the four of us on Durban beach.
15th July
This last week has been one of goodbyes. From Durban we back to Umtata to have a final send off wit the teachers and our family. The staff made a real effort and out on a great braai for us. Again it was truly staggering how much meat can be consumed at these affairs. Still it was a lovely day and very sad to say goodbye to everyone for the last time. Due to the fact that strike had only just finished none of the students were back in school meaning that we didn’t get the chance to say goodbye to them. We were both sad about this but it can’t be helped and to be fair is just another example of the inconvenience and trouble that this strike caused.
After a braai with the staff we went back to Mr Zembe’s house and had another braai. They had invited lots of people from the church and loads of their neighbours. It was a really nice evening with lots of people giving speeches saying how we’d achieved a lot and made a huge impact on them and the community. It was nice after us questioning what we had achieved and feeling down that we hadn’t done anywhere near as much as we had planned to then hear other people saying we had made a difference. It was really sad to say goodbye to everyone then next day however, we have promised that we will be back at some point. There is so much work to be done out here that we have both said that we can’t just leave it at the small contribution that we made. We will definitely be back out here many times in the future.
Mr and Mrs Zembe, our family in Umtata.
From Umtata we headed to Port St Johns to have a final night of gins with our mate Chris and his girlfriend Dee. However, Chris has plans to come to the UK so we’ll definitely catch up with at some point in the future.
After that it was off to Coffee Bay to catch up with our friends Laura and Brett, the guys we got stuck in the snow with in Lesotho. After another night of gin we moved onto East London to spend the weekend with Chris’s mum, Jill and also to get try and get our visas sorted. The visa saga had been continuing with us getting no-where, at one point we were told we’d have to do it in Cape Town. However, after finally getting to speak to someone high up in Home Affairs we managed to get it sorted. The first person we spoke to told us that we would have to come back in 14 days to collect our visa extensions. She couldn’t quite understand that this wasn’t possible because if she actually listened to us she would realise that in 14 days we would actually have left the country. This was something totally beyond the realms of her understanding and after a little while she called the supervisor. We explained the situation to the supervisor who issued a verbal barrage of instructions to everyone and lo and behold we were told to come back in 2 hours and the visas would be ready. The ladies doing the work weren’t best pleased but as they had been told by their boss to fix it they had no choice. It must be immensely annoying if you live out here to be told by a government department that it takes 2 weeks to process your paperwork for it to actually only take 2 hours. . We did have a rather amusing incident though. I asked what would happen if our visa extension applications were rejected and we were told that we would be issued with a 14 day expulsion notice to leave the country. I tried to get the supervisor to reject our extensions there and then, thus saving us £70 and issue the expulsion notice as we would have left the country in 14 days anyway. Although this made her laugh she rather annoyingly wasn’t able to do it and we had to pay!
TL, The coast at Stormsriver. TR, us after we got engaged. BL, the lighthouse at Cape St Francis, BR, Amy with Chris (taken well into the evening as you can probably tell!)
20th July
From East London we made our way down the coast, stopping at a place called Jeffrey’s Bay. This is where they hold the Billabong Pro International Surfing competition. It is also were the Billabong factory shop is. The result of this is that every single person in town wears some billabong labelled item of clothing. Even the old cleaners have t-shirts and hoodies that probably cost about £50 back home! Whilst staying in J’ Bay we visited a place called Cape St Francis. This is a really beautiful village and lighthouse on a headland. Here we decided to get engaged, which is cool.
Next stop was Stormsriver. This is an absolutely beautiful national park right of the mouth of a river. We camped 10m’s from the sea and whilst lying in the tent could see a pod of whales swimming just of the coast. That was pretty special. We also did a bit of coasteering along the coast.
From Stormsriver we went to another nature reserve called De Hoop. This is also right on the coast and is apparently the best land based whale watching in the whole of South Africa. You climb these huge dunes and from these you have a view miles up and down the coast. Everywhere we looked were whales breaching and doing tailspins. It was stunning. Some of the whales were only 100m’s offshore. We watched these for quite a while before heading back to the camp. A pattern that we have fallen into on the trip is basically to go to bed shortly after it gets dark. This is mainly because if you are bush camping then it is dangerous to be out at night due to the animals and also because there is sod all else to do. So we went to bed early, only to be woken by some Christian youth group in the next pitch singing hymns and chanting etc. All very happy-clappy and rather annoying. However, seeing as it was only about 8pm we couldn’t really go and tell them to shut up!
Yesterday morning we reached one of the 2 milestones for the journey, and that was to finally get to the most southerly point on the continent, Cape Agulhas. It was quite weird to be standing there looking at the sign, especially seeing as it has taken be 7 years of waiting, 2 years of planning, 51 weeks of travelling and 44500kms to finally do what I said I would back in 2000. On the way we passed Ewan Macgregor and Charlie Boorman on their way to the Cape Agulhas. I gave them a wave but the ignored me. Still I guess that’s what comes from doing this trip with 3 huge support vehicles to help you.
And finally that brings us up to today. We are now in Cape Town which forms the 2nd milestone because although this isn’t the most southerly point in Africa it has always being the ultimate destination. That means that Amy and I can finally say that we have driven from London to Cape Town. Pretty pleased with that to be honest.
Below, more of the Stormsriver coastline
Below, a whale off of De Hoop Nature Reserve coastline and part of the coast.
Below, us at Cape Agulhas, the most southerly point on the continent
Below, the V&A Waterfront and Table Mt. Amy surfing in Durban
28th July
We left Cape Town after spending a good few days with Chevanne and Ramon. Chevanne is Tammy’s sister and they very kindly put us up in Cape Town. As they are students we went out for a few beers as you can imagine. They also have a puppy sausage dog that Amy was extremely pleased about!
Whilst in CT we’d been contacted via our website by another couple of overlanders, Roel and Lizzie. They guys have over landed from Holland to India, shipped to Australia and then shipped from Aus to Cape Town to drive home. They’ve been on the road for 15 months now. Rather an epic trip! We met them for a few beers and decided to travel up to Namibia with them. An excellent decision because they are really cool. So the last few days have been spent driving north towards the Namibian border with Lizzie and Roel in the pissing rain.
Today we left SA 4 months and 1 day after we entered and drove to Fish River Canyon. This is supposedly the 2nd biggest canyon in the world after the Grand one. Tomorrow we will go and explore it.
