While we were living in the USA it was difficult to visit South Africa. The common vacation allotments are 15 working days of vacation but on the whole people take that time off in short stretches with the longest being 2 weeks. Mostly I would take a week in Summer, a week over Christmas and then use the other 5 days to extend long weekends or tack them on to one or the other of the longer breaks.
No one explicitly prohibited taking three weeks consecutively but the work culture resists doing that.
We ended up visiting South Africa only a few times at most once every 4 years and I did use my full three week vacation on those visits.
Now that we are retired we have a less restrictive schedule which allowed us to visit last year for a month and when an opportunity came up for an overland trip to Namibia this year we jumped at it. We had already planned a trip to visit Matt in Albuquerque so this was going to be the longest travel experience outside the 18 months that we spent traveling in 2022 visiting potential places to retire.
So here we are back in South Africa preparing for the trip.
Our first stop was in the Limpopo region to visit my sister and brothers for a few days in the tiny towns of Mokopane and Modimolle.
Mokopane has suffered significant deterioration in its infrastructure over the past few decades, in particular the roads which are mostly full of potholes. A couple of the main roads have been tarred recently but all of the secondary streets are in poor shape. The roads see heavy traffic from the nearby platinum mine and there are officials who are apparently siphoning off municipal money intended for the road upkeep because not much is spent on that in the town. Someone pointed out the luxurious homes of city officials without comment as an example of corruption.
There is a neglected children's park at the end of the street where we stayed and it is a pretty good symbol of the state of things. The swings are missing their seats and the rocking horse is rusted and unusable.
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| Dilapidated mini park |
There is not much to do in Mokopane but my sister's grandchildren are active riding bikes and playing sport. We decided to try to find a place to hike in the hills on the outskirts of the town and my sister contacted someone living just below the foothills to ask if we could park our car at his house and walk from there.
The hike started along an established path but we quickly veered off to head towards the closest hill and ended up having to navigate through thorn trees and "wag 'n bietjie" (wait a bit) bushes that have thorns that hook into your clothing - hence their name.
On the way we stopped to examine an old homestead with rather strong walls that have withstood the disintegration of the roof, windows and doors.
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| Abandoned house decorated with my grand nephews |
Further up I persuaded my grand-nephews to strike the three "No evil" poses.
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| Speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil |
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| devil's thorn |
The day before we were due to fly out to Cape Town we visited our oldest brother who lives in Modimolle (about a 90min drive from Mokopane).
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| The Bouwer siblings and Gary's wife, Krista |
The Voortrekkers mistook the prominent hill in the landscape for a pyramid and thought that the river nearby was the Nile river (hence Nylstroom - literally Nile stream). The hill was a prominent feature for the indigenous Tswana and was named Modimolle which has become the town's name after universal franchise in South Africa (1992).
The Voortrekkers in this region suffered terribly during the 2nd Boer war. The English commander in chief, Lord Kitchener, implemented a brutal scorched earth policy to crush the Boer guerrilla army by burning down farmland and creating the first British concentration camps. A large number of civilians both white and black were interred in poor conditions. It is little wonder that even today there is a strong anti-English sentiment in the Afrikaans population in that region of South Africa.
We visited a graveyard of people who had died in the concentration camp at Nylstrom between 1989 and 1901. 544 people died in the camp and there are 525 graves in the cemetery, all covered in loose black rock embedded into concrete.
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| Anne walking along the front row of the graves of the concentration camp victims |
One of these, for a little boy who lived 10 months has a cracked and weathered tombstone recently decorated with flowers that show a strong desire to keep the memory of this tragedy alive in the community.
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| Grave of 10 month old Sarel van Emmenis |
After this sombre visit Anne and I drove through to Johannesburg to see where my younger brother was moving into a new home in a retirement village. We helped unload some of his things and sat in the cold winter evening air chatting with him over a picnic brought by friends who also came to see him settle in. We've known them since we were very young in Kimberley.
It does look like he has found a good place to settle.
Anne and I spent a night at the Johannesburg airport before taking the early flight to Cape Town where we were due to stay with the couple who are going on our Namibia trip with us. They are also long time friends. I lived with them for 2 years in a house in Observatory in the early 1980's while I was studying at the University of Cape Town.
Cape Town is an amazing place. We have reconnected with people and have visited Newlands forest for walks with the dogs. It is winter now and Cape Town has a rainy winter. Houses in South Africa are for the most part like houses in Portugal. They were built for the hot weather and have very little to offer for the cold so on many winter days it is warmer outside than in. With all the rain you are more or less obliged to air your house out regularly to avoid damp problems. So sitting inside with doors or windows open takes some warm layers of clothing!
The winter temperatures are similar to those that we have in Portugal. It rarely reaches freezing point at night and often during the day gets up to a fairly comfortable 20ºC (68ºF) or around 13ºC (55ºF) when it is raining.
We went to a Philharmonic concert in the Cape Town City Hall on our second night thanks to a spare ticket that someone offered our friends.
A story I often tell about Anne is how I found out what a rebel she was in high school. She went to a celebrated school in Cape Town called Rustenburg Girl's High and she really didn't enjoy being there. Very often and for some reason with impunity, she would walk into the school grounds and straight through to the opposite end gate and over to the commuter rail station at the back of the school grounds. From there she would catch a train into the city and go into the Philharmonic Theatre to watch them rehearsing. What amazes me is that in South Africa school children wear uniforms so she was quite obviously unaccompanied in the city without being found out.
Our concerns about the safety of parking in the city were eased because of the car guards in the Parade parking lot at the City Hall. These guards are all accompanied by large threatening looking dogs. This car guard was willing to let me take a photo of him with the City Hall in the background.
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| Car guard in the parade parking lot outside City Hall |
Crime is a feature of South African cities and this is a pretty good indicator of strategies that are being used to reduce it. A few days later on a walk we came across a large stretch of discarded industrial electrical insulation and our friend pointed out this was left after someone had stripped the copper wire from it. Copper is valuable and towns have begun to replace electrical installations with aluminum or copper clad steel wire. These alternative metals conduct electricity less effectively than copper does but have proved to be a good alternative. They have no resale value and therefore break the reward loop that leads to extensive copper wire theft.
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| Discarded insulation after copper wire theft |
We visited Dalebrook, one of the quaint towns in False bay which is on the Indian Ocean side of the city. It has a tidal pool where Anne learned to swim as a young tyke. The railway line in the foreground of the photograph below is the commuter rail to Cape Town from Simonstown and you can access the pool via a subway walkway from the main road.
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| Anne waving over the railway line from the sea side of Dalebrook pool |
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| Sculpture of Nelson Mandela with a misty Sea Point beach in the background |
They have an Olympic sized swimming public pool right next to the ocean there.
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| The Sea Point public pool |
On Sunday evening, after lunching with another old friend of Anne's who now lives in Zimbabwe, we went to Noordhoek to see the Simon van Gend Band at a cafe in a quaint little farm village.
On the way there we saw a sign warning about an endangered toad that crosses the road in the nature reserve (Silvermine).
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| Caution Western Leopard Toads |
The music was great and the presence of an accomplished trumpeter really added to the sound. We went with the friends who were hosting us and again met Anne's friend from Zimbabwe and her partner.
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| The Simon van Gend band |
Newlands forest stretches along the Eastern foothills of Table Mountain and Devils Peak and our host gets to choose among a number of beautiful destinations where she will take her dogs each day. The dogs of course love them all, but Newlands forest is the place where they get to chase squirrels.
We took a walk starting at the Rhodes monument on the foothill of Devil's Peak. The view had lovely scenes over the Cape Flats towards the mountains to the East of Cape Town. In the picture you can see the Rhodes Memorial in the foreground and to its right the University of Cape Town.
The brownish smog is a feature of winter here where a temperature inversion traps the woodsmoke under warmer air. A south-westerly wind called the Cape Doctor clears the air but it is more prominent in summer so winters can get smoggy.
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| View from above Rhodes Memorial |
There are indigenous trees called Silver Trees that have leaves with fibers on them that reflect the sunlight. They can grow in dense copses which look like they are snow-tipped. We came across a couple of them on our walk.
Our host is very active in a team that come up to the mountain to cut down alien invaders and she has seen a resurgence of these and other indigenous plants over the years that they have been actively working to restrict the invaders.
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| Silver trees on the foothills of Devil's Peak |
The Rhodes Memorial was built to honor Cecil Rhodes. A visitor to the monument told us that it was modeled somewhat after a Greek temple and has 49 steps (one for each year that Rhodes was alive). The monument has been subject to criticism in recent decades because of his role as an Imperialist. Critics say that it glorifies white supremacy and imperialism and there have been calls to dismantle it. Others argue that rather than erasing history, such monuments should be preserved as educational tools to highlight and confront the realities of colonialism.
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| View from Rhodes Memorial |
In recent years there have been a number of protests that have resulted in damage and defacement of the monument, including beheading the statue of Rhodes (not in the photo above). The head was restored to the bust. The nose of the figure on the horse in the far end of the memorial was also removed at one point.
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| Kitted out for surgery |
So we had the experience of the entire suite of emergency services and responses in Cape Town starting with a car trip to a hospital emergency room in the morning, followed by a consult with an opthalmologist later that morning and then on to a clinic in the northern suburbs for a surgical consult and finally surgery in the clinic that evening.
It was a whirlwind experience. At first I was told that it may be a benign condition where fluid gets behind the retina but then rights itself but after a specialist consultation was told it was an actual tear in the retina.
The scans and reports were a little disconcerting because all of the indications were that it was a tear in the top right quadrant of my eye but the distortion to the vision was in the bottom right. The surgeon was very helpful and showed me images of the eye and reminded me that the image is inverted by the lens on to the retina and then corrected by the brain.
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| Image of the retinal detatchment |
He also told me that I couldn't travel for the next 5-14 days. We were due to fly to Windhoek two days later so this was a major problem because it meant we would miss at least the first part of our trip there - a guided trip along the length of the Skeleton Coast that we have all been planning for 10 months.
The reason for the no travel ban is that the surgeon puts a gas bubble into the eye after repairing the retina and this can expand catastrophically with elevation gain. The option of driving up to Windhoek a few days later (from sea level to 1600m/5250ft) was raised but the surgeon was doubtful that the gas bubble would recede enough to even allow that.
While I was waiting for surgery another patient, a young farmer from the winelands nearby came in to say hello. He was jokingly described by the nurse as a hospital resident because he had been at the hospital for seven weeks already with some uncertainty over when he would be released.
He had come into the hospital for surgery to remove a brain tumor which turned out to be benign. The wound had become infected by a "superbug" which ended up causing swelling in his brain that resulted in near death and the loss of his ability to speak.
He is thankfully on the road to recovery now and spoke quite cheerfully about his prospects but I couldn't help wondering about my upcoming surgery and the presence of "superbugs" in the hospital.
He is Afrikaans-speaking but had been fluent in English before this infection but he said that he was not going to try to speak English until his native language speech was restored. He understands perfectly what is said to him and has all the words in his mind but the signals to his tongue and mouth are still not working properly so he has to speak carefully and slowly.
I, on the other hand, used to be functional in Afrikaans but since I have started learning Portuguese I keep on getting Portuguese words intruding which means my Afrikaans speech is careful and the wrong words sometimes come out - prompting him at one point to cheerfully tell me that he had just realized that his Afrikaans was as bad as mine was.
We met his wife who is pregnant with a baby due in August. She speaks Afrikaans with a lovely "brei" common in an area in the Eastern part of the Western Cape - the "brei" is a back of the throat rolling of the r's in words. It sounds very much like the sound in words starting with an "r" in Portuguese.
I had to stay overnight because of a followup consult early the following morning to see how the surgery had gone. When the surgeon reported that it looked good we talked a little more about driving to Namibia. It all came down to how much the gas bubble would dissipate by the follow-up consult - on the next Thursday - 6 days after the operation.
In the meantime I started doing research into a route that would give us the most gradual ascent over 4 days in the hope that it would be possible to make it to Namibia for the 2nd half of our planned trip.
A friend from Grahamstown who makes frequent trips to Namibia offered some suggestions for scenic stops on the route between Cape Town and Windhoek. So assuming we are able to go, we have options to see some beautiful parts of Southern Namibia that we would otherwise have missed.
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| Green stars for first section, blue lines for second section |
We have what seems to be really good travel insurance from a company called Safesure who promise to pay 100% of emergency expenses and also downstream effects like flight cancellations etc. We bought a product that covers a year of multiple trips for English speaking people living in Spain and Portugal.
I should also say that friends in America and Europe may be interested in what this medical adventure has cost. We were seen as private patients without medical coverage and the ballpark for the consultations, surgery and hospital fees is hovering at around R120000 which is just under $8000 US. We are going to try to get that reimbursed for the parts of the trip that we had to cancel as well.
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