South Africa: Mokopane, Cape Town and a major wrinkle in the overland trip plan

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. 

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.

Abandoned house decorated with my grand nephews

 Further up I persuaded my grand-nephews to strike the three "No evil" poses.

Speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil

My nephew pointed out a thorn that Anne photographed.  It is called a devil's thorn in English but he called it a "skaapsteker" which translates to sheep stabber because it lies on the ground and penetrates the feet of sheep (or poorly shod humans) with a painful thorn.

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).  

The Bouwer siblings and Gary's wife, Krista

The town was named Nylstroom by the Dutch Voortrekkers who settled there after traveling North West to escape British rule.

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.

Anne walking along the front row of the graves of the concentration camp victims

The victims were mostly women and children and the saddest are the graves of the tiny children who lived for only a few short months in the cruel conditions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Anne waving over the railway line from the sea side of Dalebrook pool

Next we visited Sea Point which is on the Atlantic Ocean side of the City.  The promenade along the coast line has an area with a lovely sculpture of Nelson Mandela with the ocean as a backdrop.

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.

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). 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kitted out for surgery

We were due to see off our friends on the Friday morning and I helped out with shuttling their pickup with the camping equipment to get a few things done.  I noticed on the Thursday afternoon that my vision had a bit of an impairment - like a shadow in the bottom right periphery while I was driving.  I thought it might be a big floater but later that night when I got into bed there were flashes of light along the edges of the area so in the morning I did some googling only to find that this was considered an emergency and should be seen to right away.

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.  

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.

Green stars for first section, blue lines for second section

The map above has the original trip plan.  The guided portion is shown by all the stops marked with green stars - it is a 1000km stretch of desert coast ending more inland with a larger group of people.  The blue line is the extended trip that we planned to do with just our Cape Town friends.

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.

 

(re)visiting South Africa

This year late winter in southern Portugal saw the wettest weather is has seen in something like 20 years.

We made pretty quick work of the 5 tonnes (2.5 cords) of firewood that I had accumulated over last summer and by March it was apparent that we would probably need to get more wood to see us through untill the summer heat was enough to sustain the hot water tank heat from the solar vacuum tubes.

The rain was not a steady persistent soak, but rather downpours interspersed with bright sunlight yielding beautiful clouds and rainbows which we admired on our evening walks. 

Double rainbow from our house

I met an American last year who lives a couple of towns away from ours and who lived a couple of towns over from us in the USA (Topsfield, MA).  He also has a prolific catalog of songs that he can play on his acoustic guitar and so I have found an avenue to explore rediscovering music that I used to play in school and college.  He is a little older than me but our list of songs intersects quite well and his broad knowledge of folk songs has helped me to rediscover the list of songs that I lost somehow on the way.   We meet for a few hours a week and jam together and in some cases working a little on arrangements - though for the most part it is just to enjoy making music together.  

Evening sky in our town

Anne and I love hanging out in our small hamlet and to be honest our sense of inertia has been pretty strong.  Neither of us have really felt a strong urge to go anywhere other than our walks (most days), taking more pleasure in pottering around at home.  

Cumulus clouds on our evening walk

Friends we have met in the Algarve were going off on amazing tips to various exotic places and we had in turn been discussing plans of our own to visit either Namibia or Morocco with the expectation that we'd go to one this year and the other next year.  

By March though, it was looking as though neither of those trips would materialize this year.  We had had several conversations with our friends and family in South Africa leading up to these plans which led us to ask ourselves one evening why we shouldn't go to South Africa?  

To be honest this is another instance of not being fully adjusted to me being retired.  A 3 week trip to South Africa at short notice would have been unthinkable while I was working and we had found it hard to make trips to South Africa while I was working - leading to 2 gaps of 5 years followed by a gap of 7 years (with COVID) between visits.

So once the idea had taken hold and despite this nagging feeling that we wanted to just settle in at our new home, Anne got stuck into figuring out the best routes to use to make a trip to visit.  

We called our surprised family and friends to tell them that we'd made bookings for a few weeks time.  In retrospect the timing was not great for everyone but we were very happy that the adjustments that were needed to accommodate our trip in the midst of everyone's daily life were possible.

We spent a week first in England visiting our daughters and grandchildren.  This is always fun.  We slot into walking the children to school and having walks with our daughters and their dogs to the local coffee shops along the Thames.

A surprising sign along the river reminded me of British optimism.  The Emergency Throwline is in a locked box with a combination lock.  The rescuer on the banks of the river has to call a number to get the lock combination which opens to reveal a bag and rope and a 5 step process to inflate the bag and then throw it to the drowning person while remembering to hold onto the other end of the rope.

Thames rive life saver

 Luckily we never had to test how long a drowning person is able to wait for you to figure all of this out.

We took a trip into London with our daughters and their girls, leaving the younger boys at home with their dads.  Our grandchildren are getting so big.  We keep having these double-takes as we remember what we were doing when we were their age and their parents' ages.

London pedestrian bridge

 

My siblings all live in Gauteng and Mpumalanga and we had a week of catching up to do with my brothers and sister and their children (and grandchildren).

 

The ubiquitous rolling blackouts that left homes without electricity have more or less stopped.  It seems that government funds are being used to improve electricity supply reliability.  This is an area that was neglected for decades.  

 

Many people who had the means have installed solar panels which has meant that the regular funding from households paying for electricity has slowed down enough that there are rumors that the government will attempt to levy a tax on home solar electricity.  When I asked about this the idea was mostly met with skepticism mainly because of how hard it would be collect such a tax.

 

We were struck by the obvious problems with the road and water infrastructure in the small towns up there.  It turns out that this is a general problem in towns in South Africa where the municipalities have not kept up the maintenance of the water pipes and the roads over many years and these are starting to fall apart.

 

A very common sight at homes are these green tanks called "JoJo" tanks that collect water from the gutters and which are equipped with pumps that pump the water on demand into the house.  Most properties have several of these, often placed under the corners where down-pipes can feed them.

 

JoJo tank

 

Water supply on the other hand is harder to manage.  We heard that in some places the underground maps showing where the water pipes run and where joints are have been lost and pipe failures can cause loss of water to entire blocks for days.  The longest town-water interruption we heard about was 23 days but I'm guessing there are people who have had worse.

 

National roads are still in good shape but in many of the small towns the tar roads were severely damaged.

Pothole photo by Anne

The consensus was that all of these were simply the long term result of money intended for infrastructure being funneled into corrupt town and state officials.  

We heard that the mayor of a small town didn't live in that town, but had moved to an expensive home in a city 100 km away and that the really expensive looking homes in another town belonged to town councillors.

 

People in South Africa are quite amazing actually.  Despite the obvious problems, there is a lot of good humor and friendly banter.  One thing that was immediately apparent to me as someone who left there at the tail end of apartheid was the easy conversations happening across color and status lines.  When we left there at the end of white rule, society had been oppressed to the point where the rest of the population were required to show a great deal of deference to whites.  That has dissipated and although I suppose it is still present in some quarters, up in the North East I felt the change in how people engaged with one another.  Respectful and as equals.

 

That is not to say that there is no sense of threat over there.  My sister was quick to warn me not to walk in certain parts of their town and we were careful where we parked.  Petty crime and sometimes very threatening confrontations do happen with criminals.  I think what has changed there is that the privileged white population no longer enjoys the protections that they had under apartheid.  The crime is experienced equally by all races and it affects whites a lot more than it used to.

 

My grand-nephews were willing participants in light painting with my camera using a long exposure and we took turns to make images with each of them.

Alien life form light painting

 

After visiting my siblings we stopped in the Eastern Cape which included an amazing trip to the Winterberg mountains which are north of Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown).   A friend of mine owns some land there and has designed and built an amazing log cabin using the large poplar trees on his property.  He also has an observatory there from which he takes magnificent photographs of deep space.

Night sky and log cabin in the Winterberg

 

Grahamstown also shows the ravages of inefficient and corrupt governance.  The town has had multiple failures of their water infrastructure and outside the main roads, most of the in-town roads are full of really bad pot-holes.

 

There are wild donkeys that roam the streets now and rifle through trash bags if they find them and every day you have to slow down in your car to let the ambling cows cross the road.

Cattle in the road in Makhanda

We heard that in 2015 the town was voted the best municipality in the district with around 90 staff members.  There are now over 1000 staff in the municipality and not much to show for it excepting draining the city coffers.  

 

From Makhanda we traveled by car to Addo, a town on the way to Port Elizabeth.  We had booked an afternoon tour of the nearby Elephant park.  We were lucky to have booked off-season and mid-week so we ended up being the only people on the game drive.

 

Our guide was incredibly knowledgeable and he pointed out a number of animals that we would probably not have seen if we were on our own.

 

Two ostriches with their chicks

Lions resting in the shade in the late afternoon

Warthog and its piglet

 

Giraffe

 

Cape Buffalo

And so many elephants.

Elephant in the fading light

 

Most of the animal sightings were really up close.

Lion walking past our open tour bus

 

After Addo we drove along an inland route to Knysna, through some small towns that seem to be in much better repair than the previously visited small towns.  We had heard that some of these towns have taken it upon themselves to manage their own district properly and it was very evident.

Some of the towns seemed to have vacuum tube driven solar heat for hot water on every house in the poorer township which is likely from an efficient execution of a government program to provide hot water to poorer homes.

Township houses with solar heated water

We spent the night visiting friends in Knysna and then flew from George on a small plane to Cape Town for the last 10 days of our trip.

We ended up meeting with friends that I haven't seen for at least 12 years and reconnecting with people from my university days at UCT (University of Cape Town).  We also met Anne's friend who we had seen in Seville and other friends from our Grahamstown days. 

Driving home one evening from a movie night in the city,  I took a photo of the floodlit mountain from there.

Table mountain illuminated

My recent plans to gather together music that I have played and sung over the years inspired me to ask our friends in Cape Town who were hosting us if they could find a second guitar that would allow us to jam a bit.  We ended up playing a few songs off and on and then taking the guitar on a trip into the Cederberg which is a spectacular remote place a few hours drive north-west of Cape Town on the Namibia road.

Playing guitar outside our cottage in the Cederberg

 

We went on a couple of walks, the most impressive of which was a hike to the Cederberg arch.  The entire route is along corridors of the most amazing rock shapes - many of which have eerie human and animal shapes that at times make the place seem like a magical land where creatures have been turned to stone.

Cederberg arch

We also stopped at an area called the Stadsaal (Town Hall)

One of the many caves at Stadsaal

with amazing cavernous features, similarly mystical, made more so by the presence of some ancient San rock art nearby.

San rock art in the Cederberg

The Cederberg has very dark nights with very little light pollution and following a tip from my astro-photography friend I set up my camera one night to take 2 hours worth of photographs of 20sec each pointing the camera up at the milky way.  

The result is what is known as star trails.  The successive photographs each capture the orientation of the camera as the earth rotates and therefore captures the stars successively making a circular trail across the sky.  You combine all the photos with an astrophotography application on the computer afterwards.

Star trails in the Cederberg

We traveled back to Portugal incredibly happy that we had taken this journey.  There are so many people we love who we left for all those years.  We've decided to visit again soon.

Two days after arriving back we had the massive 11 hour power failure that affected Spain and Portugal.  During that evening I decided to redo the night sky star trails in the nothern hemisphere.  It was very dark that night.

The northern sky has a single star that is at astronomical north.  It amazes me that the southern sky doesn't have one that is bright enough to register and therefore you see a small circle of the stars that do shed enough light.

Northern star trails with candlelight in the house

 

So after being so reluctant to move from our new spot, we ended up going on quite an adventure.  One that hopefully we'll be able to repeat before too long.