Worldtour diary- Part 11

26 03 07 – 14 04 07 World Tour Diary Part XI

I do have the impression that my diary varies strongly from
one part to another. And although I experience similar things
again and again, see similar things again and again, it always
feels so different.
Whereas my last two mails very full of passion and joy, this part is
much calmer, much more thoughtful.
You may even call it boring…but…it just represents my thoughts,
emotions and…the way I travelled. And the way I travelled in the last 3
weeks (especially the last two) was very different from what I was
used to. I was used to ‘adventure’, sleeping in a shitty, dodgy place,
eating self-cooked meals for 1 EUR, taking nightbuses, showering ‘for
free’, meeting the locals, chatting with them in the street… stuff like that.
In the last 3 weeks…I have had a very good time (although my mood
was close to zero for a few days)…but I didn’t feel like a backpacker.
I felt…yeah…like a tourist. A tourist who comes, sees, but doesn’t live
in a place.
After a 14 hour flight, I arrived on a Sunday evening in Johannesburg.
And…due to all the people telling you horror scenarios, I chose the ‘safe’ way
and visited Johannesburg and Sowetho on an organized tour.
Organized…though I love so much running through the streets, feeling the people,
smiling naively at everybody with my attitude of “ Smiling can shock other people”.
The tour was nevertheless fairly interesting and directly brought me into another world.
Men, I am in Africa. I’ve heard about Spanish invasions in South America, attitudes of
Brazilians against the States, French against British or whatever…
But…I had never felt something like this here before.
I arrived in a country, which has just been freed from the severest and ugliest form of human ??? behaviour
, called apartheid.
But…evidently…you can still feel it, breathe it…and in a way I still feel
shocked, sad, I don’t know.
You may call it naïve, stupid or just Jochen…but once again I felt much better
freeing myself from all those things, wandering alone through the ‘dangerous’
zones of the town Durban a few days later.
Not a particularly nice town ( Ok, apparently the beaches shall be…but I had rain)
, but interesting. And the experience of tribal life in the “Kingdom of the Zulu”
was more than interesting. Seeing a huge crowd of poor little children
dancing full of joy made me nearly cry and feeling ‘arrived’ in Africa.
Then the bad weather arrived ,-(( Between days of 35 degrees they were too many moments
of..I don’t know, storm, rain, mist whatever which made a lot of things I wanted to do
just impossible. Nice walks through Nature Reserves, kayaking, surfing,
diving with sharks, alligators or just simple reef diving. Argh!
And then…after another great experience of public transport (14 hours for
700km, bus breaking down, light on at 2 am for three hours, a girl sitting next to me
vomiting the whole time)…I got a tourist. Although my mother(, who I met in Port
Elizabeth and have been travelling with for the last 2 weeks) is more than cool and
definitely not one of this luxury babes…travelling was different.
Staying in B&B’s, eating in (cheap) restaurants and especially staying in the hostal, restaurant
or whatsoever felt much different than ‘normal’ travelling. Still good, just..
very different.
So, from Port Elizabeth we went firstly to different type of ‘game parks’, seeing
hords of elephants, zebras, warthogs (kind of “Wildschwein”), giraffes, monkeys,
buffalos and…even some leopards. I mean…there still some of the “Big Five”
missing..but I can tell you…it is an amazing feeling to see those guys
in their natural surroundings, fighting with each other, playing around…
That’s why I’m here!!
Passed the following days on the so-called Garden Route (which got
It’s name due to the amount of flowers to see here in summer….
pitty that it’s winter right now.)
Driving along the coast, I felt like in a wrong film. Didn’t I imagine like
Desert? No, man…the mountains running parallel to the coastline all over
this area cause such a humid but warm climate that you feel like in
Switzrland. There’s just forest and forest and winelands.(Ok, to be honest as well coast& beaches)
Unfortunately, we didn’t walk them too much and had some long sitting
times (interrupted by some oestrich riding and visit of the world’s
largest caves) until…yes…until we finally arrived in Cape Town.
Finally …my bad mood was gone and we actually ‘did’ something.
Visiting the city center with its colourful streets, the Holocaust museum,
the soccer stadium (or better the ruins), the Table Mountains I felt alive and
“into” it again. And…walking through the streets, visiting one of those
massive townships (‘ghettos’ outside of town where coloured and black
people live who can’t afford to live in town) and finally visiting Robben Island
(the prison where Nelson Mandela was kept for 17 years) made us really
get a feeling of what it means to live here….
Hard to imagine for people like me who are used to their “war-free European standards”
what it means to live with 140 EUR a month (for a family of 5-10 !!),
hard to see so many people begging in the streets. Strange to hear about
traditional healers….and all that in a country which is still economically strong.
Makes you feel concerned. And admiring heroes like Nelson Mandela, who
Fought for our all dream. Equality and ‘human’ conditions for everybody.
And in a way even forgetting about beautiful landscapes as the Cape Peninsula.
But…not…never forgetting about soccer ,-)
I don’t know yet to which place, to which country I’ll gonna head in the next days…
But it might be that the next time I’ll write, I will have been cured from the 2001-Trauma.
Schalker till I die!