It is a ghost town. The shops are closed, the windows shuttered and the interiors gutted.

But it is not an abandoned ghost town. People do still live here. Their livelihoods, however, do not.

This is the town of Vic Falls.

When you enter Zim be prepared to encounter the most aggressive and desperate haggling. Anything and everything is for sale, your shirts, your socks, your shoes, your hairbands, your food, but most importantly, your US Dollars. And don’t go to them, they will come to you. In Vic Falls we found ourselves walking around with a veritable harem of hagglers. It was like a game of hot potato as we tried to convince them that we did not want anything. Also, make sure you don’t show anything of value, like your camera–that’s a recipe to drag LOTS of attention to you.

In Zim the first thing you’ll notice are Zimbabwean dollars, everywhere, which are utterly useless (A truckload couldn’t buy you a loaf of bread in 2009). Not anymore!

Ever want a 100 Trillion Dollar bank note? In Zimbabwe, you can get one for about one or two US dollars! Yes, the currency actually has value, if only to trade with the few tourists.

And tourists are what Zim is starved of. You can see the infrastructure is there. Throughout the country there are backpackers. In Vic Falls, there’s an extremely helpful Backpacker information center. In Bulwayo there’s a very helpful Black Rhino safari group. There are vibrant (well, used to be vibrant) shops and markets throughout.

We went to a restaurant in Vic Falls. My meal of steak, vegetables and sadza was $1.50, and that included wait service and dishes. We were given a very informal township tour by a local who we met a supermarket. I also had the delight of arm wrestling a Zim guy after convincing him that I did not have any old shirts to give him.

Crossing the border from Zam to Zim we met a Brit and recent Uni grad, Chris Lynch. He’s doing the incredible Cairo to Cape and has been on the road since November. He’s been to the most hair raising places, from Sudan to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and I can only say that I am fantastically jealous! I am, however, not at all jealous of that monstrous backpack of his.

The train from Vic Falls to Bulwayo leaves maybe everyday at 6:30ish and is anywhere from a 12 to 18 hr ride. There are many instances where you actually roll backwards on the tracks (a ‘wonderful’ feeling) or stop for long periods of time in the bush.

We entered Bulawayo and were picked up at the train station by Christine, an old white (surprising) lady who runs a hostel with her husband and we scheduled a safari for the next day, at $70 USD per person for a full private catered day out with a professional hunter at Matobo National Park. Although we did not see any Black Rhinos (what the park is famous for. That and Cecil Rhodes’ grave) we saw a rather curious hippo, some fleeting Giraffe and some truly incredible San/Bushmen Rock art.

ATMs do not work in Zimbabwe, not just for Mastercard. Rumor has it that the government put a block on ATMs just for Bulawayo, but I find that hard to believe. I asked our guide how they saved their money. The answer: They don’t. So we spent our time in the city futilely ATM hopping–conveniently an excellent way to see the city.

Bulawayo is a beautiful city, full of wide avenues originally designed for a horse and buggy to do a u-turn in. The buildings are quite nice too.

Since we could not withdraw cash we nearly failed to exit the country. Things became so hectic that our guide began contacting his personal friends to ask if they could loan us money. Hayley considered kicking a police officer so that she could get deported. Finally, Christine, our hostel owner, convinced Greyhound to let us on the bus and we could pay once we got to the South African side. We got on just as the bus driver started the bus! We’re also $60 in debt to Chris, who payed for the backpacker.

Next a 14-15hr bus ride and 3hrs at SA customs!

So we entered Zim through the Vic Falls entrance. Yes, this is really the border police station. (The actual customs station is a real building beyond the hill)

At a glimpse, Zimbabwe is a country with great potential. It’s people are friendly peaceful and innovative, its cities have decent infrastructure for both business and tourism, and some of its public utilities work (debatable), surprisingly. There is a very posh, and I mean posh in the imperial British sense, hotel at Vic Falls. Banks and ATMs are everywhere (more on that later), the road system isn’t a total disaster, and you can actually take a train from Vic falls to Bulawayo, cockroaches and all, despite it taking about 18 hours (by minibus: 6hrs).

But statistical indicators, and actual life, are more ominous. According to the Fund for Peace, Zimbabwe is number two in the world on the Failed State Index, as of 2009, right after Somalia. That is, the government is so ineffective and weak it exerts little or no effective control. The central ZANU-PF (Mugabe’s political party) has limited authority over the outlying areas. Unlike Somalia, however, the country is actually quite safe to travel in and to walk around in, even at night, which is a pleasant surprise. It’s been said that if the Zimbabweans were not as easy going, they would have overthrown Mugabe years ago.

(Looking out from the Vic Falls hotel.)

That’s not to say Zimbabwe’s government doesn’t exert any influence. It’s perceived tentacles seem to infiltrate daily life, even outside of the country (The Zimbabwean refugees at De Doorns fear Mugabe’s Intelligence Agency.) People within the country will not speak about Mugabe in public. The consequences are too great.

And Zim is poor. It has the lowest measured GDP (PPP) of every country in the entire world at something like $200 per year per capita. Poverty is everywhere. As a tourist, people treat you like royalty because they know you have money.

Lusaka, how does one describe it? Polluted, Soviet-esque, Grey, heavily Christian. Africa.

We had some random experiences there. Stumbling upon a meeting place for the African Union, Parliament, playing Soccer with Zambian youth at a Church, going to the market (called Arcades). As well, any Zambian in a car will call to you and shout “Taxi?”

Zambia has a small economically important Indian population–mostly Shopowners and restaurateurs.

At our hostel, goods were known to go missing. Oddly enough, they tend to get replaced when one complained to the staff–like my Mosi beer which conveniently reappeared when I had a lengthy discussion with the guard/ handyman, John–a bright lad of 20, who complained that dowry for wives had doubled to 200,000 kwatcha, or about $50.

People love Obama. If anything, the first sentence they speck to you usually follows this pattern…. mumble mumble mumble Obama!? mumble!

From Lusaka we traveled to Livingstone by bus, a 7 hr journey. The Bus station is not for the faint of heart–you have to steel yourself for the barrage of bus offers and stares. We were also treated to a complimentary fire-and-brimstone sermon on the Mazhandu Family Bus Service, bus.

It would be about two days by train. Trains by the way, look as if someone took them off the tracks, burned them. Dissembled them and reassembled them with junk parts. Highly ill-advisable.

Livingstone is a more touristy location due to Victoria Falls. Victoria falls are hectic. Thousands of gallons a second, mist so intense that there is constant torrential rain (you can’t bring a camera close to the falls!). Pictures do it more justice than words.

We planned for things to go horribly horribly wrong, and that’s exactly what happened.

On arrival at Lusaka International Airport, we expected a $30 charge for a travel visa, a requirement to enter the country.

Wrong.

The government changed it to $50 per person a few weeks back. It MUST be paid in US dollars, not the local currency, the Zambia Kwatcha. ATM’s only distribute kwatcha. There are about 4700 kwatcha per dollar. You can imagine bills racking up into hundreds of thousands of this play money.

The travel visa desk took our passports until we could withdraw the requisite cash. I decided to go use an ATM to get Kwatcha out and then convert it to USD. To do so, I had to exit the airport.

Wrong move.

Mastercard is NOT accepted in Zambia, only Visa cards. No cash, no travel visa.

Now I had to return to the arrival section of the airport without a boarding pass. I spent the next few minutes arguing with security about how idiotic their system is. They wouldn’t let me back in until a member of the travel visa desk arrived and Kristin removed the money.

Problem solved, and on our way to Chachacha Backpackers, in Lusaka. Three of us, Hayley, Kristin, and I.

Flying to Lusaka, Zambia in a couple hours. Then to Victoria Falls. Ether Zimbabwe or Botswana thereafter! (by bus) back to Joburg. I’m expecting things to go horribly, horribly wrong. That’s all part of the fun.

Back March 28-29th ish

This past weekend my History of Southern Africa Class went on a field trip to a local historical sight near the Afrikaans town of Pniel, about an hour North East of Cape Town.

The “historical sight” happened to be located on a wine farm, Solms Delta.

Our tour consisted of a brief look at a couple old buildings on the farm as well as the vineyard. Then we settled down to the real business, free wine tasting.

Next stop was a short trip to the Church in Pniel, where us students, and the professor, were all inappropriately drunk while the Pastor gave a lecture on the town’s history. I’ve never felt so sacrilegious before in my life.

The image is of the Church. The old slave bell can be seen at right.

For those who are interested, here’s a post on beer/wine in South Africa.

You’ve Got:
Castle
Black Label
Hansa.

These are all mediocre lagers produced by SABMiller (that’s the American miller). SABMiller is about 90% of the market, so its pretty much a monopoly.

There are also some others, but South Africa has no microbrewery movement like that in the States or Europe.

Windhoek, a Namibian lager
Mitchell’s (hard to find)
Savanah hard apple cider
Amstel Light
Heineken
Dreher

That’s about it.

Then there’s wine, which you can pick up for as low as 14R a bottle (a little under $2!) As a rule of thumb when buying cheap wine, the more Afrikaans and less English on the bottle, the better.

Sunday night I was at the De Doorns refugee camp 2 hours outside of cape town. 3,000 (now down to about 1,500) people have been crammed on to a rugby field since November 09 when they were forced out of townships because of Xenophobic violence (There are some suspicions among Passop that the CIO, the Zimbabwean intelligence agency may have sparked unrest in order to dig out Zimbabweans that had fled the country for political reasons).

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/world/africa/21safrica.html

They are surrounded by barbed wire and work 12hrs per day for $6-7 dollars a day at farms. In a month they’ll be out of work once the farms shut down for winter. The UN has abandoned the site, and the local government sometimes shuts down water access and hasn’t cleaned the portable toilets in a month in attempts to force people out. More tents are locked up in a government building nearby and are not being removed for use. According to Braam, the director of Passop, there is obvious corruption along the line. Moreover, the site was reportedly set up by two UN employees, one of which had no prior experience. There is no access to medical care and no facilities for bathing. Prostitution is the most recent development, probably to supplement wages. Children have not been to school since entering the camp. Cooking is done out of propane tanks, so tents routinely burn down.

They have only one electrical access point and the whole system is jerry rigged thereon out–someone was nearly electrocuted while I was there. It is a most wretched place. There is no forseeable solution.

Spent the weekend with a family in the township of Oceanview, about an hour south of Cape Town, near Simonstown. Residents of Oceanview were forcibly removed from Simonstown in the late 1960s when the government proclaimed it to be a whites only area. Before the township’s founding it was just scrubland. A fascinating experience, though not a whole bunch interesting to report on. I did, however, get a haircut from a Nigerian in a small tent for R20 while I was there.

It’s a very slow pace of life there and not particularly impoverished. Nevertheless, two students on the program got all their belongings stolen while there. There were six Americans in the house, although we were only supposed to be two. Cumulatively, there were five beds in the house and nine people, but hey this is South Africa so it worked out somehow.

Looking out from the house. You can see the haircut tent to the right outside.

Seven of us rode in the back of Neil’s “bakkie.” Also, apparently using seatbelts is an insult to the driver’s abilities.

A soccer match in the township.

Neil at the beach.

Haircut time.

Tomorrow I leave, with CIEE students others, to the Oceanview coloured township!. Google it, it’s in the western cape. As far as townships go, it’s well off. probably because during apartheid, coloured were considered a step above blacks.

Pat, a student in our program, was jogging along the Liesbeeck parkway, the highway adjacent to Liesbeeck res.

It was 1pm, broad daylight along a busy highway. As Pat ran by two men, they grabbed him and asked for his iPod and running shoes. Pat gave those up, but asked how he was to get back to the res without his shoes.

One of the muggers took off his flip flops and gave them to Pat. Talk about wealth redistribution.

Nearly every night I walked home after dark. Often around midnight. Foolhardy, I know.

Nearly every night I walked home after dark. Often around midnight. Foolhardy, I know.

(I have a functional bike now, so this really isn’t a problem anymore. Sometimes I take a taxi home–expensive–fridays, for example, are payday, so it’s a good idea to take a taxi then).

I like the feeling of adrenaline I get walking the mile from the Liesbeeck Gardens res to my homestay.

I walk out of Liesbeeck, a res that looks roughly like a prison cell. I turn right, waving at the Security Guard so that he opens the gate since my ID card doesn’t swipe.

Another right onto Durban Road. Speed walking time. I cross Liesbeeck parkway, the highway that divides the suburb of Mowbray.

Past Fat Cactus on my left, and the Greek Restaurant on my right. The two gas stations. Up the left, cross the street and left onto Raapenberg Road. Almost there. 26 Raapenberg Road.

One night I was in for a scare. Usually the streets are abandoned late. It was midnight, and out of the darkness two bakkies (pickup trucks with closed hatches) came screeching down the road, driving tandem. The first one slowed down and out the back jumped a man, poster in hand. He sprinted to a sign post across from me and then another a little further down the road.

It’s was just newspaper employees updating the newspaper signs all around the city, at midnight.

A South African odyssey. It’s a bridge next to the N2 highway about 3-4hrs east of Cape Town that goes to nowhere, from nowhere. Seriously, it on both sides there’s just grass and trees.

There’s a different highway overpass in downtown Cape Town that’s the exact same (no photo). It just ends with a 30ft drop off right in the middle of the city. There’s no construction being done on it. Absolutely bizarre. I don’t get it.

This weekend our program (CIEE) brought students to the Spier Wine Estate in Stellenbosch for a wine tasting festival with live music! (CIEE paid for it, too) An excellent, if commercial, wine estate.

We spent the afternoon there and, when all our other fellow Americans left, Tom Parmer and I went to visit and stay the night at my friends of a friend (Thank you Doug Pierce!) Katherine and Andrew at their place Stellenbosch. Katherine is an American from Higganum, my home town. She studying abroad at Stellenbosch and liked it so much she decided to graduate there, becoming the first American ever to do so. Andrew is her husband.

Stellenbosch is a great town, very European, very chic with cafes and boutiques. Everything you could ever want in a college town. Plus, it’s totally safe to walk around in at night. It’s the second oldest European settlement in South Africa after Cape Town.

Andrew works as a business manager at Zorgfliet vineyards where he helps other smaller vineyards sell their product. This means lots of free wine tasting in his job description. A nice gig, right? He gave us a free tour of the cellar and a wine tasting!!! it was unreal, especially seeing the winemaking process.

A couple odd things about South African wineries: Most are not for profit. Rather, they’re owned by wealthy businessmen who operate them as a hobby. Second, from the business manager himself: South Africa tends to export only its lowest quality wines, leaving the better wines in SA. The stuff you get in SA is quite good, and cheap.

Red and white wine use the same grapes, the only difference is that red wine retains the skin. Basically, white whine is much simpler to make. The grapes go through a series of conveyor belts and a de-stemmer. After cleaning they are mashed, the skins extracted, and sent into the metal fermentation tank for a year until ready.

This weekend our program (CIEE) brought students to the Spier Wine Estate in Stellenbosch for a wine tasting festival with live music! (CIEE paid for it, too) An excellent, if commercial, wine estate.

We spent the afternoon there and, when all our other fellow Americans left, Tom Parmer and I went to visit and stay the night at my friends of a friend (Thank you Doug Pierce!) Katherine and Andrew at their place Stellenbosch. Katherine is an American from Higganum, my home town. She studying abroad at Stellenbosch and liked it so much she decided to graduate there, becoming the first American ever to do so. Andrew is her husband.

Stellenbosch is a great town, very European, very chic with cafes and boutiques. Everything you could ever want in a college town. Plus, it’s totally safe to walk around in at night. It’s the second oldest European settlement in South Africa after Cape Town.

Andrew works as a business manager at Zorgfliet vineyards where he helps other smaller vineyards sell their product. This means lots of free wine tasting in his job description. A nice gig, right? He gave us a free tour of the cellar and a wine tasting!!! it was unreal, especially seeing the winemaking process.

A couple odd things about South African wineries: Most are not for profit. Rather, they’re owned by wealthy businessmen who operate them as a hobby. Second, from the business manager himself: South Africa tends to export only its lowest quality wines, leaving the better wines in SA. The stuff you get in SA is quite good, and cheap.

Red and white wine use the same grapes, the only difference is that red wine retains the skin. Basically, white whine is much simpler to make. The grapes go through a series of conveyor belts and a de-stemmer. After cleaning they are mashed, the skins extracted, and sent into the metal fermentation tank for a year until ready.

South Africans have a peculiar sense of time. They’ve two versions of ‘now,’ and the Cape Townies especially love lounging around not doing very much in the beautiful weather. If they say “I’ll be there ‘now now'” that means they’ll probably be there soon. If they say I’ll do it ‘just now,’ it means maybe 45 minutes, maybe tomorrow. You have to listen to their inflection. The longer and more hesitantly they say the word just, the less likely it will get done anywhere near on time.

Last week, I had a group meeting for a presentation in a politics class here at UCT. There were five of us in the group, two Germans, two Americans, and one South African.

We scheduled our group meeting at 1pm. The two Germans arrived at precisely 1pm. Us two Americans showed up at 1pm, too.

And when did the South African get there?

He didn’t even show up.

I bought a bike on Gumtree on Nelson Mandela’s birthday. It’s essentially been the bane of my existence so far.

It currently resides in my friend Matt’s room. To buy the bike, I walked 3 miles from UCT to 9 Pineland drive in Rondesbosch. Bought the bike from a british soldier for 400 rand. Bike turned out to have two flat tries which I figured I could inflate, otherwise it was in great shape. Walked another 3 miles to my homestay in Mowbray and went to two different gas stations to inflate my tires, neither of which could do so since their air pumps are designed for cars. Walked to Liesbeeck and took the Jammie to Claremont where I walked another mile to the bike shop. There I was told that not only had I overpaid but one of the tires had a puncture. 255 rand later I got a u-bar bike lock and fixed tires I rode the 3 miles back to Liesbeeck.

While taking the last tie on the u-bar package off with Matt’s knife I cut my right hand in the fleshy bit between my thumb and forefinger down to my thumb bone through my muscle. Blood started gushing out in spurts. Plup plup, plup plup. Haley quickly helped me, rose my hand above my heart, bandaged up. Was driven to a public hospital ER by Quinton. Waited for an hour or two and there was only one doctor, an off duty resident in a zip up hoodie there. So the bike cost me from 12 noon to 1030 at night, stitches and an extra 1420 rand for the hospital visit (South Africa having privatized healthcare and public hospitals requiring payment before treatment.). Stiches are out as of Sunday, courtesy of Haley. I realized I can’t shake people’s hands yet, as blood tend to come out of the wound when I do so.

Now here’s the kicker. The tire the bike shop fixed is flat, again. Back to the bike shop…

Today, I hiked from 9:30 in the morning to almost 7 at night. Intense. From UCT we took the contour path around the north side of the Table Mountain. It was Jake, Tom, Matt, Howie, Nick and I. Howie and Jake stopped at the Cable Car while the rest of us continued across kloof nek road to Lion’s Head. Wonderful trek! You can follow it on Google Maps (From 7 Durban Road, Mowbray to the UCT campus and then to lion’s peak)

We were so tired by the end that we started sticking our thumbs out the old hitchhiker way, not expecting anything until two Black South Africans going to the airport in their truck pull over (they’re on the other side of the road) so we have to cross 4 lanes of traffic) and drive us to Rondebosch. Crazy.

Hitchhiking is illegal in South Africa. That’s not to say no one does it. Like many things here, the rules are optional and frequently broken.