Cape Town and Home

We arrived in Cape Town on Friday night. It was a pleasant trip but frankly I think we were both ready to head home. Our first introduction to Cape Town was the massive "township" around the airport. South Africa is famous for these townships but we really didn't see them on our trips to Johannesburg. Townships consist of shanties that are placed on unoccupied land. The are of course very small and they're right on top of each other. The townships are huge and go for as far as you can see in some places. This is urban poverty as opposed to the rural poverty we saw in Malawi. The South African goverment is doing a lot to try to replace these townships with sturdier housing. Also most of the homes in the towns were electrified and clearly had television.

We arrived at our small hotel near the center of the city. Behind the locked gate, it was quaint and modern at the same time. The white walled common rooms had simple colorful watercolor prints signed by "NMandela". Two dens, dining room, kitchen and serving areas were small, inviting and spotlessly clean. The owner, a former nurse from the UK who had worked in South Arica with Physicians without Borders, was gracious and tremendously knowledgable about Cape Town and S. African life and recent history.

The next morning we got up early and purchased a ticket on the On0ff Tourist Bus and toured through much of Cape Town. It is an astoundingly beautiful city nestled between Table Top Mountain and the Atlantic. The Table Top Mountain is accessed by a cable car and the views from the top of the Mountain are spectacular. The coast is also very beautiful with nice beaches, lots of rocks and huge waves.

We stopped for lunch at a very nice Indian restaurant along the beach and had delicious Indian food (one of our favorites and we hadn't had any real Indian food the whole time we were in Africa) and watched the surf - it doesn't get much better than that. That evening we had dinner at a small family owned restaurant a few blocks from our hotel. Their specialty was fish (another favorite we hadn't had in a long time) and it was a very pleasant meal.

On Sunday, we hired a tour guide and took a trip through the more rural parts around Cape Town. This included a trip to Stellenbosch which is in the heart of the S. African wine growing region. We had to stop to sample some of the local product to see how it compared to our own upstate New York wines. The S. African wines are quite good and (at least in Africa) very cheap.

From Stellenbosch we proceeded to the coast which is really beautiful. The mountains come right down to a rocky seacoast. It's quite odd to look out over the ocean and realize the next land is Antarctica. One curiosity of this region is that they have penguins! They're quite small and not like the ones you see in Antartica on TV but as you can see from the photo they're clearly penguins. Most of them are on a few beaches that have been set aside as national parks.

As you can see from the picture of Carolyn it was quite cool in Cape Town. It is after all late fall and at this point in our trip we are about as south as you can go in Africa. Cape Town does have a winter with occasional temperatures below freezing and snow in the mountains.

That afternoon we proceeded to the Cape of Good Hope itself which is a national park as well. In addition to the mountains and seacoast they also have a large number of animals in the park including antelope, baboons, monkeys and also apparently some lions. We then returned to our hotel in Cape Town for dinner and to get ready for the flight home.

On Monday we got up for a leasurely breakfast, final packing and headed to the airport. Our trip home took us back to Johannesburg for about a 5 hour layover and then we boarded for the 17 hour flight to Atlanta and from Atlanta to Syracuse. Amazingly in our entire trip we didn't have a single delayed flight or a lost bag!

As we arrived back in Syracuse I was struck by the verdent green of our spring countryside and the amazing affluence of America. We are certainly blessed to live in this part of the world.

Our trip to Africa was really quite an experience and we already miss the many wonderful people we met there. But as usual with traveling, returning home is one of the nicest parts of the trip.

On Safari

On Thurs April 29, we drove with Darlene and Paul from Mzuzu to Lilongwe. The ride through the highlands of Malawi was beautiful and it was surprising how undeveloped that section of Malawi is. It is largely a forest and wood production is the major industry. In Lilongwe, we enjoyed a pleasant dinner at a nice Italian restaurant.


On Friday, Darlene and Paul took us to the airport. Sadly, our stay in Malawi came to an end as we boarded a plane back to Johannesburg. We loved our time and experiences in Malawi and will miss the many new friends we made there.

In Jo-burg we went to the Apartheid Museum which is very well done and quite moving. It was interesting how little of that history we knew despite the fact that it all occurred during our lifetimes. I think we Americans were preoccupied with our own history at that time.

On Sunday we caught a flight to Maun, Botswana where our safari began at a lovely lodge called Motsentsela Tree Lodge. The lodge was very nice and located in a game reserve. The room was luxurious although it was a tent! It had a shiny polished wood floor, modern double sink, footed bath tub and an outdoor shower: the nicest tent we've ever stayed in!

The safari began in earnest the next day when we traveled by land rover to Moremi National Game Reserve on the Okavango Delta. The Okavango is a river that begins in Angola and flows 800 miles to Botswana where it empties into the desert and evaporates without ever going to the sea! This area is a natural bonanza for wildlife and the waterways and swamps have kept the area virtually undeveloped except for occasional Bushmen settlements. I have included only a small sample of the animals we took pictures of. We saw many elephants and various types of antelopes as well as lions, leopards, worthogs, and giraffes. The bird life is phenomenal.







We also saw hippopotomus, monkeys and baboons. These were not occasional sightings, many times we saw 4 or 5 different types of animals at once!

































In all we saw 32 different mammals! Travel is extremely primative and mostly over very rough dirt roads. On one occasion our land rover got caught in an elephant hole! But as they say in Botswanna - "Not to worry". It turns out that this is a very routine problem and our land rover was equiped with a "tall" jack that simply lifted it out of the hole. We put rocks under the wheels and after a few moments (and of course a cup of tea!) we were on our way.



Then we took a long ride to Chobe National Park. Chobe is a beautiful park along the Chobe river in Botswana. The animal life here was even more striking than Moremi - if that's possible.



During all of our trip we were accompanied by 3 other travellers and our stellar guide Stanley Dube. Stanley is a Zimbabwian with phenomenal knowledge of the animals of southern Africa and is a remarkable person. He tracked lions, leopards and various antelope all over the parks until we found the animals. During most of the safari we stayed in mobile tent camps. The staff of the safari set up and broke camp while we were on our game drives, laundered clothes, and cooked meals over an open fire! Every night after a long day of chasing animals we came home to warm showeres and wonderful meals with our choice of wine - tough duty and quite a change after Malawi!

Our only dissapointment was that we couldn't do much hiking. It's illegal in the parks of Botswana because of the presence of large predators i.e. lions and leopards that could threaten humans. Even the elephants, zebras and buffalo can be dangerous. Before we would get out of the land rover, Stanley would always check the bush for predators.



The last part of our safari was a trip to Livingston, Zambia to see Victoria Falls. We stayed at the Royal Livingstone Hotel, rated one of the "10 best hotels in Africa." It has maintained the style of colonial Africa. The property was on the shore of the Zambezi River at the head of the falls. We took a walk along the rim and were promptly soaked to the skin by the mist, even with raincoats. Our "butler" was a miracle working in drying out shoes! The other unique employee at the hotel was the monkey chaser. The monkeys were so bold that they would steal food right off the tables. The chaser had a slingshot which he never used, because the monkeys just had to see him and they gave up.

We left Livingstone on Friday the 14th for the last stop of our trip, Cape Town.