A Day at the Beach

It may be the bleak mid-winter back home, but not in Africa. On Saturday, our colleagues invited us to the beach at Marracuene. What a great way to see a bit more of Mozambique and relax at the same time. Mozambique hugs the coast of the Indian Ocean, and is reputed to have great beaches.

Of course, since Maputo is a port city, it's right on the ocean but the locals tell us that the beaches are better a bit out of the city.

Foreigners have advised us to get even further out of the city.

As it turns out, getting to the Marracuene beach is no picnic.

First, there was the ferry, they said. When we arrived at the docks, someone pointed to the ferry. I laughed, not for a second taking her seriously. That's clearly a raft, and a sketchy one at that. Before I had a chance to ask when the ferry would arrive, the man on the little raft waived our truck on board.

Our truck barely fit, with our wheels hanging over the edge, but that seemed to concern only two passengers: Laura and myself.

I couldn't help but think that they would probably keep shuttling cars across the channel until the day the ferry sunk. And wondered when the last time the safety inspector had come to visit. They do have safety inspectors, right?

After the short ferry ride, we had to drive along a road for about 45 minutes. Again, "road" was a poor choice of words. Between dodging small craters and herds of cattle, we likely would have been better off driving in the fields beside the road. Which, at some particularly rough points, our colleague, Nate, actually did.

Then we got to the sandy stretch, which reminded me of the morning after an all-night snow storm in Canada, before the snowploughs had had a chance to clear the streets.

We eventually arrived in-tact, and the beach was magnificent. Given the journey, it shouldn't have come as a big surprise that the beach was empty. We had it all to ourselves. Just us and our colleagues. And those little crabs playing in the surf, allowing themselves to get swept up in the warm salty water and riding it down again, like they were at an amusement park.

Many people tend to think of Africa as a poor, dry, starving continent. Even a war-torn continent. But it's also a lovely continent, with much natural beauty to boast.

Who, Us? Unwelcome?

As comfortable as we have become in Africa, it's useful for us to remember that the country printed on the front of our passports is our home. Everywhere else, we're just visitors.

And everywhere else, we're just guests who can be asked to leave.

Part of our vacation in Cape Town was spent plumbing the ranks of South Africa's Department of Home Affairs, trying to seek permission to stay in the country long enough to finish our 7 days of vacation. The problem started quietly in September with a boarder official who neglected to stamp our passport on our way out of South Africa.

And then, just as quietly, another forgot to stamp it on the way back in six weeks later.

This time, because of the missing stamps, it looked to the boarder guard that we had overstayed our welcome in South Africa on our previous visit. We would still be allowed in the country, but we had to speak with someone at Home Affairs. And just to be sure that we would, he scribbled instructions to that effect across our visa in our passports.

This note was written at Jeppe's Reef, between Swaziland and South Africa. We had the first several days booked in Kruger Park. After that stay, the ink on the notation dried a little further as we traveled to Cape Town, and further still as the government offices closed early on Friday and sat locked up over the weekend.

The day before we were set to become illegal in South Africa, we finally found our way into Home Affairs and were received by a lady with a long list of requirements to fulfill: we can fix this problem for you, but you'll have to have proof of exiting the country (difficult when we arrived in a private car), proof of sufficient funds to finance our stay (difficult since we have no bank account in Africa), and pay R425 each as an application fee and R2200 as a security deposit, refundable once we leave the country.

We scrambled to assemble these things, and returned the next morning to speak to a new person behind the counter. This new person, a man, was friendlier but after several hours had only bad news.

Unfortunately, our application was denied, and there was nothing he could do. He had even checked with his colleague, who agreed that the visa could not be extended. We had to leave the country that day. No matter that Maputo is 1,600 km away, and no matter that we had no way to travel that distance.

Luckily, the man was friendly despite his no-nonsense message. He pulled out a scrap piece of paper and started diagramming for us why we were unwelcome in his country. The missing stamps in our passports fabricated a story that we were living in South Africa, staying from temporary visa to temporary visa, leaving only long enough to have a new visa issued. He was sympathetic enough to my corrected version of our situation that he was willing to let us speak to his boss, though he initially thought even this to be futile: "It will be difficult to assemble the machinery of management to get this approved in a single day," he said on our way out.

We found his boss upstairs, a busy bureaucrat who found importance in being seen to run from task to task. "If you try to chase two rabbits," he counseled us, fretting among the stacks of paper burying his desk, "you're not likely to catch either one." He proceeded to shake his head and wonder why he couldn't heed his own advice. I tried to gain his sympathy by commenting that he appeared to be chasing at least a dozen.

He listened to our story, and made a note on a scrap of paper for us to bring downstairs to the man at the counter. His penmanship was the calibre of an important doctor, and it seemed that his prescription must have been for us to wait in line for several more hours.

Back downstairs, the friendly man at the counter stapled this note to our paperwork and passed the file to the next bureaucrat to process, who also sent it up to Mr Fudd, the wabbit hunter, to approve our "unique case." After an hour of silence, we ventured back upstairs. By evidence of banging his fist against the plasterboard office partitions, Mr Fudd's day wasn't improving, but he too was surprisingly friendly and helpful. Our paperwork was found within a foot-thick pile to be processed whenever time permitted, but he pulled it out, wrote another prescription, and sent us back downstairs.

Within 30 minutes we had new visas allowing us to stay in South Africa until April if we so desired, and without having to pay a penny for the permit. It turns out that we were, once again, welcome to stay.

The Contrasts of Cape Town

There are plenty of places on this continent, and in this country, that experience greater poverty than urban Maputo. There are certainly a few wealthier places, as well.

Nowhere are these contrasts as sharp as in South Africa, and perhaps nowhere in South Africa are they as distinct as in Cape Town, where we spent some holiday time over Christmas.

Cape Town is a city of wealth unknown in Maputo, even if that wealth is only a thinly-brushed veneer.

Traveling from the airport, we passed entire neighbourhoods of Africa's trademark corrugated roof shanties, and plenty of evidence of more solidly-built but equally small housing provided by the government. The seeds of progress. Cape Town's poverty was quickly left behind as we reached the office towers and tourist shops that make up the city bowl.

Cape Town is the legislative capital of South Africa. It's the city where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island in the height of the country's disgrace called apartheid, and where he later took his seat as the post-apartheid republic's first president.

Immediately beside the seat of legislative power is a museum that was once a slave lodge prominent in a city that served as an important hub of slave trade activity. The museum that now celebrates racial freedom creates parallels between South Africa's apartheid experience and the Civil Rights movement in the United States, drawing inspiration from the latter that South Africa can move beyond its racist history.

Simo, who lives 2,700 km away in Malawi but works in Cape Town part of each year to earn additional money, was our host at a small bed and breakfast that we used as our staging ground as we prepared our day-long excursions into the city. He preferred home: sure, Cape Town is beautiful, but the problem is that it's on the ocean. When people have no money, they have nowhere to go for fresh water. At least people in Malawi, situated on a large in-land freshwater lake, don't die, he said.

The fact is that people in Malawi die far too frequently of starvation, but Simo's point was that there are certain benefits to being able to live in a country where survival doesn't depend on participation in a formal trade-based economy. Simo's life back home, where the lakes are full of fresh water and the neighbourhood's trees shed plentiful fruit for the taking, is free of the complexities of a global world.

We met another man who also lives in Malawi but works in Cape Town's booming tourism industry to be able to send money home. Working as a hotel porter is far better than the harsh conditions faced by the previous generation, who traveled to South Africa to earn money working in the gold mines of Johannesburg.

* * * * *

Cape Town continued to build upon our image of Africa as a continent of natural beauty, as well, and in so doing drove the stake deeper into the heart of the mythology of Africa as a dry, desolate and depressing desert (click on any of the photos below for a larger version):

• Cape Town's signature Table Mountain (also pictured above) is appreciated most after a sweaty and occasionally difficult two-hour climb.

• The Kirstenbosch National Botanical Gardens illuminate the extreme diversity of plant life in the Eastern Cape, like the famous protea family of flowers.

• Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope, focal points of natural beauty and often mistakenly thought of as the southernmost tip of Africa (even the tourist shops traded on this mistake, selling a wide variety of goods incorrectly emblazoned with the slogan, "Where two oceans meet.")

• Boulders Beach, a small sandy patch of False Bay where the photogenic African penguins spend their days hobbling around under the sun and enduring the paparazzi-flashes of streams of tourists.

• Similar hot spots where entire colonies of seals compete for attention and the prize of being captured on all manner of digital devices (or could it be that they just want to be left alone to lay on the rocks and bask in the heat of the sun?)

• A spectacularly developed waterfront, including the Two Oceans Aquarium, providing up-close examination of southern Africa's spectacularly colourful sea life.

Once again Africa, a hugely underrated continent, has not failed to show off its impressive natural beauty.

Don't Be Late For Dinner!

Despite our best intentions, we didn't make it to a Christmas church service this year. Instead, we were inescapably snared in the African time trap.

The trap was set a couple of days ago by my friend Mario, who was talking about his church's plans for an evening Christmas service followed by a social time afterwards. We don't have enough time to sit around and get to know one another, he said, and was really looking forward to creating such an opportunity this Christmas.

We offered our kitchen for Mario, his brother Dilson, and their cousin to come prepare some Christmas snacks. It would take two hours, they said, or three, tops. They arrived shortly after noon, and for hours we mixed, rolled and deep-fried samosas (or "xamussas"), spring rolls, chicken, french fries, and hamburgers (yes, deep fried!). Anything not deep-fried was smothered in mayonnaise.

Eight hours later, "some Christmas snacks" were finished, with a feast sufficient to feed the entire church of 40 people.

As we made the preparations, Laura battled to keep anything with meat or mayonnaise in the fridge. It was a cultural battle; a gargantuan battle between the fridge-people and the non-fridge people (the importance of keeping food in the fridge is lost on people who don't have electricity in their homes!). The battle ended in a draw.

My battle was more of an internal fight: an epic struggle to maintain bodily hydration. Our house, lacking air conditioning, strains under the African heat at the best of times; having the oven and several stove elements pumping additional heat into our cramped kitchen for hours made me crave running outside to roll in the Canadian Christmastime snow.

We can dream all we want. The snow isn't coming for Christmas.

Maputo was experiencing a communist-style run on soft drinks, forcing me to wait half an hour in the beating-down sun to exchange a crate of empties before the party. I fared better than Melvin, who was told that stores had run out of Coca-Cola and Pineapple Fanta.

The time trap tightened, with the tick-tick-tick of the clock growing louder and louder as the kitchen became hotter and hotter.

After 8 hours of sweating at the vegetable market, in the lineup for soft drinks, and in the kitchen, we were finished making the feast that would feed an entire church. Just in time, too: now past 8pm, the church had started their evening program two hours earlier. We loaded up the car and drove slowly to the church, weaving around potholes like we were in a battleground minefield, plates and platters of food balanced precariously in the passengers' hands, laps, and any other mostly-flat surface that could be found in the car.

The great virtue of the African time trap is that few people cared that we were so late, and even those few who did had their cares melt away at the sight of the feast. And an hour after we arrived, the evidence of our labour was reduced to crumbs on plates and smiles on faces.

Merry Christmas!

Zipping Around South Africa

Last week was American Thanksgiving, which meant that school was out for an extra long weekend. I quickly learned when several of our friends became teachers over the past couple of years that teachers are even more excited than their students for the arrival of holidays.

Laura is no exception. She planned for us a great long weekend in South Africa.

One of our first activities was an aerial cable trail near Hazyview, South Africa, which featured us being strapped to cables suspended high within the forest's canopy, zipping along from platform to platform for 1.2 kilometres. As Laura excitedly shared our plans for this activity with her Mozambican teaching colleagues, she realized that not everyone shares her sense of adventure.

The aerial cable trail experience wasn't entirely unique (but it certainly was fun!). I once had a summer job as the head instructor on a similar sort of course. I was even trained to conduct high-altitude emergency rescues using climbing gear. Having this background meant that I knew what I was looking at -- and that I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of their equipment. I knew that we'd be safe, which isn't always the case in Africa.

And we couldn't help but feel at home. The forest felt very much like the Canadian Shield. Nearby tourist shops even sell amethyst, Ontario's provincial rock.

We experienced greater fear at the Moholoholo animal rehabilitation centre, where we stood a (thin) chain link fence away from a roaring lion, and were able to pet a leopard (again, thankfully, through a fence).

The rehabilitation centre exists to care for animals that are injured or otherwise unable to live in the wild. They're not always there for their own protection, but for the protection of humans. The cats, for example, were raised as kittens by humans, so they have lost any fear of humans that they might have had in the wild. They are more dangerous now, not because they are ferocious, but because they would play rough and accidentally kill. And their instinct to attack weaker flesh is their basis for survival.

It's true that a leopard can't change its spots!

We also spent time touring around the mountainous Drakensberg area of South Africa, exploring such wonders as Berlin Falls, the "Potholes," and a view so magnificent that it is known as "God's Window."

Africa really is a beautiful, albeit abused, continent. Our weekend adventure serves to remind us that God did create the entire world and everything in it.

Kruger Park

This past weekend, Laura and I visited one of Africa's treasures: Kruger National Park in South Africa. At 20,000 square kilometres, the enormous wildlife preserve is nearly three times larger than Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario.

Driving around the park is an experience that is stereotypically African. Kruger is famous for its animals. People come to observe animals commonly restricted to zoos living in their natural habitat. We spotted elephants, giraffe, lions, zebra, buffalo, hippopotamus and rhinocerus. Impala -- small deer-like animals -- are plentiful. Vervet monkeys and baboons are commonly seen playing on the side of the road.

Tourists come to Kruger Park to shoot (with a camera, of course) the Big Five game animals: lion, elephant, cape buffalo, rhinoceros and leopard. In previous centuries, these were the most sought-after by hunters because they were the most dangerous to hunt. We managed to spot four of the Big Five, but the fifth -- the leopard -- proved elusive.

Unlike Algonquin Park, which is great because campers are able to trade their car for a canoe and really experience the wilderness, tourists in Kruger are allowed out of their cars only at very specific and well-controlled points.

Even the most docile animals can be dangerous. We've heard on numerous occasions that the lazy hippopotamus kills more humans than any other animal.

Kruger National Park shares a border with Mozambique. Unfortunately, since Mozambique's civil war, these wonderful African animals have become extremely rare here -- in fact, we've yet to see any animals in the wild.

Some people have told us that they were killed by hungry soldiers. Some people have theorized that they were scared out of the country by the gunfire. They are gone, whatever the cause.

It's spring in the southern hemisphere, which means a couple of things: Kruger Park, like most of the continent, is very dry right now. The rainy season, along with the heat of summer, will start in a couple of months. It also means that we saw many animals with their young, like this young zebra feeding from its mother.

We couldn't cram all of the photos we wanted to onto a single web page, so we created a short video featuring some of the animals that we watched while driving around the park.

Our accommodation while in Kruger was a small chalet within a gated camp. For our protection, we were required to be within the gates by sundown (6:00pm).

Immediately out our front door (and past the electric fence) flowed the Sabie River, in which we saw elephant and hippopotamus at play, and a multitude of colourful birds. The rest camp also had a beautiful main lodge with a store, a cafeteria and a restaurant. We ate our meals sitting on a large veranda overlooking the Sabie River, with the warm Africans spring breeze blowing and birds serenading us from above.

(We heard that it snowed in Ontario this weekend.)

Kruger Park, less than a two-hour drive from our door in Maputo, is a great spot for relaxation after the intensity and stress of living in a foreign land. We can't wait to go back.

An Emergency Vacation

This weekend, Laura and I made a break for it -- a run for the border. We hadn't planned on going to South Africa this weekend, and in fact only booked our hotel the night before leaving. Twenty-four hours before standing at the border, we weren't even allowed to leave Mozambique because our resident visas hadn't been approved yet.

The emergency was that our (borrowed) car was having trouble. The only garage our colleagues trust is in Nelspruit, South Africa. It's not a completely comfortable feeling knowing that we had to drive 220 kilometres in a car whose state of repair was questionable, but even in need of repair, the 2000 Toyota Sprinter that we've borrowed is in the upper quartile of cars on the road. (The bottom quartile consists of cars that have either long since been abandoned at the side of the road, or should have been.)

On Wednesday morning, I went to the immigration office to see if our resident visas were approved. They were and -- a near-miracle, I'm told -- a week earlier than promised. We left on Thursday morning for Nelspruit.

South Africa was at once familiar and not familiar -- comfortable and not. People spoke English, yet didn't understand our accent automatically. We still felt like foreigners, not completely able to let our guards down.

Ferdi the mechanic looked at our car Friday morning. It turned out that the awful screeching noise was caused by some metal something-or-other that was bent and rubbing against another something-or-other. Ferdi handled the repair himself, and charged us 90 rand (about $12) for his trouble. A small part of me would have felt a little more assured that our car was road-worthy again had he charged 900 rand instead.

With a clean bill of health on the car, Laura and I headed north into the mountains of Sabie. Laura wanted to stop to get a photo of the sign saying that we could really drive 120 km/h on the narrow, winding two-lane mountain roads. She didn't fully understand just how crazy that speed "limit" was until she was standing at the side of the road snapping a photo -- the transport truck that whizzed by shook the car and startled the photographer.

Once in Sabie, we spent some time admiring Sabie Falls (taking lots of photos -- some of which are included here) and looking in some gift shops before returning to Nelspruit for dinner.

We headed back towards Mozambique on Saturday morning, intent on spending some time in Kruger Park before coming home. Laura was disappointed that we didn't stop, but is already planning a time when we can make our stay worthwhile. After all, we've been in Africa for six weeks and have yet to see African wildlife.