Namibian Roads are Good to Think With

Uncharacteristically I nearly missed my flight but, thanks to my trusty taxi driver jumping a few red lights (only feasible very early on a Sunday morning), I made it to the boarding gate just in time. Friends in Windhoek laid on a wonderful relaxed brunch, tucked against the hillside in Eros, and the next morning I caught a bus to Swakopmund.

Swakopmund is a little difficult to put one's finger on. Its postcolonial essence is perhaps captured in a shop sign painted on the entrance of an old German building that caught my attention when I first visited a few years ago. It proclaims: “Where N$1 is still worth R1”. I always found this a little bizarre, given that the Namibian dollar is pegged to the South African rand…so surely there would never be any doubt about this particular equation. My anthro-historical interpretation of the sign is something about colonialism's continuity, I suppose, and a hankering after certain (non-monetary) values. Anyway, one of Swakopmund’s selling points is its quietness. Not a lot happens there. Walking the beach was liberating, and my friend Angela has two fabulous golden labradors which kept me company most times.

We enjoyed sundowners in the Swakop river dunes one evening – a quite extraordinary moonscape of scenery. Namibia is home to a strong circle of women friends who are all leading unconventional lives and doing interesting things. It was really good to be away from the city, not to have to care about my appearance, or whether my clothes matched.


Where else in the world can you hire a car for $45 a day with unlimited mileage? Clearly I was so impressed by this little nugget that I was already half-way from Swakopmund to Henties Bay on the Skeleton Coast when I realised that I didn’t have my driver’s licence. Oh well. It clearly wasn’t that important to the rental company either! And at the turn off to Uis, where the road is barely differentiated from the surrounding desert, flanked by miles of flatness, I figured I was unlikely to encounter any roadblocks. Uis is a really a dorp. I think it only has about 20 buildings. Nevertheless, I’m lucky enough to have friends in most dorps, regardless of country, so had a guided tour of the area with my friend Victor that afternoon. Namibian roads are good to think with – they are long, wide and empty.


I received some curious look from other travellers, surprised to see a blonde gal with shades driving alone around dusty Damaraland in a Walvis-Bay-registered 2x4 sedan car. My wheels may have been modest, if not amusing, but nonetheless it was exhilarating being on the road again. There are long stretches with no mobile network – not that common an occurrence nowadays -- so that too was somewhat liberating. I spent two days in the Brandberg, Namibia’s highest mountains, under an incredibly bright moon, the night-times big and still, and traversed by my old friends, the Scops and Pearlspotted Owls. I had forgotten what it’s like to witness that endless blanket of stars overhead, to be enveloped in that big silence. The landscape is rugged and striking, full of granite and ancient lava flows, and the colours of the mountains change by the minute. The Damara homesteads are dispersed and desolate, and I wondered where they get water.


Food poisoning prevented me from making it to the White Lady rock paintings – sadly I had to turn back when I was already over halfway -- but the guides at the site were wonderful and, seeing that I was on my own, offered to drive me and my car back to the campsite, and walk the 7km back to work. The nearest doctor was only 100km away, they reassured me.

At the next-door lodge, where I had a luxury ready-made tent, the menu was heavy with oryx and not much else: oryx schnitzel (obviously), oryx bolognese, and so on. I passed on those and managed to procure some yoghurt and maize meal porridge. Next to the bar was an empty fishtank, and the conversation went something like this:

Victor: Where’s the snake?
Barman: Oh, it’s gone. It escaped. We think someone helped it.
Me: Oh? What kind of snake?
Barman: A python.
Victor: What happened?
Barman: Yeah, well, we took it out during the Germany-Spain game to show some guests, and we’re not quite sure what happened after that…

From Brandberg I took a long slow gravel-road drive through Khorixas to Twyfelfontein (“doubtful fountain” – altogether an appropriate destination given my love circumstances) to see the ancient rock engravings which are Namibia’s first World Heritage Site. Having the freedom to stop whenever and wherever one pleases is such a privilege. I clambered up rocks and hillsides to see the views, ponder over a never-ending miscellany of curious rocks and stone formations, and breathe in those wide open spaces.




Near Twyfelfontein I camped on the Aba Huab river, neighbouring with a horse safari group and some overlanders. I exchanged some Nam dollars for US dollars with a Belgian traveller who, poor soul, hadn’t realised that there aren’t exactly ATMs at every corner once you get out of Windhoek. En route to Omaruru via Outjo I stopped at the remarkable Vingerklip for more striking landscape.

My trip was rounded off with a visit to another friend who is raising eyebrows in Omaruru by bringing yoga, Ayurvedic medicine, and contemporary sculpture to this conservative marginally-bigger-than-Uis dorp. Altogether very inspiring and refreshing. From there, a short stop in Windhoek to enjoy the culinary delights of the Craft Centre cafe, and now back to life in Jozi ...I'm already into my eleventh month back in southern Africa. Unbelievable.

The World Cup Comes and Goes

I'm not ashamed to say that I let myself get caught up in some of the World Cup fever. It was almost impossible not to! The build-up to the opening game was indeed quite something. Vuvuzelas could be heard from early in the morning for at least a week beforehand, starting from 6am, no less. And on the 11th of June, it seemed that the entire city left work at lunchtime and took to the roads to make their way to see the opening game. The streets were overflowing with yellow-and-green tshirts and South African flags, and everyone was terribly excited. The traffic was so congested going down to Melville that I had plenty of time to practise blowing my vuvuzela out of my car window, which is actually something of an art. The first week of the Cup was blue-skies-but-bitterly-cold. The sun shines, but the average winter morning is about 6 degrees, and we had a few days of 2 degrees as well, which certainly shocked all the European visitors. There's not really anything by way of indoor heating, so it requires something of a different wardrobe approach.It seems there's nothing like a big sports tournament to distract a nation from its chronic problems. It was certainly a unifying experience for South Africans, even if temporary and surface-deep. There were some issues, of course, especially on the transport front but, contrary to all the Afro-pessimist predictions in the European and American press, the stadiums *were* ready, and so was the fabulous new high-speed Gautrain.


I watched my first ever soccer game at Ellis Park (Slovenia-USA) with visiting Croatian friends, preceded by Portuguese lunch at the legendary Troyeville Hotel. The whole experience was really surprisingly enjoyable. Everything was well-organised and professional, and all the facilities operated totally smoothly. Go South Africa! I also went to the Ghana-Uruguay quarter-final which was devastating for Ghana, and for all of us African supporters, but experiencing Soccer City at night with 85 000 spectators was quite something. I did have to wear earplugs, fyi. My favourite game, however, was South Africa-France, which I saw in the Newtown fan park: really an amazing atmosphere. I had plenty of visitors, some of them friends, some sub-letters: Mexicans, Germans, Americans, Croatians, Swazis, and Lesothans, so that also made for quite a lot of fun and quite a lot of linen laundry.

My explorations of downtown Jozi continue. On a public holiday during the tournament, I had a lazy brunch at Narina Trogon in Braamfontein with a collection of internationals and one or two locals. Yeoville was next on the cards, to visit the Hotel Yeoville exhibition at the new public library. Sadly it was closed due to the holiday, but I persuaded the group to acompany me to visit the Congolese artist whom I commissioned to paint a hair dressing sign. I've been wanting one for ages. I think Yeoville's residents were a bit surprised by this group of apparent tourists wandering around their neighbourhood, but we felt no hostility or threat. Needless to say I'm thrilled with my new sign.After Yeoville we went to Arts on Main, after checking out a regenerated block of apartments next door -- all of the spaces are very modern and minimalist, with some fab cityscape views. They are selling for next to nothing, given the relatively 'undesirable' location, but difficult to know what will happen in this area in the long run. Jo'burg has a number of these experimental projects, which is good to see. Main Road is verging on being Brick Lane-ish, albeit on a much smaller scale. There's also a small new independent cinema downstairs, and funky coffee-come-fashion shop. Other recent cultural visits include a Cuban exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, and sitting in the winter afternoon sun for open-air Senegalese kora music at the Alliance Francaise.
There is no shortage of things to do here. So, the World Cup came and went, after many months of preambular hype and speculation. Many of us started to fade about halfway through, once Bafana was knocked out, and we realised that we'd been burning the candle at both ends for a few too many weeks. But all in all, it was great to be around for it. And although there are now lots of vacant stadiums littered about the place, we do have some nice new roads and some progress on the public transport front!

Fordsburg, Mayfair and a Taste of India

It was Freedom Day yesterday, commemorating the first-ever non-racial democratic elections in South Africa in 1994. So it was fitting that I finally made it to the Apartheid Museum, which was excellent and definitely deserves a second visit. I went via Melville and Observatory first to pick up friends, and after the museum we went to a fabulous and buzzing Gujurati restaurant in Mayfair. So I drove many new streets today, which I’m rather proud of.

The museum helps me to make sense of the many bits of jigsaw that I am collating about South Africa, including a recent visit to the ‘Indian quarter’ of Fordsburg. We were a curious group two Saturdays ago: a Senegalese author; a Botswanan of British-Philipino descent, an Indian South African, an Ethiopian-American, and a white Zimbabwean.

We started on 14th Street, where the ‘oriental’ Fietas market used to be (before it was forcibly closed and moved under the apartheid government Group Areas Act) and where our friend-and-guide used to stand on the corner selling combs as a boy. He showed us where his family’s house once stood, before it was knocked down – although the homes of certain professionals such as lawyers were left alone, as well as religious buildings such as mosques. The stand remains vacant, with only a small plaque recalling what passed there in the 1950s.

Growing up, N. attended to no less than 9 different schools because his family were forcibly relocated so many times. And during the times when they lived in ‘grey’ areas (areas that were being made white, or which were being protected from non-white settlement), he used to wait in the school library until it got dark, because otherwise he would be beaten up on the way home.

From 14th Street we went to Akhalwaya’s Fish and Chips, on the corner of Mint Road, where N. has been a customer for about 20 years. Akhalwaya’s specialises in a unique type of toasted-curry-and-fries sandwich. Strange sounding, yes, but original, suitably fattening, utterly delicious, and enough of a meal to last you most of the day. We then sauntered into at least two Indian sweet shops: they always make me a little weak at the knees until I actually eat the sweets and am reminded of how utterly overpoweringly sweet they really are.

The ‘new’ Oriental Plaza is one of Joburg’s most racially mixed shopping malls, offering a huge array of food and wares ranging from a samosa bar with a permanently long queue and stainless steel kitchenware stalls, to West African print fabrics, Chinese shoes and wedding shops.

Wandering along Main Road and its tributaries, we drank fresh coconut juice on the sidewalk, perused Bollywood DVDs, made banter with the stall owners, stared jealously into restaurant windows where masala dosas were being dished out, and I bought some spices and paneer for a Pakistani dish that I’ve been wanting to make for months.

We then swung by Wemmer Pan for some reason only known to S., where there’s a bizarre children’s park with miniature replicas of Johannesburg’s best-known buildings. At the entrance there’s an enormous statue of someone who looks like Jan van Riebeeck and inside…wait for it…there’s a truly enormous statue of Michael Jackson. Yes, in a children’s park. Oh the irony. And oh, the photo opportunities.

Leaving Mayfair yesterday with a very full stomach, I went into a store opposite Shayona’s to buy basmati rice. The Asian managers may have been a bit surprised by our racially mixed trio, but sold their basmati with sincerity and gusto. On hearing that I was a Zimbabwean, they pointed to the black assistants at the back of the shop, saying ‘Ah yes, they ran away from Zimbabwe too…’. At which all of us - assistants included - dissolved into the kind of genuine and binding laughter that only stems from incongruous interactions in unexpected places, mixed in with a measure of southern African humour and an undertone of sadness. One of my favourite kinds...

Harare, Tinotenda

For the first time in years I feel a stillness in me about this tumultuous place. I drive out past Ngomo Kurira with my brother and his friends to another smaller gomo [hill]. Out through the increasingly rural settlements, where things are dusty and poor and organic and potholed and haphazard, where people walk long distances, and the Apostolics are enrobed in white for Easter. The grass is still tall from the rains. The path up the gomo starts at a woman's two-roomed homestead. She wears a shabby Zanu-PF tshirt. My brother speaks politely to her in Shona to ask that we may pass through, and to check where the path begins; she is fine with it. Most of the others in our group walk through with barely a glance, as if they don't notice that anyone lives there.

We push our way up through foliage onto the sprawling orange-earth boulder beyond, and then it is just us and the cascading rock and the sky. I fork away from the group. Dropping below are endless valleys of greens and blues and greys, the tinkle of Mashona cattle bells, and whispers of late-rain streams: this beloved and stunningly beautiful country.


I pass a broken clay pot in one of the clearings. Maybe something from the Apostolics. It is perfectly shaped, smooth, enticing to touch. It nestles the imprint of a cross at its base. (Tutu says: 'When the colonisers arrived, we had the land and they had the Bible. We closed our eyes to pray, and when we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible'). My first impulse is to take a piece of this exotica, and then I stop myself and ask why. Why do we want to take pieces of things that have nothing to do with us? And so I photograph the broken pot and leave it be. There between the earth and the sky, wind on its back, as it was on mine.

Water is a scarce resource. Our neighbours had their borehole pump stolen, so now my parents feed their hosepipe through a crumbling section of the dividing wall to help them out, despite the fact that for years we've suspected them of running a brothel. My parents laugh about it, and about the firewood business that their gardener has been running ever since they chopped down some huge Jacaranda trees that were threatening to fall on the house.

I see Mugabe’s siren-less motorcade driving down Borrowdale Road in the late afternoon. South Africa's young and highly controversial Julius Malema has been visiting, and the state newspaper says: "Malema Hails Zim's Empowerment Drive". Meanwhile, Gallery Delta has been raided by police for exhibiting photographs of human rights abuses during 2008, and a Bulawayo artist has been arrested for 'inciting violence' with his critical paintings. Veterinarian friends come over for drinks, during which one of them is called away to attend to a poisoned dog.

On Easter Sunday I go for an early morning run. The roads of Highlands are quiet and neglected. The weather is pristine. I savour the silence, so different from Johannesburg. An impeccably shiny, red Morris Minor passes me, carrying a full load of white-robed Apostolics to meet with God: men in the front, women in the back. I smile. At home I lay a competitive Easter egg hunt for my family and some friends.

Afterwards dad and I drive our domestic worker back to Mabvuku township, past Chikurubi maximum human-rights-abuse Prison and the cement factory. We visit the cemetery so that I can pay respects to Mishek, who died just before I returned to southern Africa - there was no chance to say goodbye. He is buried in a poor man's grave, thirty one rows down and seven across, marked by a small painted piece of aluminium, already overgrown by a flurry of weeds. The graves are many. We proceed to his wife’s house and greet her all-women family in their two-roomed structure on a tiny plot an the edge of the township. Her seventeen-year old daughter has just given birth to a boy, Tinotenda ('we thank'). Gratefulness and thanks even in these times of hardship. Nine months ago was before Mishek died. I wonder if he knew he was due to be a grandfather. We return home and I resume reading Antjie Krog's Country of my Skull, about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. It’s hard to stomach but I grit my teeth and push on. I'm lying next to a swimming pool, after all.

I buy fifteen kilos of beautiful stone sculpture the next morning on the way to the airport, for next to nothing, and somehow manage to fit it into my hand luggage... along with an avocado, and sprigs of lemongrass and rosemary from the garden. Zim lives on. All the contradictions rest more easily nowadays, for some reason. It’s been a good visit.

The Tap that Waters a Thousand

There's been lots going on. About two weeks ago I went on a Soweto ‘tour’. I thought I had opted for the touristic minibus version, but it turned out to be a bit more personalized, and in a Mercedes no less. Our guide was an hour and a half late collecting me, thanks to major roadworks that he hadn’t anticipated. After we got over the hurdle of his stress and my irritation, all was well. We eventually negotiated our way through the worst of the traffic to pick up the two Germans who were visiting my office.

We started in Kliptown at the Walter Sisulu Square, the site where the freedom charter was adopted in 1955 as a guiding document for the ANC. The Freedom Charter Monument, a tad reminiscent of Great Zimbabwe's architecture, is frequented by a man with a penny whistle playing Nkosi Sikelel'i. I quite like the monument but I'm not the biggest fan of the penny whistle guy.


A guide from the Kliptown Youth Foundation walked us around the dusty informal settlement adjacent to the square which is home to over 45000 people. He works at a soup kitchen and hostel for local children. There is no running water or sanitation here -- instead, a tap that waters a thousand, and the occasional porter-loo that each service a dozen families, if not more. The Germans were quite taken aback at this point. It reminds me of parts of West Caprivi, only on a grand and much more urbanised scale. I bought onions and avocado to take back to Wisteria Lane.



We visited the Regina Mundi church, the largest Catholic church in Soweto, by a smooth-talking guide with an acutely dry sense of humour. The church was a key site in the Soweto student uprisings of 1976. It still bears bullet holes in the ceiling, and the permanent photography exhibition upstairs is quite moving. Time was not really on our side (a 'Soweto tour' would surely be incomplete without some participants having to catch a plane), but we spun by Orlando West, including the houses of Tutu, Mandela and Winnie, before driving back past the freshly finished calabash-inspired Soccer City Stadium. It's looking good.


The next weekend was busy and explorative too. My Ethiopian-American former-war-correspondent friend took me to the Ethiopian quarter of the bustling CBD in downtown Jo’burg...in his car that was stolen and miraculously recovered a year later, with a bullet hole in the back. There are some fifty thousand Ethiopians in this city, apparently. We idled in a few stores before heading into the unnamed restaurant on the third floor of what used to be a key medical practitioners’ building in the city. There at a plastic table in a cosy, clean, wood-panelled room probably once used by an expensive medical consultant, we indulged in fabulous Ethiopian food for the princely sum of R25.

I bought Ethiopian coffee on the way out, and then we tussled with the traffic and the taxis before heading to Sandton for the annual Joburg Art Fair. What a juxtaposition it was after Little Ethiopia: I could have been in London. The young, the artsy and the metrosexuals were all out and about, and the quality of the art was high. I bought a hot chocolate halfway for the same price as my entire Ethiopian lunch, and people-watched from the comfort of a large black sofa, as if I were at Tate Modern...

Groot Marico and Afrikaaner Alternatives

Last weekend Janice and I decided on something of a whim to drive Groot Marico in North West Province (former Western Transvaal) for a ‘Biekie Bosman’ weekend – Bosman being the celebrated South African writer and poet, Herman Charles Bosman. And what a weekend it was. Groot Marico is essentially a two-street town, and allegedly one of only two towns in the entire country that still has a phone operator.

The weekend was organized by the local Literary Society, and took place on white-owned farms that run along the beautiful Marico river. This LitSoc group seems to represent a sort of alternative, hippified Afrikaanerdom that I hadn’t experienced before. One of our hosts, inappropriately named Egbert, looks like a character from Lord of the Rings: a long sinewy man, all arms and legs, with Gandalf-like grey beard and hair. He was perched mostly next to a collection of sizeable soot-coated kettles from which he produced honeybush tea and smoky coffee.

We went walking the first morning with one Koos Olivier to absorb the trees and plants of the riverine belt and the hills beyond. Afrikaaner/English divides were a running theme for the weekend, with Koos describing the enkeldoorn (ankle-thorn) acacia tree as ‘engelsdoorn’ (English-thorn), that is, good for nothing. We nibbled on the cardamom flavours of Berchemia discolor berries (tcindjere in West Caprivi) and saw one of the tallest Shepherd’s trees possible. Brunch was served later on the fire back at the farm – roughly ground locally-grown pap/sadza, onion and tomato relish, a mountain of scrambled eggs, cabbage with feta, and various other tasty delights.

Janice and I napped before taking a furtive skinny dip in the river, and then rushed to catch the afternoon convoy to a local mampoer farm, a few kilometers out of town. Made from fermented fruit, mampoer is a particularly strong home-brewed moonshine, also known as witblits in the Cape. Just in case we were looking for a stereotype, the farm owner was an imposing sjambok-wielding (yes) Afrikaaner with frighteningly blue eyes called Johann. After making a slightly uncomfortable scene around the prettiest girl in the group, he led us past a large barrel of fermenting marula fruit into his distillery barn, stressing that he only spoke English in self-defence. Between lecturing us on the distillation process and the much-debated origins of the term ‘mampoer’, he casually beat his dogs away from a Cape cobra that appeared amidst machinery a few metres away. Some of the more urban guests were suitably alarmed.

Thereafter we sat on the farmhouse veranda and sampled a variety of mampoers and liqueurs, served by the farmer’s somewhat XXY wife, with some of the dogs in the background (‘PH’ (Professional Hunter) and ‘PS’ (Pavement Special). One shot of mampoer was enough to get the entire group chattering rather excitedly, and we wondered what was to become of us after a few more. We were actually surprisingly fine. We equipped ourselves with bottles to take away, as well as homemade rusks and jams (the staples of any half-decent Afrikaaner pantry), and returned to the fireside for Bosman story-readings and stargazing. Our cottage was tucked away in the riverine forest and impeccably dark at night. I did try to convince Janice that we could make it back without a torch, but she was probably right in persuading me otherwise.

The crowd was a slightly indeterminate white middle-aged mix but one of our more bizarre conversations was with a woman whose home doubles up as a sort of animal shelter. We heard all about her tortoise that eats mangoes, and about her albino duck with a malformed beak which nevertheless gets shagged by the boy ducks. On hearing we didn’t have pets of our own, she extended an invitation to come babysit. Why thank you.

Janice and I caused a bit of a stir, we suspect, Janice being the only non-whitey present and a PhD botanist at that… and the two of us generally not fitting any mould that was familiar to these folk. One man asked us whether we were friends. (Janice and I laughed privately afterwards about who should be whose maid.) We later helped him to change the flat tyre on his Toyota, which really flummoxed anyone who had thought we were city gals from Jo’burg.

On Sunday morning we went to the Bosman cultural centre where we heard poetry readings and some history, whilst hymns and organ music emanated from the NG Kerk (Dutch Reformed Church) next door. But at midday I had to rub my ears because, sure enough, drifting up from somewhere in the middle of Marico Afrikaanerdom was the Muslim call to prayer. It turns out that Janice and I weren’t the only ones to disrupt assumptions that weekend.

From Lagos to Doornfontein

My welcome to humid Lagos included spending 40 mins sans passport at 0430 in the morning -- an immigrations official disappeared with a stack of them for 'processing' of some kind, which involved him actually walking out of the main terminal with all the docs in his hand. In my various third world travels, this was a special and unsettling first. The official, clearly enjoying his regular power kick, refused to give us any information whatsoever, and patronisingly chided us to stay where we were rather than follow him outside, which is what I did.

So there I was, outside the airport, in Lagos, of all places, without a passport, watching this guy saunter off… After being refused re-entry to the immigration section, I realised that the entire planeload of passengers had been similarly deprived. They were all sitting on the luggage conveyor belt, waiting with the sort of acceptance that you only generally see in Africa, no matter what one’s background. We got the passports back in the end. Friends have warned me to look out for my double.

It was a heavy week on the work front, and I didn’t have much time to explore, sadly. That said, Lagos reminds me of Indian cities, actually: sprawling, vibrant with women dressed exquisite print fabrics, and one crazy traffic scene. My visit was for work, so I was sadly confined to sanitised air-conditioned spaces much more than I would have liked…though I have to say that the air-con wasn’t all bad. I enjoyed the Nigerians; they were friendly, welcoming and confident. We sampled local delicacies, including even giant snails cooked with tomato [impressive achievement for my mostly vegetarian self]. Rubbery comes to mind.

I had a surreal evening visit to a bar called Pat’s, much to the horror of a South African journalist friend who knows Lagos well. Pat’s is frequented solely by foreign men and pretty long-legged Nigerian women in 4-inch heels and very miniskirts. This little excursion was followed by an armed escort back to the hotel...I did try to get a photo with the two gunmen in their unbuttoned shirts but they sadly declined.

My return to the airport was also memorable – in the most embarrassing of fashions. Since I was travelling in the early evening, the company security coordinator arranged an armed police escort again. I presumed that, like the night before, this second vehicle would simply follow behind. But no. They drove ahead of us, aggressively hooting, gesturing out the windows and, intermittently, using flashing lights to push the Lagos rush-hour traffic out the way. It was like being in a high-speed car chase, African dictator style. Instead of taking 2.5 hours to get to the airport, we took only one. This was the closest I’ll ever get to being Idi Amin or Robert Mugabe. I was absolutely mortified and hugely grateful for the tinted windows. My driver was sympathetic to my embarrassment, but reassured me, “Don’t worry, this is how they do it in Lagos. Everyone will be wondering who you are.” Oh what comfort.

Anyway, I made it to the sweltering airport in time to queue and be searched multiple times over a 3 hour period. The flight routes to Jo’burg all depart at midnight and arrive in the early morning, and there were no other passengers of my age-race-gender. Not that that’s anything new in my travels. I have to say I was somewhat relieved to step out into the fresh sunrise air of the rand again.

This past Saturday afternoon I went on a historic tour of Doornfontein in downtown Jo’burg, run by the Westcliff Heritage group, in a large and cumbersome bus. The whole thing was bordered on surreal, in a sort of amusing fashion. My friend and I were basically the youngest on the bus by quite a long way, he was the only black guy, and my java print skirt looked positively loud next to all the floral cottons.

The tour was four hours long, believe it or not, with only one disembarkation at an old curtain rail factory, still functioning, and which still has the defunct apartheid racially-segregated signs above the toilets: “Bantu Males”, “European Males”, “European Females”, and so on. Quite extraordinary. We saw all sorts – synagogues, factories, transport depots, a crumbling mayor’s house, the ridge behind the Ponte tower, theatres, mosques, old wells, and more. Really quite fascinating, though best done when tired or hungover, I’d say. We ate delicious pizza at Ant’s in Melville afterwards and watched the full moon rise.

It’s a hundred days till the World Cup, the newspapers shout out. I’ve been on radio a few times talking about search trends and the new stadiums -- oh the random things I've ended up doing. The evenings are warm and borderline sultry, and the mornings are starting to cool a little. I’m determined to start Zulu lessons soon. It’s already been way too long. Oh, and the worms have survived, by the way, so the wormery lives on after all.