Month: March 2011

Cape Town: Glitter, Beggars, Mountains, Jazz!

| kiell

We arrived in Cape Town on Friday morning after a brutal 32 solid hours of airports, airplanes and airline food. We were successfully able to check in at the Auckland airport without being asked for proof of onward travel (you may remember that I nearly missed a flight to Auckland because of this in 2009) and went through South Africa customs without a problem.

We were lucky to have accidentally chosen the weekend of Cape Town Fest for the date of our arrival, and were rewarded with a huge parade on Saturday night. People started queuing at the barriers on the sidewalk long before the sun set, donning sparkly feathered Mardi Gras-esque chintzy masks and drinking sour Castle beer from flimsy plastic cups, beggars with no teeth and mismatched shoes jingling handfuls of small Rand coins through the throngs of people.

Then, we watched as the streets lit up after dark, starting with huge foam puppet unicorns, giraffes, springbok, flying  owls, a kangaroo, gangly ostriches running circles around each other, a dancing tyrannosaurus rex. Church youth groups danced to intense drum beats, their elbows punctuating the rhythm around them, some in tribal costumes with glitter face paint, some in neon glowing pinstripe suits and bowlers with trumpets, kids with vuvuzelas tooting along to the beat from precarious window sill roosts high above the crowds. The hotpantsed moffies–gay men or perhaps simply in drag– doing casual backflips down the sidewalk or on parade floats (singing predictably to the Village People but attracting awe and attention nonetheless). Spectators lined the streets, oversized glitter bits clinging to their sweaty hairlines and cleavage, young men in skinny pants and vests, girls in short shorts or shiny leggings and gladiator sandals, fat older gay couples with button-up shirts and suspenders meandering along the movement of the street. Kids clung to lampposts with a certain borderline tantrum, too-tired-to-function-anymore look to them, right around when I started to feel the same way and we went back to the room to bed, too jetlagged to even be hungry.

The past few days we have been going to see jazz concerts in the garden park, eating tuna sandwiches and watching several different wedding parties stop for photos, radiant brides surrounded by bridesmaids in shiny gold or hot pink polyester matching dresses shooing away the pigeons before posing and smiling, Table Mountain in the sun behind them. Having coffee in little market restaurants, sitting in bright plastic chairs at bright plastic tables with bright plastic tablecloths covered in pictures of Barack Obama, yellow and purple cardinals holding a banner that says “Hooray for the President!”

The next step is deciding when to leave–we will take the train to Johannesburg or Pretoria, but without an agenda and being in a place we like, it’s hard to make that decision…

When it Rains, it Pours

| kiell

We are in Auckland at an airport hotel tonight, getting ready to sleep off a kebab pizza (delicious food + delicious food = an even more delicious food), and then fly out tomorrow to Cape Town, South Africa.

Daniel wrote last about making and breaking plans and the constant flexibility required during travel; tonight we get to test our ability to be flexible and relaxed despite mounting arguments for freaking out. While researching the very real possibility that we will need onward travel tickets to board a flight to South Africa, we realized that a) our travel itinerary pdf was completely blank and b) Daniel’s debit card number has been stolen and someone has been trying to use it to buy advertisements for used RVs and yachts. Would you like to buy a yacht? Someone pretending to be Daniel can sell you one for the low, low price of $110,000.

We were able to check in to our flight and have a plan for exiting South Africa (after lots of panicking); the main issue that remains now is Daniel’s card. We’ve contacted the bank, and hopefully can come to a reasonable solution that may involve canceling the card entirely with no ability to collect a new one.

So, we hope to be able to post soon from South Africa (with a plan from the bank). We’ll let you know how it goes!

The Christchurch Earthquake

| kiell

I landed in Christchurch late on Valentine’s Day, Daniel patiently waiting for me outside my hostel when I got there. The priorities of the next few days, in order, were getting a dark beer on tap, a shower longer than two minutes, finding a new place to stay the next day, getting a decent cup of coffee and going to the beach. We took the bus out to Sumner beach, a sweet little cliffside town with a U-turn cave inside a rock (creatively named, I believe, Cave Rock) where the ocean waves would pull little tidal rivers back and forth between the two mouths.

Daniel and our friend Eric spent a few hours flying a kite up and down the barely windy waterfront, the teenage boys at the beach trying to pretend they weren’t interested in the rainbow kite for the too-cool-for-school girls with them. We spent the next few days with embarrassing inverted-bandit-mask sunburns, having apparently forgotten what the sun does to exposed skin.

We left for Wanaka a few days later, staying with friends in a beautiful house constructed of hay, clay and yellow paint, with a fat juicy vegetable garden, trampoline and wood-burning pizza oven on the patio. I hadn’t realized until I got there that I really missed having the ability to cook at Pole—so while our friends were out tumbling headfirst down whitewater currents and mountain biking, I made bagels and bread and curry soup with a little orange pumpkin from the yard.

We were home making lunch on Tuesday when one of the other women staying at the house called out, “did you feel that?” We hadn’t, and debated for a bit whether it was an earthquake or not. We checked the news a bit later and realized that there had indeed been an earthquake, the epicenter being in Christchurch, that the city was completely in shambles, and that many people had died, with the numbers of fatalities climbing rapidly.

That evening was a nervous one spent checking the informal shared spreadsheet of the 500 or so ice people in the Christchurch area that someone from McMurdo had created, detailing who had seen whom at the CDC, who had posted online that they were okay, who was already home, and those people who were unaccounted for. The really hard thing was that there were plenty of people who you shouldn’t have been able to get in touch with, who had been planning on tramping in the mountains for two weeks and who might not even know that there had been an earthquake.

The earthquake was far more devastating than the previous one in September of last year, even though it was a lower magnitude; the epicenter was more shallow and closer to the city. Temporary morgues were set up in the streets, the city unable to deal with the numbers of dead. Hundreds of people have died, many are still missing, even now, and hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses are lost.

And now, everywhere we go we’re hearing more earthquake stories, where people were and what they saw. Daniel’s coworker Pablo, whose wife and children had just met him in Christchurch after a long season at Pole, lost everything he had in the hotel, half collapsed and listing so severely that no one was allowed to enter; including his passport, newly stamped from all seven continents. We overheard a woman with her teenage daughter explaining to some tourists in Kaikoura, “We’re on extended holiday while we find somewhere to work and go to school… and live.”

We met a German couple on the West Coast who had been at the New Brighton beach surfing; the woman was in her underwear when the earthquake hit, her partner in his wetsuit, and amid the terrible noise and shaking the surf rental owner came running up to them yelling, “Gas! Gas!,” because the line had broken, but they didn’t know what that word meant in English. They tried to describe to us the total chaos and panic that the Chirstchurch suburb was exploding into: of changing out of his wetsuit in the middle of the street because there was nowhere else to go and wondering if he needed to return it, running out of gas for the car and not being able to get any, camping in public parks with other refugees. Not having any clean water or food, and seeing abandoned groceries behind walls of broken glass; “well,” he explained, “the thought crosses your mind at that point.”

One night they stayed in a park with a man who was playing guitar and sharing bread and beer given to him by a shop owner leaving town, talking about the comfort that the music and the friendly gesture provided them, thirsty and scared and trapped. In the end they finally left the city when a police officer siphoned the petrol from his own vehicle with his mouth—they praised him, their hero who helped them finally escape the madness.

We spent the rest of the week in Wanaka feeling really fortunate to have been away during the earthquake, leaving a little bit more time for snuggling before getting up in the morning, watching the evening news and looking vicariously through the rubble for landmarks and familiar faces.

Africa or bust

| mradyfist

The hardest thing about having plans is occasionally having to break them. We’d decided during our season together that another round-the-world ticket would be the simplest and most cost-effective way to do the trip we had been envisioning – plenty of time relishing New Zealand before flying to South Africa to travel overland to Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania, flying from there to the island nation of Mauritius for an island vacation, and then north to Turkey (which we’d hoped to see on our last trip, but cut due to budget concerns).

But flight taxes have only gone up, and the fare for the 4-continent ticket this year was nominally more expensive than the 5-continent ticket we bought last year, and on top of that we ended up delaying our purchase long enough that the slim number of flights to and from Mauritius during our time-frame were fully booked. Reconsidering our itinerary in light of all these factors, individual tickets are now our best option.

It’s a little scary and a little relieving; buying a single ticket which gave us a distinct outline for our trip and a time to be home was comforting, but by the end of our last trip we found ourselves wishing we’d bitten off a little bit less to chew. This time we only have a vague set of dates written down in a planner to determine where we’ll be, with plenty of conditionals and questions. We also have an escape hatch – we can buy a ticket home from nearly anywhere in the world, and we wouldn’t be throwing away thousands of dollars worth of flights.

We’re buying the first leg of our journey now, a long flight from Auckland, NZ to Cape Town, SA with an unpleasant 7-hour layover in Singapore. Our hope is to travel overland up to Victoria Falls through either Botswana or Zimbabwe, and from there cut across Zambia northeast, crossing into Tanzania and ending in Dar Es Salaam. We’ll travel around the coast of Tanzania for a while before flying out of Dar to Istanbul, the city we couldn’t quite catch last year, and we’ll use it as a base to explore Eastern Europe/Turkey/go home early. Same basic plan, just more tenuous; and Mauritius had to be cut.