First and foremost, I am sorry this post has taken so long.
Cape Town, and much of South Africa, seems to feel that Wi-Fi is not a life
necessity. This has proven both kind of nice, and kind of infuriating. Luckily
we got to Mossel Bay yesterday and the hostel we’re at for the next six weeks
has free interwebs. While slow, it seems to be getting the job done which means
I can actually start updating you people. Huzzah! I’m going to split my first
week in South Africa into two posts, the first of which you are reading and the
second of which I will get up tomorrow.
Africa is also experiencing something called load shedding,
which I will get to in a moment and which did not help the situation.
So I’ll keep this as short as I can for almost a week’s
worth of experiences. I flew for nine hours from Denver to Heathrow, London
overnight and got about five hours of sleep. Followed by a nine hour layover,
and then an eleven hour flight from Heathrow to Cape Town overnight and got
about four hours of sleep. I arrived at 10:00 am on Thursday morning pretty
wrecked. I was debating renting a car to drive around, but when I found out
that Cape Town has Uber (what!?), I decided not to bother.
My Uber driver on the way over started chatting me up a bit
on touristy type information, but when I began asking his more personal
questions he launched into a tirade about how his father had left fourteen
children behind for another woman, how his oldest of four was the first in the
family to go to college, and how easy South African women were. He expounded
over and over about how I was not raised in this culture so I would never
understand. Fair enough, but by the end of the ride I was still pretty unsure
as to what kind of point he was trying to impart on me.
He drove away and ten minutes later I was greeted by this
absolute goddess of a woman- tall and statuesque with a punky short haircut and
a cultivated South African accent. Her apartment was located in a part of town
called Sea Point, right next to the ocean. She had decorated in bright colors,
with portraits of Frida on the walls, glass jars filled with sharpened pencils,
and books by Franz Kafka and Kurt Vonnegut. She handed me the keys and I
immediately passed out.
Four hours later, I woke to a daytime blackout. This is load
shedding. When Nelson Mandela was appointed president of South Africa, he made
and kept a lot of promises to the poor population of SA, including access to
electricity for everyone. Infrastructure was put in place that allowed even
SA’s most poverty stricken people a pay-as-you-go system for electricity. They
were given cards with which to charge, say, $.50 of electricity on to run a
single bulb, or heat a single pot of water. Unfortunately, South Africa’s main
power company Eskom did not anticipate keeping up with the growing demand for
power. Now, many years and millions of dollars of development later, they are
completely ill-equipped to supply the power all of South Africa needs at any
given moment.
Rather than overload the system and plunge the country into
total darkness for weeks on end the solution they have evolved is to section
off the country and assign each section a “scheduled” blackout period of
anywhere from 2-4 ½ hours. The schedule is loose and changes at a moments
notice. Locals seem to begrudgingly accept these blackouts (what else can they
do?), but many businesses have resorted to running on generators rather than
rely on the country’s failing power grid. This is a growing and problematic
trend that is already taking environmental tolls.
I ventured out for some dinner when the blackout ended a few
hours later. Back in the apartment, I tried charging my phone and only then
realized that the power adaptors I have bought were completely wrong. Exhausted
and a little beat down, I went back to bed around 8:00 pm. I woke at 3:00 am
and made myself a cup of French press coffee, which seems to be the main form
of coffee consumption here. I am not complaining. I sat in bed and finished my
plane book (David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell), and spent a few precious
percentages of my phone battery to look up the nearest travel store three miles
away.
The sun didn’t rise until 7:30, which seemed unfathomable to
me until I realized it’s fall and almost winter here. The weather had been in
the 60’s and it completely slipped my mind. I took a brilliant walk along the
Cape, lost and enjoying the hell out of it, until I reached the travel store.
Which ended up being in a MASSIVE mall that looked like it belonged in London
rather than Cape Town, with upscale stores and well dressed people.
I found the charger and walked my sore-ass hips back three
miles, packed my things, and called another Uber to get to my second AirBnB to
share with my professor, her husband, and the other two students who were flying
in that night. Little did I know that the place I had chosen was on the other
end of the Cape. Lucky for me, the African rand is about $.08 to the US dollar.
It cost me roughly $40 for an hour of driving.
The place was amazing a beautiful and peaceful and far
enough outside of Cape Town that you felt like you were alone. I took another
nap, and then another Uber to the airport to collect my crew. The rest I will
write about later, because we are leaving for dinner. And I cannot miss dinner,
as it’s into the caves tomorrow. More on that soon…
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