traveldiary.stracke.us

We arrive at the Mercure Rainbow hotel in Victoria Falls at high noon. It is about 100 degrees F and the roughly dozen ceiling fans in the hotel lobby and restaurant are not working ( I suspect somebody is saving on the electric bill). We have a cold beer and only stick our feet in the pool since Gabi has no suitcase. This is not such a great loss, because the water temperature is not any different than the air temperature! Our guidebooks paint Victoria Falls as a great tourist destination with lots of activities and bars full of Zambezi river rafters and bungee jumpers. What a surprise to experience reality. The place is a depressing dump, the supermarket and some stores are closed ( even though they are open according to the sign on the door) and Gabi and I are the only tourists (and white people) to walk in the street. (more…)

We arrive in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe with some trepidation. The newspaper reports, that a new law is in effect, threatening imprisonment for 20 years for any person who is caught making negative remarks about President Mugabe or the “Democratic” Republic of Zimbabwe. I am more afraid for my wife, who sometimes has difficulty to keep her mouth shut! ( The German” inborn error of metabolism” is to state the facts the way they are).
At the airport we line up to pay US$ 30.- per person for the visitor’s visa which is issued on the spot as long as you pay in US Dollars, Euros or South African Rands. The Zimbabwe Dollar is not accepted as form of payment.
One customs official takes our money ( out of principle I gave them Rands, not greenbacks), then shoves our passports to another customs officer to issue the visas. My German passport is done next, but for some reason Gabi’s US passport ends up at the bottom of the pile. Gabi suspects a minor form of harrassment against Americans. I am getting fed up and, after waiting for 2 other non-US tourists to be processed, tell the guy to please finish Gabi’s passport next since we have been waiting in line longer than the other people. He complies with my request without comment and we are allowed to enter the great land.

November 26th, 2004: Yesterday was Thanksgiving and we bought a roasted chicken, some salads and the last can of cranberry sauce in the Pick- and- Pay supermarket in Fish Hoek, False Bay. We had our Thanksgiving meal on the beach in Simonstown, South Africa under sunny skies and the temperature in the 8o’s. We missed Carsten and Sonja and will have a turkey meal with them at Christmas time!
Today we spent the day reading on the beach at Sunny Cove ( where the lady was devoured by a great white shark the other day) and Gabi had spaghetti carbonara for lunch. Unfortunately the food did not agree with her and dinner consisted of Alka-Seltzer and Pepcid! I did not eat much having sympathy pains.
November 27th 2004: We are up at 4 AM ( Gabi complained because I got up 5 minutes before the alarm went off) and catch the 6 AM flight from CPT to JNB( Cape Town to Johannesburg). The SAA service is very good and a full British breakfast is served during the 90 minute flight. We continue to Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe (former Rhodesia) and arrive minus Gabi’s suitcase. We are issued a PIR, aka property irregularity report by Air Zimbabwe and are not expecting to ever see her suitcase again.
Gabi is searching for some clothes in the few stores in Victoria Falls that afternoon, but no such luck! Surprise, surprise ! The missing luggage is actually delivered to our hotel ( 20 miles from the airport) the same evening , while we are having dinner. Our respect to South African Airways.

Sabbatical is supposed to have something to do with rest, correct? Please explain that to my brain which has never learned and been engaged at this rate since…………..maybe college! At that time I was learning new things in new places all over Europe but this learning in a place that is so different than anything I had previously known is exhilarating…and exhausting! Every day we are incorporating new information, often info that can really not be received from books, but only face to face with a culture. (The books are helping us understand what we are seeing.) Wherever we are, we can not stop reading, thinking, questioning, evaluating, prophesizing…. For you educators, wouldn’t Madeline Hunter be proud of me! The last few days in Zimbabwe were exciting, frightening, sad and happy, all at once. More to come on that subject, cause that’s a whole new chapter in itself!
P.S. Sometimes having trouble knowing which is the English and which is the American spelling of a word… add a little German and Afrikaans to the constant bombardment of words to the brain…..it is definitely on overdrive! Sorry for the speeling purists among you…… Lothar and I try to correct each other! :roll:

Every bank, restaurant, shop,mall etc. in South Africa has the sign ” Right of Admission Reserved” posted at the entrance. Today we spoke with an American lady who lives here and I asked here if this was a leftover from apartheid times and what it actually means. Her answer was that it only is a way to keep drunks out of shops. It has nothing to do with race or color. In her opinion, apartheid laws were basically protecting the interest of white, m a l e Afrikaans and women or people of color were treated as second class citizens.
The language down here is different anyway. An oversize tractor trailer has a big sign “Abnormal” on its back and we are still trying to figure out what is normal and what is abnormal here. In our experience, the society in everyday life is still frequently split, resulting for example in all white guests in the restaurants and all black staff serving them. This makes me very uncomfortable and I certainly prefer the cultural mix of the US melting pot. On the other hand, I have to admit that this country has come already a long way in the 10 years since Mandela became the first President here. I have great respect for Nelson Mandela’s policy of integration of the different races into one nation versus kicking the white people out of the country like Mugabe did in Zimbabwe. I also have to remember that it took more than 10 years for black people to be treated equally in the US.
Today we flew on South African Airways in a brand new Airbus from Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe to Jo’burg in South Africa. I will write about our Zimbabwe experience separately. We are staying again in a hotel ( in Pretoria) with a high wall plus electric fence on top around the compound.It certainly will help to make us sleep easier ! Another street sign on the corner near the hotel that you won’t find in Clifton Park :
” Warning- Frequent Highjacking Point”! Travel is certainly interesting.

I read the following stories in the Zimbabwe Sunday News on November 28, 2004 :
The Zimbabwe National Parks and Wildlife Authority has identified 153 elephants for culling. The elephants in the Hwange National Park are to be killed in order to provide the communities with much needed nutritious food. The government will keep the skin and the ivory. The paper does not mention what happens with the ivory, but I strongly suspect, that it will be sold for foreign currency. Ironically the program was delayed because of a salt shortage, which is needed as a preservative agent.
Another article reports that villagers feasted on a lion who had been killed by National Parks Authorities.
The lion had terrorized the villagers and apparently had mauled many goats and cattle during the last 6 months. The villagers normally do not eat the meat of carnivores, but in this case had a lion braai. In the spirit of the ” an eye for an eye” doctrine the people ate the lion meat so that they would be “as strong as a lion”.

:cry::sad::cry::sad::cry::sad::sad::cry::cry:
Tomorrow is the day of the Pilgrims and the Indians and family and, and, and………
Now I am sad….even though it is really only an “eating holiday”, it always meant we had the family together…which was nice…even if sometimes with Lothar’s or Carsten’s schedules, it meant eating the dinner either real early or real late…This year we are here in 80 degree weather, Carsten at home,(but I’m sure he will find a way to keep busy), Sonja off to Vienna with a fellow Fullbright TA, my parents without the usual prepared turkey……thank goodness for the Capetown Times it not only gives us all of the news, particularly of Africa, but it also had a nice insert today for thePick and Pay(their Price Chopper)… ready made chickens were on special this week…ok, it’s not a turkey, the smaller cousin will have to do this year…..tomorrow a roasted chicken with prepared mashed potatoes, corn, (hopefully…cranberry sauce——
on the beach! This may not be so bad after all…………I get the meal without cooking it for the first time…….. in I can’t remember how many years. For you family—-I will make up for it at Christmastime…..Tom Turkey watch out then, I’ll be coming after you with a vengeance.:evil:

So far we have been immensely enjoying our time together. Especially since there is not always a schedule to keep. We have been on the road and with each other now every day for more than 100 days and still having a lot of fun.
Yesterday we entered a restaurant on the Cape Town Victoria Wharf at 3:30PM with the intention to have ice cream and coffee. Instead we ended up having a nice Italian meal( of course accompanied by Cape wine ) and I was asleep at 8 PM. The only drawback was that I woke up at 4 AM today and was not tired any more. This morning we checked out of our hotel in Cape Town and had planned to drive to the beach. While in the car we changed our mind and visited the beautiful Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden at the base of the Table Mountain range. I am not a huge fan of botany, but this place is great. It starts at an altitude of 100 meters and goes up the mountain slope to 1000 meters. They have all kind of flora, ranging from huge trees, flowers, succulents to desert shrubs. Now I know what an Aloe tree looks like. We hiked into the mountain and spent more time than anticipated. We never made it to the beach today! Instead we found a very picturesque bed-and-breakfast with our room overlooking the dark blue ocean at False Bay. (The beach where the shark attack took place last week) The B+B is run by a couple from Belgium, who had to leave Belgian Congo ( now Democratic Republic of Congo) about 20 years ago. They went back to Belgium, where he owned an automotive repair shop for a number of years. After getting tired off Belgium, they packed up and started this B+B here. It is amazing to see what some people do in a lifetime! In comparison, our lives have been pretty straightforward.
We are getting hungry and are heading for dinner now. No watch required!

Another lingua to contend with! Afrikaans isn’t so bad though because it is a variation of Dutch, which to me always seemed like a combo of English and German. Yesterday we visited the Afrikaans Museum that explained how the language got to be what it is today. Since the Dutch were the major first colonists here, they of course had to communicate with the natives, as well as with the imported slaves, and the various later colonists, who were French, Germans, and the original Portuguese. It seems that the natives, slaves and other immigrants learned the Dutch language, but many variations from their native languages were incorporated ……resulting in the nowadays Afrikaans language. When the British took over South Africa and wanted to Anglicize everything, the then Afrikaaners (mostly consisting of original Dutch immigrants—also known as Boers) resented that. Thus they began a school that taught in Afrikaans. Papers in the language, as well as the Bible soon followed and a new lingua was born! But not until 1925 did it become recognized as an official language…..people had already been speaking it for at least 200 years.:shock:
In 1976, one of the major reasons for the Soweto uprising was that the blacks were to be forced to learn solely in Afrikaans, which they felt put them at a disadvantage. It did!:sad: (The language at that time was considered the language of apartheid.) Nowadays, the younger generation in Soweto is complaining that they are not able to learn it anymore in their schools, since most provinces have adopted a 2 language only policy ……there in Gauteng province, it is English and Sotho, the language of the major tribal group in that area, ……………..could get to be rather expensive to have all 11 officially recognized languages mandatory in every school!:shock: The younger generation now feel that Afrikaans would not only be a good bridge to the older generation, both socially and economically, but also a social bridge between the races. Sounds valid to me. Hope they get to have it in their school through peaceful means:!:

We drove into the wine country near Cape Town and looked at some bed- and- breakfast places to stay for the night. Sticker Shock ! Farmhouses in the middle of nowhere had been turned into country lodges and were charging $170.- per room per night. Now I know why there are so many 8 and 12 cylinder Mercedes on the road around here.
We ended up in a very nice Protea Hotel in Stellenbosch for a fraction of that price. The front desk girl gave me the room for about one third of the going rate ( just my charm or possibly negotiating skills?). My dear wife could not believe it and actually asked me afterwards what I may have promised that lady. All it took was a smile!
Yesterday was a walking tour through the Malay quarter of Cape Town and we visited the very interesting Bo-Kaap Museum. We arrived simultaneously with a German tourbus group ( we really hate tour-groups: they always get in our way or eat the restaurant menu empty before we get there). Fortunately the Germans were gone in about 10 minutes and we had the exhibits to ourselves!
The so called Kaap-Malays were originally convicts from Batavia( now Indonesia) who were sent to Cape Town by the Dutch East India Company to serve their sentence here. Other groups were political exiles from India and Indonesia as well as slaves that had been “imported” by the Dutch colonists.
The Malays maintained their Muslim faith and culture in Cape Town and live in a very colorful section of town.