15 minutes until boarding. I’ve mixed emotions about this – while I’m ready to get home, this has been a wonderful trip to a fascinating country that deserves more exploration.
Can’t have it all, I guess.
I’ve posted pictures from Pretoria, Sun City and Pilanesberg to my account on Flickr.
Well, I didn’t get to Cape Town this weekend. All the flights were booked solid because this is a long weekend for the South Afrikaners. Actually, Tuesday is a national holiday, and a lot of people have apparently taken Monday off as well and they’ve all gone to cape town.
No matter. A friend of mine in the Mission recommended a local tour company to me, and I gave a call and booked a day trip on Sasturday to Pilanesberg Game Park near by. It is, in fact, a man-made park – about 20 years ago the land was bought up from the people living there, foreign plants and animals were removed, and indigenous species re-introduced. The 55,000 hectares is fenced in and, I learned, is basically the caldera of a long dormant volcano.
Our guide for the day was Richard, but in the morning I was picked up by his mother and driven to meet Richard and the other three people on the tour at a bazaar. Richard’s mom and sister raise award winning Australian shepherds. They’re the tops in South Africa. Once we arrived at the bazaar, since the opportunity presented itself, I got a little shopping out of the way and learned once again how poor my bartering skills are.
From there, we drove about two hours across the country to Sun City, quite a nice resort. I have to admit I was more interested in the drive than Sun City. Along the way we passed two of the biggest platinum mines in the world. I learned that we were not far from the Cullien (sp?) mine, a diamond mine that has produced four of the largest diamonds in the world. There is also a lot of gold mined in this same region, so it is quite mineral rich. The disparity between the rich and poor, though, is quite marked and (almost) everyone agrees that it does need to be addressed. The geography was interesting, too. We gradually left plains and drove into a more mountainous region; apparently this was volcanic millennia ago, hence the caldera that is now the park.
Two of my companions on the day’s trip were an older couple from Long Island, New York, and the other gentleman was about my age and from Paris. He works for Renault and travels primarily to Asia and Africa for them. All of us in the minibus had some serious travel under our belts and we shared stories.
We arrived at the park and I learned that it also has a lodge and timeshares. We had a nice lunch at the lodge and then piled into the open-top trucks for the game drive. On the drive we saw hippos, several herd of zebra, white rhinos, water buffalo (gnu?), gazelles, wildebeest, giraffes, and as the sun was setting we saw jackals and a couple species of owls. No lions, cheetah or elephants. I did get some pictures and I’ll upload some of them as I get a chance. The silence in the park, when the truck engine was turned off, took me by surprise. You could hear for miles, and all you could hear were the birds, an occasional snort of an animal, and the distant rumble of other autos.
Since my previous post, I’ve finished the training that needed to be done and spent a day visiting offices of partner organizations to take care of a little work that needed some personal attention. I discovered that another person I knew from Nigeria is here working for Research Triangle Institute, so that makes this by far the country where I knew the most people coming in. There are people in the Inspector General office, the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, The Deputy Mission Director, and now RTI. And I thought all roads led to Rome. Maybe that’s in the northern hemisphere.
Oh, for the record, the water does not spiral down the drain the opposite direction here. Also for the record, the Milky Way is really bright when you’re out in the middle of the countryside away from city lights.
Tomorrow, Monday, is the last day in the office and I depart for the States in the afternoon. After a brief stop to refuel at Isle de Sol (basically a volcanic island in the middle of nowhere) I’ll swing through Atlanta and be home Tuesday afternoon.
I’m two days through the trip and things here are in full swing. I spent yesterday briefing staff here at the USAID Mission and, with the help of a couple key people, taking stock of what needs to be accomplished during the rest of my time here. It’s a good list, but reasonable and all should be accomplished by the time I leave next Monday.
It turns out that someone I worked with in Cairo is now on staff here in Pretoria. Yesterday evening, I accepted an invited to dinner with her family. It was one of the most unusual “developing country” experiences I have had; not for its strangeness, but for its total normalcy.
The occasion for dinner was the 8th birthday of her daughter, and she was invited to pick the restaurant we’d go to. Thankfully, she didn’t subject us all to the fine Scottish cuisine of MacDonald’s. Instead we went to Mugg and Bean, a South African chain, located in one of the nicer malls in Pretoria. Re-read that sentence, and remember that I’m in a developing country. I know I totally forgot where I was for the couple hours we were sitting there and I was enjoying all the comforts of home! One of the most telling sites I saw in the mall was a pet store – such a thing wouldn’t exist in many countries I’ve visited where people can’t feed their families, much less afford to have pets, much less afford to buy the cat(s) a big scratching post/condo.
It is well acknowledged that there are parts of South Africa that are very developed and are much more European than African. The economic centers of Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town and Durban sound like they rival any first-world cities. I’m told that if you get out into the provinces, though, the magnitude of the disparity is striking. That’s where the development comes in.
My meetings today were with a number of project teams; I was able to meet with and brief Chiefs of Party in the morning, and then spent the second half of the morning and the afternoon training members of their staff. All went well, and as usual I’m bushed.
I had the opportunity at lunch to sit and speak with a couple of USAID staff whom I have come to know in the short time I’m here. We talked about a lot of things (of course), and eventually the conversation got around to the changes here in the last decade. It has only been about 10 years since the end of apartheid, but in that time it sounds like a great mental shift has already been made and the society is becoming more and more multi-cultural. This has been somewhat of a melting pot for a long time, with Oriental, African and European influences. According to one of my friends, though, the change in attitude from one generation to the next (parents to kids) is going a long way to erasing some, but admittedly not all, color boundaries. Paradise this isn’t, in most of the urban areas black & white couples are accepted, and many office colleagues have become blind to the color of their coworkers. Would that we were so in the U.S.
So I think I’m going to try to go to Cape Town for the weekend. Several people have told me that the flights are inexpensive, the city is gorgeous, and that I’ve got to go! I’d best start exploring options tonight and tomorrow, because the week is already half done.
It was a loooong day, but I’m in the hotel in Pretoria, South Africa. My flights left DC and NY on time, and after a stop in Dakar, Senegal for gas, arrived right on time too.
To give you an idea of how big this continent is; the flight from NY to Dakar was roughly 6 hours, 30 minutes. From Dakar to J’burg it was no less than 8 hours. Wow.
Not surprisingly, the Sheraton hotel is great. I’ve got a view of the Union Building out my window. We’ll see what it looks like in the morning and maybe I’ll get a picture. So I’m here tonight and tomorrow getting acclimated to the timezone and hemisphere and work starts bright and early on Monday.
Friday afternoon I am on the road to Pretoria, South Africa. I’ll arrive Saturday evening and will promptly, I hope, fall into bed. I then have a day to recover, and jump right into work for a week and a day.