Mom and Dad Bleckley Come to Africa

Jennie and I were recently blessed with a visit from my parents, just before the end of the semester. Mom and dad spent a couple days in Johannesburg before flying to Polokwane to spend a few weeks with us.

We met them at the airport and after navigating the hustle and bustle of Polokwane, we drove to the village. Mom and dad were kind enough to plunge into South African village culture without the prior training we received from Peace Corps so they could get an idea of what our everyday life is like. They stayed with a friend of ours who is opening a bed and breakfast in her retirement. Ms. Maloka owns a shop in town and is on a board of directors for a number of organizations, including Mohlarekoma Home Based Care, one of the organizations where Jennie works, and the Phokwane Improvement League Rural Education Trust, where we're helping to start a library and college guidance center.

Ms. Maloka has traveled outside South Africa, but like us, her culture is an insurmountable influence. My parents were given star treatment both because of how Americans are precieved, and because Ms. Maloka is such a hospitable host. They had plenty of blankets and shared tea and rusks (a delicious type of tea biscuit) with Ms. Maloka, who asked them to call her Edith.

During their time here, my parents helped prepare lunch at Mohlarekoma's drop in center for orphans and vulnerable children, visited my schools, ate a traditional lunch at Ms. Maloka's shop, and met many of the friends we've made here. My dad took a khumbi ride to the grocery store with me and did a training for area directors at youth camp.

Our host family, Mr. and Ms. Maserumule, were out of town for most of the week we were there, and we were afraid our real parents wouldn't be able to meet our African host parents. Ntate (our grandfather) had an eye operation in Pretoria, and couldn't return because the medicated eye drops he was taking had to be refrigerated; they wouldn't survive the ride back to our village. But Saturday, my dad was outside packing the car when our ntate walked through our gate.

Granddad told them the stories we expected him to: how we have the same Sepedi names of his two grandchildren, Bontle and Monare; how he had his foot operated and that the doctors had left the pin in his foot and he had to have another surgery to get it removed; and about the eye surgery he just had and the eye drops that had to be refrigerated. He addressed my dad as old man, a term of great respect here. I've thought that the two of them are very much alike, and I'm grateful they were able to meet.

Our vacation time was wonderful. We drove to Sabie on that first day, a tourist town near Nelspruit in the Panorama, a beautiful area of rolling hills and winding roads. This was where we ran the Longtom Marathon in March, but the views were new to my parents. In Sabie we ate at a diner with a train car front and miniature golf out back. They had some good burgers and potjies - dishes cooked in a three-legged, cast iron pot. I think my alfredo pasta was probably only served in a potjie, but it still tasted good.

Proceeding from Sabie the next morning, we arrived in Kruger National Park for a wilderness hiking program. Kruger has a number of camps far from public roads traveled by tourists where eight visitors can stay at a time. During the day you are taken on hikes by two park rangers with very large guns. We had seen a number of animals on our Christmas trip to Kruger, but it's a very different experience to see them from inside a car to seeing them while you're crouched behind a rock. And we were able to see rhino, which we hadn't viewed on our previous trip.

From Kruger we returned to the Panorama a little further north in the Blyde River Canyon. Graskop is a big tourist attraction because of it's shops and restaurants. Pancakes here, we learned, are made with more eggs, and often folded over with a filling inside - a sort of cross between pancakes and omelets. I had a spinach and cheese filled pancake, for example. A very unique experience. We did a bit of shopping and some more sight-seeing in the Panorama before driving north to the border with Botswana.

On the South African side we stayed one night in a tent camp, which is not what we had in mind when we thought about a tent. These tents had full bathrooms and a kitchen. They were like cabins, but with canvas walls and a bit colder. After spending the night at Mapungubwe National Park, we went on a tour of their archaeological site, where a village lay on major gold trade routes.

Crossing the border into Botswana, we spent three nights at a second game reserve where we saw big cats. We had seen cheetah in Kruger in December, but at a distance. We saw cheetah, lion and leopard from the truck on many occasions. We even saw a leopard snatch a guinea fowl out of a tree for dinner. The animals there are much more used to vehicles and people, but it was still neat to be able to see them. The food there was awesome! Breakfast "snack" which included yogurt, granola, fruit, juice, toast, and cereal. Tea was served on the morning game drive with rusks (South African biscotti). Brunch was served after the game drive around 11 and there were eggs and meat and casseroles and fresh bread and crackers with . . . wait for it . . . bleu cheese! And salami! It was like being back in America, only there's a herd of semi-wild elephants drinking at the waterhole below the dining area. Then at 3 was something they called high tea, which I was informed meant tea with more food. Crackers and fresh bread came out again. And more bleu cheese. Drinks and popcorn served on the evening game drive and then dinner at 8, served buffet style, something I always hardily support, especially when it's good. For us, food is something we are always able to enjoy more on vacation, so it was a real treat. They did have assigned seating at dinner, which was a little weird, but we didn't push back all that hard.



We drove back to the village the following day. Along the way, my dad secretly bought us a box of wine - something it isn't culturally acceptable to purchase in our village. My parents spent one final night with us before loading up their luggage and saying goodbye. We cried for a good half-hour, but then slowly prepared for reintegration and the following week.

We were so happy to be able to spend time with my parents and so honored that they decided to spend their 25th wedding anniversary trip with us.

Vacation in Zanzibar

After running the Longtom Marathon in April, Jennie and I joined 10 other Peace Corps volunteers on a trip to the island of Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanzania in East Africa. The first term of school had just ended and we took two weeks of vacation to get out of the village and take advantage of some relatively nearby wonders.

We took a two hour flight north to Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, just north of Zimbabwe and south of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The flight was brief and they served dinner! Zambia Airways has not scraped in-flight meals like corporate America. We ate delicious tuna salad hoggies with 100% fruit juice and a nuts in milk chocolate candy bar. Then, in addition, they served drinks, including bottled water! It was one of my highlights of the trip.

Landing in Lusaka, we spent about an hour getting through immigration. They were only accepting US dollars to buy our $150 visas. Some of us had the wise foresight to change some rand into dollars before the flight. Some of us also got to walk through immigration to change our rand into dollars near the entrance and then walk back to immigration and pay for our visas. After immigration we spent another hour trying to haggle for a fair price on a taxi to take us to the home of Fraiser, a Zambian Peace Corps volunteer, who was opening his flat to all 12 of us to stay the night. We finally found a bus (covered with Disney characters like Dumbo) that would charge us only 20,000 kwacha each and loaded up with about 15 other Zambian passengers for our ride into the city.

South African culture is at a very interesting stage. We have been welcomed warmly by the people in our village and they have always been friendly to us. However, due to apartheid, there is a sort of quiet discomfort when it comes to color in South Africa from Black, White, Indian, and Coloured. It affects how quickly trusting relationships can develop.

Zambia was different. It wouldn't be until the next day when a local told me "we Zambians are a very friendly people." I already knew it was true. On our airport Dumbo bus, we had the regular chit-chat on our ride, not unlike the conversations I sometimes have on kumbis in South Africa. But when we had some trouble finding Fraiser's flat, another passenger whipped out his cell phone and asked for the number. This is no small thing in Africa. Airtime is expensive and pre-paid. I almost always text message if I can avoid a call. Cell phone users more often send free "please call me" messages rather than buy airtime. But this man that we had met only twenty minutes ago was using two minutes of precious airtime to figure out where we needed to go at midnight in a completely unfamiliar African capital. We did figure out where we needed to go and all the passengers wished us a safe journey.

Fraiser was very laid back about everything. Jennie and I found some floor space to crash on in a spare bed room and caught about four hours of sleep before we had to get up to catch a taxi to the bus station the next morning.

The bus station was an experience. As our mini-bus taxi pulled in, we were swarmed and for a moment I was genuinely concerned about our safety. Two men threw open the door and jumped into the moving taxi and asked us where we were going. We told them and they both had a bus to offer us. We had been told that the bus ride shouldn't cost more than 20,000 kwacha. Both of these buses cost 45,000 kwacha.

We didn't want to get cheated due to our skin color so we bargained with about 50 bus drivers - all at once - for a bus at that first price. We finally found that bus, much to the disappointment of the other bus drivers, though one said to me as I walked away "Eh, that bus won't leave for 16 hours. You'll see."

The nice thing about traveling with a bunch of other people is that sometimes they're more willing to deal with stuff than you are. And so after waiting on that bus for over 4 hours, the price rising to 35,000 kwacha, and then two hours later finding the bus still has not left, we had to get off that bus and get on another that would get us to the train station two hours north of Lusaka in time. And get our 35,000 back. Fortunately, Jennie and I did not have to fight that battle. Unfortunately, we did not get our money back and then paid 45,000 kwacha for the bus afterall. Ah well - it was really a difference of eight US dollars.

In Kampiri Moshi, we boarded our train and moved into our 2nd class cabins that we would use for the next two nights. I have been on a train only once when I was 10 or so and it was a short two hour ride. Jennie had been on a train just last year before leaving the United States. We both had something different in mind. In our car, six people slept in a cabin. The back pad of the couch-like seat folded up to become the beds. The pads were a thick metal slab with half an inch of cushioning. We didn't figure out how to lock the middle bunks until we finished our trip to Tanzania, so they kind of bounced up and down during the night. The toilet was a hole in the floor of the train that dropped everything onto the tracks. The food was affordable but oily. The whole experience was a lot of fun.

We did finally see what Africa was really like. South Africa is two worlds - first world and second/third world. In the village we pump our own water, take bucket baths, and handwash our clothing. But in another part of our village, a fair number of people have indoor plumbing, full bathrooms, and washing machines. We all have electricity. In the city, these things are common place. There are malls bigger than those in the United States. Going to the city in South Africa is kind of like going home. Kind of.

On the train, we passed village after village with housing made completely of thatch and venders selling fruit or chapathis (like tortillas, only better tasting and worse for you). We saw more poverty than we've seen in South Africa. We bought bottled water - the only stuff we could safely drink - from some clever children at one of the stations. They had refilled old bottles found by the train tracks. At all the stops we were sometimes taken advantage of and sometimes given a more than fair price.

At the Zambian - Tanzanian border crossing, after our first night on the train, we were told that the train would no longer accept kwacha on the other side of the border. We had to exchange all our money for Tanzanian shillings. This was a lucrative business for some money changers that boarded all trains at the border. They made a 30% profit exchanging our kwacha and rand for shillings. We also got our passports stamped and bought Tanzanian visas for 100 US dollars.

The next morning we passed through a game park on the train and saw some zebras and giraffes. I might have seen hippos in the water, but it was at the very crack of dawn, so who knows. We pulled into Dar es Salaam at 11 o'clock that day.

I had thought Dar was a grand town and was a little disappointed. It was a very busy city and definitely a different and educational experience, but I had expected more Arabic archetechure or something more cultural. Our hotel was very nice and we had a big lunch to save on expenses. The next morning we boarded a ferry at 7 for Zanzibar. I expected a ferry ride like we've experienced in Seattle. But if you look at a map, Zanzibar is actually pretty far off the coast and north of Dar es Salaam.

Getting off the boat we were helped by a local to find our hotel, the Manch Lodge, and set about the town. Without help, we would have never found anything in the first few days. The streets of Stonetown are narrow alleyways, turning and curving in all directions. The first day we found place to eat and just figured out our bearings.

The two places we stayed were both very cheap and served breakfast. The Manch Lodge was 15 USD per person per night and had a great breakfast of crepes, fruit, and bread. The Flamingo Guest House was 10 USD per person per night and served fruit, toast, and an egg. The Manch Lodge had the better breakfast, but the Flamingo was cheaper - at least, during low season.

Low season is a very short window when rain is more frequent. It hardly disrupted our visit. The first day it rained all day long, and there were a couple downpours on other days, but it didn't diminish our trip at all.

Jennie and I tried to eat two meals a day. It was cheaper, and we found a fantastic resturant on one of the busy main streets of town. The Passing Show Hotel, where we were the only tourists, has a long and affordable menu featuring all sorts of basic Indian and East African dishes and freshly squeezed juice. For some travelers the first experence of bogobe (or pap) takes a little bit to get used to, but we've acquired a taste for it. We ate lunch there forthree days.

We were a little disappointed by the beach close to town. It was a quick, 300 shilling (about 30 cents) taxi ride up the coast to Mtoni Marine, but the beach was littered with trash and a pipe lead from a nearby factory into the water where a brown, foamy liquid was deposited. The beaches near Stonetown are not the same pictured on postcards.

On the island our group didn't stick together as much, but we did join them for a trip to Prison Island, site of a Portugese prison and tortise sanctuary. The main attraction for us was swimming and snorkeling. These beaches are the ones found on postcards. The water was very clear, allowing us to see starfish on the ocean floor.

We took another taxi across the island to Jozanzi forest, endemic home to the red colobus monkey. They are protected on the island and so used to humans we were brought directly below the trees where they were eating. We hiked around a little bit and also saw some black colobus monkeys. Colobus describes the number of fingers these primates have on their upper limbs: four.

Zanzibar is famous for it's spices, and we took a slightly expensive (25 USD per person) but tremendous tour with Eco-Culture Tours of a spice farm just outside Stonetown. They also threw in a 10 minute tour of a Persian bath the Sultan built for his second wife . . . We saw the plants nutmeg, cinnimon, pepper, vanilla bean, iodine, cardimon, tumeric, and others. Vanilla was particularly interesting - if you've ever bought pure vanilla instead of immitation, there is a significant price difference. A large factor is that vanilla has no natural pollinators. In order to produce the beans used to make the extract, people have to pollinate the flowers by hand. Iodine, the orange staining antiseptic, is harvested from the stem of a woody, tall but slender plant.

Joining us on the spice tour was a couple on their honeymoon. Athena and Josh are working for for Tulane University in Rwanda and had done Peace Corps separately about 7 years ago in Guinea and Ivory Coast. It was neat to meet some people on the other side of the experience. They were nice enough to ask us out for drinks that evening and then we decided to have dinner together too! They're doing malaria prevention and will be returning to the states around the same time we will be.



Some of Jennie's thoughts on Zanzibar:
Zanibar was so different than I expected. I was thinking that this would be a vacation divided by lying on the beach reading and swimming in the beautiful water. I was thinking that there would be more white sandy beaches. What I found turned out to be magical in a very different way. Beautiful, curious people allowing us to witness a part of their everyday lives. What an experience to walk down the winding, narrow streets that are not familiar but to feel a sense of peace and hope. The giggles of children running down the cobblestone passageways always brought a smile to my face. While I came to Zanzibar expecting to lay on a beach oblivious to the world around me, I was blessed to become tangled into the web of Zanzibari life.

All in all, we had a wonderful trip and it was an experience that we will never forget.

Holiday Vacation 2007 - Wild Coast

The second half of our trip was spent on the south-eastern coast in the town Port St. Johns. This section is called the Wild Coast because of the dangerous winds and sea conditions for ships. The coast is scattered with shipwrecks and unique geological features.

We spent this time with fellow volunteers Ben and Susie Barr-Wilson, another couple from our group. We became good friends with them during training and enjoyed seeing them again.

We spent some time hiking in the forest, on the beach, and in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. While our guidebook promoted the area as undeveloped and sparsely populated, there sure were plenty of people on the beach on New Year's Day - so many we couldn't get there. We had plenty of time the days before though and it was restful and rejuvenating. Check out the captions for the whole scoop.

If you're still looking for something to read, check out Lisa's blog - she's a friend of ours arriving in Uganda to begin her Peace Corps service - and Jon's blog - another friend in the middle of training for AmeriCorps.

Holiday Vacation 2007 - Kruger National Park

Jennie and I are back home in Limpopo after holiday vacation. In fact, we've been back for over a month now. We spent five days near Kruger National Park and four days on the coast of the Eastern Cape. Afterwards, we spent a couple days at Peace Corps headquarters in Pretoria doing some research on public colleges and financial aid options for youth in our village.

I'm glad we took a vacation. Even though the initial culture shock is starting to wear off, it was good to get away from the village and all the drastic changes from the life we were living back home. At the same time, it's hard to experience South Africa as a tourist after experiencing it as a resident of a rural village.

Suddenly, the privilege we've tried so hard to shed (or give the illusion of shedding) was donned again like a heavy coat. We were able to save enough in the village to rent a car, stay in bed and breakfasts, and go out to eat often over the two weeks. The lines of communication were cut - our Sepedi was of little use in Seswati speaking Mmpumalanga or the Xhosa speaking coast. We could no longer greet South Africans in their own language and were forced to rely on English, making our skin appear even whiter than it was. But for our overall psychological health, we enjoyed being tourists, even if there was a trade off in our frame of mind.

We spent the weekend before with another Volunteer couple, Brook and Jed. They live in a village near Nelspruit about three hours from our site (six hours by khumbi, as we discovered). It was interesting how different life was for them living near a large city compared to our life in rural Limpopo. We had pizza at the mall, saw a movie, and browsed a book store - things we haven't done since early September. The highlight though wa spending time with the two of them. We played a lot of cards, and received a tour of the area where they live and their organization's office. The two cooked some great food - chicken parmesan, french toast, and eggs with toast.

On Monday, we drove from Nelspruit to the small, mostly Afrikaaner town of Marloth Park, just on the edge of Kruger National Park. We spent Christmas Eve and Christmas being lazy - lying in bed, reading, playing cards. For Christmas dinner we had more pizza.

The 27th we made our first attempt to enter the park. Unfortunately, the place is so overbooked during the holiday season that the gates are open only from 5:30 to 6:30 AM each morning, and a line starts forming at 4:00.

Disappointed, we returned to Marloth Park and drove around the vicinity. Not much of a loss, because we were able to see giraffe, zebra, baboons, and a kudu. I thought I had already seen a kudu - I had seen an antelope with sort of twisted horns the first day we arrived. Impala are not kudu. If a kudu and an impala were in a fight, the kudu would win. I would question whether the majority of lions could take down a kudu singlehandedly. It is the most noble animal I have ever seen. And very large.

We went home, hit the sack at 7:00PM, and got up at 3:00AM the next morning. We got in line at 4:30AM with about five cars in front of us. At 5:20, we were in the first group granted entrance.




That day was incredible. There are very few places where you're allowed to exit your vehicle, but it was amazing how close you could get to the wildlife on the road. Our camera only has a 4x zoom, so you can see from these pictures how close we were. It seemed closer than the zoo to me.

We were lucky enough to spot a cheetah and her cubs in the tall grass, though we were no where near enough to get a good picture. There are estimated to be only 200 in the park.

We ate lunch at a picnic area I read about in our South Africa guide book. It described monkeys gracefully descending from trees to try to steal your lunch. We imagined them climbing down a tree, giving us a puppy dog face and us resisting the urge to toss them a piece of our sandwich. Sounded like a fun time for all involved.

Instead, a veret monkey snuck up from behind and assaulted Jennie in an attempt to knock the apple from her hand. She was unsuccessful, and then spent five minutes staring at us, as if to ask "so, are you going to give me the apple?" Eventually, she scampered off and moments later we heard another one of her victims yelp in surprise.

We did pretty well on sighting the Big Five. We saw a number of elephant and water buffalo. At the end of the day we also saw a rhinoceros. We're fairly confident we caught glimpse of a lion. We did not see any leopard though, but aren't too disappointed. I mean, what are leopards doing in the Big Five? They're not big at all. A giraffe is way bigger. Same with hippos. Both would make better candidates for the fifth of the Five. But I think the best choice would be the kudu.

We left Marloth Park on the 29th, driving south through Mmpumalanga and Kwa-Zulu Natal to meet friends in Durban and tour the Wild Coast. That will be the subject of our another (potentially our next) post.