Africa route - Mar 06  AND I’M BACK FROM AFRICA, ungored by rhino and unstricken by malaria. The map above has my route, with places where we stopped for the night noted with blue dots.So challenge #1: Driving over 2000km on the other side of the road. I rented a Nissan Almera (not bad automatic w/ AC, but tremendously bad uphill acceleration) and we drove everywhere we went; in the end, it’s not much more expensive than taking buses, and clearly much more convenient. In the end, driving in the opposite lane isn’t the biggest challenge, as I had everything figured out after only a couple days. The different road signs, however, such as writing yield as a triangle on the pavement, were a bit confusing.The itinerary ended up starting in Johannesburg. We stayed with my bud’s old camp friend near a town called Vereenging, about an hour south of Jo’burg. Very nice people, but man, they were just flat-out racist (as are the majority of S African whites). You can somewhat understand the pre-1960s South by looking at the situation today in South Africa: incredibly high crime rate, de facto segregation and massive black-white differences in education and income add up to a race-infused climate.The second day, we headed south through the Freistaat, which is still the center of Afrikaans South Africa. A misread sign put us on a 100km journey down dirt roads, on which we saw not a single car. Yeah, that’s the boonies. Fantastic scenery in the eastern Freistaat, though, so it wasn’t all for naught.

From there, we crossed the border into the small mountainous nation of Lesotho. For some reason, this place was devoid of tourists despite (relatively) good facilities, political stability and incredibly friendly people. There’s fantastic scenery as well, with huge, verdant mesas; it’s essentially a greener Arizona. We were the only tourists staying in the town we stopped at (Butha Buthe), and the only people who visited a massive national park the next day. The drive to the national park involved 30km on a dirt road, and we were leaving the park the same time school was getting out. It was like Prince Charles, for real; people were running out of their houses to see the white people, everyone was waving, it was nuts. I learned maybe 15 words of Sesotho - though the educated and young people all speak English, Sesotho is certainly more common on the streets - and was throwing the kids off with a “Dumela, ntati” here and there. Good times. I’m also curious what it is that people in Lesotho eat, because pretty much everyone had staggeringly white teeth.There was one strange thing about Butha Buthe (a town of 10000 people tops). Walking around town, I kept seeing store names that looked pretty damn Chinese, and I told my friend that Sesotho really does resemble Chinese when it’s written. After we passed like 5 of these, I decided to see what’s up, and I went in to “Ming Da Clothing”. I asked the (black) lady up front if the manager was in, and she said, “Oh, he doesn’t speak English.” Yah, it was a Chinese dude. When I asked him why there were so many Chinese in this tiny African town, he said “There are Chinese everywhere. We have a lot of people.” True enough. The grocery store was also run by Chinese, which proves the point: no matter what ‘hood you go to, the Asians still run the grocery stores. I should’ve asked if they were Korean.

We left Lesotho the same way we came in, and drove through Golden Gate Park and Royal Natal Park on the way down to Durban. The same people we stayed with in Vereenging had a small place on the coast near Durban, so we got two more nights without paying for a hotel. Ace. I’d never seen the Indian Ocean before, so it was fun to walk down the shoreline. Swimming was rough, though; the riptide was absolutely outrageous, and there are so many sharks that you can’t go anywhere to swim unless a shark net has been put up.

From Durbs, we headed North to Hluhluwee-Umfolozi park (I think the first bit is pronounced Shlooshloowee, but all I know for sure is that Zulu is damn hard to pronounce). The park is known for having the greatest concentration of rhinos pretty much in the world; I saw half a dozen in two days, including one that was close enough to touch. There were also giraffe, lions (only saw them from afar, though), elephant (we saw one rip a tree out of the ground with his trunk), warthog, wildebeest, cape buffalo, impala, nyala, springbok, zebra and a few more. I think we ended up seeing everything but leopards and hippo. Definitely a stop at a park like this is way better than one of the luxury safaris; we paid something like $60/day each (not counting car rental), including food from the grocery store, a 3 hour guided night drive, a rondeval within the park at night and park entry fees. It’s incredible, actually; there are some all-inclusive safari resorts in Africa that run upwards of $1000 per person per night.

With one day to go, we swung through the kingdom of Swaziland, with infamous King Mswati III and his 13 wives. We stopped for lunch at the “Big Taipei” restaurant outside Manzini, run by yet more Chinese living in obscure third-world countries. I talked with the manager a bit, and he said not only were there 300 or so Chinese in Swaziland, but there were actually *4* Chinese restaurants. They do, in fact, have a lot of people. We also ran into the only American we saw the whole time at a backpacker lodge in Mbabane (sounds like Mm-bah-BAH). She was working for the Peace Corps in a tiny village, doing HIV/AIDS education, which is something quite needed in a nation with 40% of the population afflicted (that’s not a typo).

If you get a chance, definitely swing down there. In all, I spent under $50/day including car rental, food, gas and rooms at real hotels, so the only major expense is the plane ticket. I put some photos up to the right, and there are more at flickr here.

Some quick hits before I roll: So now we know for sure that Barry Bonds juiced. Why is it such a big deal? None of the substances he used were illegal in baseball until 2004, so he didn’t break any rules. Half the league (or “75%”, according to former MVP Ken Caminati) was juicing. And to Barry’s credit, he didn’t take steroids until 1999, after Sosa and McGwire had their Steroids-induced home-run challenge and no one (in the media or at the MLB) seemed to care. It’s not cheating if what you do isn’t against the rules, no matter what we think of it in retrospect.

You catch the new Air Jordan ad? Best Jordan ad in years. The video I linked to has it side by side with the original Jordan moves. Dare I saw it’s better than 23 v 39? Or frozen moment? The old Mars “It’s gotta be the shoes!” Blackman ads? The famous 5-minute long What is love? Or my personal favorite, “failure”? Good stuff.

Last up: If only the the Lorax were an Economist, he could’ve explained why monopoly power for Thneeds would’ve saved the Truffala trees.

We eat a lot of fruit and vegetables, maize on the cob, roots (wild and domestic), lipabi (ground maize mixed with sugar and other spices), mangangajane (dried fruit) and lihoapa (biltong). I don’t know if that’s why our teeth are white, but here in europe where I live I’ve been complimented on the general good health of my teeth.

Thanks for the information you provided on SOTHO.