Couldn’t get this image into the last post. so here it is.

Habari..we’ve been in tanzania for a week now. we have been staying in N’datou a small village outside Arusha in north TZ.

We can see mt meru towering above the village. we start climb it tomorrow and be on the mountain for four days.

During our stay here we volunteered at a local nursery school. The kids are aged two and a half to six and spend three and a half hours there. it is a private school partially sponsored by our outfitter Duma Explorer. They study english, Swahili, math and bible. The local language is amehru but primary instruction is all in swahili. secondary imstruction im TZ is in english.

We taught the kids ‘the hokey pokey’ and ‘head, shoulders, knees and toes’ and also worked with them during individual activities. They have very few resources but some kids have made great progress yet others that are stuggling. Even the latter will likely have an advantage over others once in public school.

The children are very sweet and well behaved.

The kids’porigi time.

We have been taken care by Julius who cooked for
us and has been helping us with our swahili.

julius

The village has only one paved road leading to a missionary hospital. Most people grow corn, coffee and bananas as cash crops in addition to other work that they can find.

i am typing this on my phone, so excuse me for being lax on capitalization formatting and spelling. i have some audio files also waiting for posting, but have been struggling with technical difficulties. stay tuned.

tutaonano …. see you later

Oh, poo. We didn’t schedule enough time for Johannesburg. Not that we intended the 24-hour layover to suffice, but word to the wise – don’t skimp on Jo’burg. I already regret not having the time for a deeper visit.

We wanted to visit the Apartheid Museum and take a bike tour through Soweto, but the driving distance between the two was too long and the museum closed early. Since we had booked our room in Soweto, the bike tour won.

Soweto is the mecca of South African freedom history. Mandela lived here. Desmond Tutu was his neighbor, and it was here that thousands of high school students organized a demonstration to protest a government edict forcing Afrikaans as the language of instruction for all core coursework. (For comparison, it’s worth noting that the USA had similar forced language policies toward Native Americans, and that the goals of such programs were intended to subjugate native peoples by stripping them of their language and providing inferior education in English.) The students, some as young as 8, staged their protest on June 16, 1976. I was only 8 years old in June 1976 when so many Soweto school children were killed, but I remember being confused by the tv news. I was flipping channels looking for game shows. Did they just say the police killed all those kids?

We stayed at Lebo’s Soweto Backpackers, a hostel in the heart of Orlando West, one of Soweto’s more politically infamous “starter” townships. We scheduled one of their rides through town (which is some 3 million strong), and like Nathie in Langa, our tour guide was a sharp young man in his early 20s. He explained the origins of the township, its developing history, and treated us to some traditional beer made from sorghum. We had our drink at a shebeen (lots more to say about these but I’m too lazy), where all the Zulu elders hang out from the early morning sipping and chatting. The elders dressed us up in traditional hats and jewelry and walked us through the ritual of passing the kalabash. Like many other aspects of black life, the Apartheid government forbade black people to drink alcohol, so blacks hid their home brew in milk cartons. Today the industrial version is sold in white and red quart-sized milk cartons as “Joburg Beer.” Clever!

Onward we peddled down a narrow dirt lane puddled with runoff from the outdoor communal water taps and washwater. The otherwise tidy little homes had no plumbing of any kind so all of the dishwashing, laundry and toileting took place at the communal facilities outside. Along the way children shouted hello and held out their hands for a high-five, and if we stopped long enough (which was often because of zig-zag riding to avoid ruts and splashing gunk), the youngest children would rush our bikes to climb aboard. Tsepo said we’d likely get hijacked.

Of course, just like Langa, Soweto has its Beverly Hills and neighborhoods all along the spectrum. For all the trash and ramshhackle housing we passed, we saw equal amounts, if not more, new housing with clean streets and updated city services, such as street lamps, electricity and water.

Alas, the bike tour was the absolute bare minimum we could manage with the time we had. It wasn’t nearly enough, but it was plenty to remember we won’t shortchange Johannesburg on a future trip.

We had a few days of hopping from city to city flying each morning and arriving mid day. A day in Soweto (Jennifer has a forthcoming post).  A day in Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania and then took a small plane to Arusha this morning. if you zoom into the photo you can see our first look to Kilimanjaro peeking through the clouds.

In Dar and Arusha, lots of people in the street, hawking , fixing stuff and making things like furniture. Across our hotel in Dar we saw construction workers on a four story building working barefoot with no machinery whatsoever let alone scaffolding or hardhats. In that respect, south africa is the “Royalty” of Africa – Much more developed despite it still having millions living in poverty.

Today is Saturday the 12th, marking nearly two weeks in South Africa and the end of five days in Capetown. Sorry folks, no pictures as we are low tech on this portion of the trip. Nevertheless, pictures aren’t necessary to say that Capetown should be on everyone’s travel bucket list. The city offers something for everyone – rigorous butt-kicking hikes, super yummy tasty cuisine, well-designed museums that chronicle the city’s turbulent history, plenty of gorgeous beaches, impressive shopping, did I mention the great food?

I’ll get to the highlights shortly but let me say here that we had a very easy time in Capetown. For all the fear-mongering in the travel guides, we never felt unsafe or uneasy. It’s obvious from the gates, guards and fences that violent crime is an issue, but nobody tried to hijack us in broad daylight and walking around the main drags of the city during the day felt like any city without the reputation. That being said, locals we met did advise against walking around certain areas at night and stressed the importance of driving or taking a taxi. Given the neighborhood we live in back home, and considering unchecked gun violence throughout the American suburb, who’s to say South African streets are any less safe?

Overall, Capetown will appeal strongly to outdoor adventurers, winos and history buffs who follow slave trade routes and civil rights struggles. In our four short days, we climbed Table Mountain, learned all about the Indian Ocean slave trade (as opposed to the Trans-Atlantic), visited the District Six Museum, drank some Cape blend red, caught a musical and visited Robben Island (where Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners were kept). We also arranged a township tour to Langa, Capetown’s oldest township.

Details coming up. I’ve about had it with this tablet keyboard : (

we got our first glimpse of the indian ocean when we arrived this afternoon in Arniston. we are staying in a cottage that is thatched with native grass. we are a few kilometers from cape agulhas – the southernmost tip of africa and the boundary between the atlantic and indian oceans.

posting from phone or tablet so will be not as attentive as we’d normally be to spelling ,capitalization and punctuation.

some catchup posts to follow.

We celebrated the New Year by climbing the Klein–Hangklip (Afrikaans for “small hanging rock”) above Rooi Elis to see the sun rise.

View Larger Map

We are staying with Marti & Illah and their children who bought  a house here in Rooi Els a few years ago and spend summer and winter holidays in South Africa. It is a small town within a nature reserve. Today was incredibly windy – Illah wanted us to pick mussels at the beach for lunch, but the wind was very strong and waves were too big- so we had to be satisfied with watching the big waves crashing on the rocks.

The wind here is notoriously strong – can gust to 160 Km/H – one of the reasons there were many shipwreck around the Cape of Good Hope.

We are all packed and apartment cleaned – leaving this afternoon to South Africa.  Seems like it went by so quickly. We are excited about the next phase, but at the same time sorry to leave the Ornano Apt and neighborhood.

Since we got back from London its been busy. We had  Melisa and Dan visit from Seattle and Christina from Rome. Plenty of food  and wine and walking around. We also went to a few Jazz and Jam sessions this month. We also started getting busy with planning the next phase of our trip.

seems that video from phone only works for macs. lets try photo.

trying a post from the phone