Travels in Southern Africa

May 6, 2008. It’s been nearly six months since I first arrived in Swaziland, and I can’t believe it’s now nearly time to start packing up. I’ve made some of the best friends while on assignment here, and we managed to squeeze in some traveling in between work. This past weekend, we scratched the surface of Durban, home to generations of South Indian Tamil immigrants who were brought to South Africa as indentured laborers in the 1860s to work the sugar cane plantations under the leadership of a British governor. Most of our time was spent eating in sushi and Indian restaurants or on the beach by the ocean, which was quite a luxury since all of us are from coastal cities but have been living in Swaziland, which is a land-locked country. We wrapped up our last day at the Indian market, near Mahatma Gandhi Avenue, shopping for unique, African-influenced Ganesha statues and chappals.

A couple of weeks before Durban, some girlfriends and I made a trip to Cape Town for a long weekend, and it is, by far, one of the most topographically eclectic cities I have ever visited. We spent our first evening riding a cable car up Table Mountain and enjoying the amazing views of the city, ocean, and mountains over a bottle of white wine. We spent the following day at the V&A Waterfront, and the Cape of Good Hope, where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet. As we walked up to Cape Point, I heard someone shouting my name with a French accent and coincidentally ran into an individual who is working for the European Union who I had met in Swaziland one morning! We wrapped up that evening at a Thai restaurant after visiting the African penguins at the Boulder Beach penguin colony in Simon’s Town. For those of us visiting Cape Town for the very first time, we managed to get tickets to Robben Island after waiting in a queue for two mornings for on the day sales. The Island is located in Table Bay, seven kilometers off the coast of Cape Town. It was here that former South African President Nelson Mandela, alongside many other political prisoners, spent decades imprisoned during Apartheid. We spent our last full day exploring the many famous wineries that Cape Town is renowned for.

In between it all, we decided to make the six hour drive south of Swaziland to Blyde River Canyon in Mpumalanga, which forms the northern escarpment of the Drakensberg Mountains in South Africa. One of my good friends, Liz, had a colleague who had just moved to the nearby town of Graskop, so it was a good opportunity for a quick, but relaxing visit. The Draks is a 200 kilometer long mountainous landscape that was named Ukhalamba by the Zulu people and the Dragon’s Mountains by the Dutch Voortrekkers and serves as a natural barrier between KwaZulu-Natal and the Kingdom of Lesotho. Ostensibly, it was the Draks that inspired Tolkien when he chose the terrain on which the Lord of the Rings series takes place. Blyde River Canyon is apparently the third largest canyon in the world after the Grand Canyon in the U.S. and Fish River Canyon in Namibia. The highlight of the trip was the Three Rondavels, and along the route, we visited God’s Window, the Pinnacle, and Bourke’s Luck Potholes.