shaunism

Tuesday, 10 January 2017

The Life of Shaun #546] The Mother City

The final destination on our honeymoon was Cape Town - and what an absolute joy it was. We were there for a full week, and I could have easily stayed longer. I can't remember the last city I went to where that was the case; normally a long weekend is enough just about anywhere. Cape Town is not a cerebral city - it lacks the historic depth and economic heft of Johannesburg - but it drips with beauty, charm, ease, and, for whites and tourists at least, levensvreugde.

Like Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco and Sydney, Cape Town's natural setting seems almost too perfect to be happenstance. The city sits in a bowl, nestled between the Atlantic Ocean, jaunty peaks and the lofty expanse of Table Mountain. To the South lies the majestic Cape Peninsula, to the East lies wine country, and the climate is temperate.

If it sounds like I am gushing, it's because I am. Cape Town has its problems: it's got plenty of poverty, sprawl, inadequate infrastructure and crime that's high by European standards. But it's less segregated than Johannesburg, safer than many American cities, and is reasonably well run by the opposition Democratic Alliance, free from the cronyism and corruption and plagues what's become of Nelson Mandela's ANC.

We stayed at a fabulous gay guest house, which serves breakfast until a very respectable hour. We had perfect weather the first day, so took up the opportunity to go up Table Mountain and do a city tour, getting all the rigorous touristing out of the way on day one. Then each day we slept in late, lingered at the breakfast table talking to other gushing tourists from around the world, and then headed out on another exploration: the waterfront, Robben Island, Camp's Bay, the Cape of Good Hope, Bo-Kaap, Stellenbosch - usually capped off with a drink in Cape Town's diminutive, but enjoyable, gay scene. Not the stuff of haughty drama, but one fantastic day followed by another. Amazing.

I knew I would like Cape Town. I've never heard a bad word said of it. But I didn't realise how I would love it. There's something understated about it, despite its natural beauty; it's a bit player on the global stage, and even plays second fiddle on its home turf to brash Johannesburg. It seems eager to please, but not like it's trying to show off; it knows it's in a sketchy neighbourhood, but it also knows what it's got. It's simply lovely. I can't wait to go back.

Sala kakuhle,

Shaun

Table Mountain from our room.

Sushil the Redeemer.

Sushil had been bugging me about taking a helicopter ride for months. In Cape Town, I finally relented.

Camps Bay, which felt like it should be painfully over-touristy, but was really great. We went a couple of times, including for a brilliant extended parting lunch at Mezepoli.

The CBD, with Table Mountain behind. Much of the modern downtown was water until it was filled in during the 1940s.

Older

downtown.

Urban edge in Woodstock, perfect for galleries and hipsters.

District Six, just Southeast of downtown, was a residential neighbourhood within the main bowl of central Cape Town. Its 60k+ residents were removed in the 1970s by the Apartheid government and the neighbourhood razed to make room for new whites-only developments. Some of the area was redeveloped, but most of it still lies barren due to a combination of protests, legal manœuvres, and the economic reality of international sanctions. The area is now in a turf war between those who want to leave it as is to serve as a memorial, those whose historic rights of relocation have been recognised, and developers salivating over a large tract of prime real estate in a city on the up.

Cape Town and Table Mountain, seen from the boat heading out to Robben Island

the prison where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 18 of his 27 years behind bars.

The quarry where Mandella and other prisoners were made break rocks, and stack and restack them.

Mandela's

cell

block.

Downtown Stellenbosch, the charming heart of South Africa's wine country.

They take their trees very seriously in Stellenbosch.

City Hall, with a Mandela sculpture that's immediately apparent in the camera lens, but hard to discern with the naked eye.

We decided to take the Bites & Sites tour, which combined a bit of history while walking around downtown sampling artisanal bread, locally-grown organic vegetables and, of course, wine, before heading out to the vineyards. It was a great choice - a good balance between town and country, and gave a lot more colour to this localvore foodie haven than a full day of cellar tours could have.

No, this...this...this is the one we want! @Simonsig

Hout Bay, a suburb of Cape Town on the Cape Peninsula.

Boulders Beach on the Cape is home to a large penguin colony.

And wine!

Don't forget about the wine!

We made it!

And celebrated with a bottle at lunch. Cheers!

Shaun H. Coley ~ Shadwell ~ Tower Hamlets ~ London E1 ~ UK ~ shaunism.blogspot.co.uk

Tuesday, 3 January 2017

[The Life of Shaun #544] The Myth of Mugabe

I recently started reading Sapiens, a fascinating book on the history of humankind. In the opening chapters, it discusses the myths around which Homo Sapiens have built their world: law, human rights, nations, money. These exist only because people believe they do, as opposed to the laws and forces of nature, such as gravity and radioactivity; you can abandon all belief in either, but they'll both kill you nonetheless. This is not to say myths aren't important or don't impact our world - they do immensely, and the widespread loss of faith in these beliefs can be disastrous.

Riding high on the myths of empire, land ownership and the value of the local currency, the British colony of Southern Rhodesia was amongst the richest and most advanced nations in the developing world. The breadbasket of Africa exported all manner of crops, earning hard currency and supporting a vast network of farmworkers and dependents. Several decades later, the rebranded Zimbabwe has endured a complete loss of faith in the government that runs the country and the currency that facilitates its economy, becoming one of the most dysfunctional and destitute countries on the planet. It's a stark warning about how quickly a nation can fall apart, and how much damage one man can do.

Having followed the fall of Zimbabwe against the rise of its inflation (as high as 79,600,000,000%), I was keen to see what had become of its capital, Harare (née Salisbury), since abandoning the ZimDollar for the US Dollar in 2009. The country is still poor and misruled, but at least there is a measure of financial stability. Surprisingly, central Harare, with its neat street grid, parks and slightly shabby towers, appeared cleaner, safer and more prosperous than Johannesburg, Africa's wealthiest city. But a telling sign of the despotic, paranoid rule of Robert Mugabe was that we had to register with and get permission from a military post downtown before we were allowed to walk its streets. We were also requested not to take too many photos of the CBD, as that could be taken as an attempt at espionage.

Despite its interesting recent history, Harare was quite lacking in local diversions. Other than the local markets, shopping centre (in the surprisingly large white section of town) and universally friendly residents, there is not a whole lot to recommend the non-business visitor. Quickly realising this, Sushil and I rebooked our outbound flight to the next evening and rode out our 26 hours in the capital with a city tour, cheap local beer and mediocre Ethiopian food.

A reasurring sign welcomes you on arrival to Harare International Airport.

From a nearby hillside, Harare could pass for a mid-sized American city.

Worshipers spill out into the courtyards in Zimbabwe...

...and into the fields.

The Parliament of Zimbabwe was surprisingly understated, especially compared with the presidential compound (where pictures are not allowed).

Africa Unity Square, at the centre of Harare.

The Old Mutual building downtown.

"As hyperinflation accelerated, the value of the Zimbabwe dollar declined fast against other currencies, yet official exchange rates published by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe were infrequently updated; this made it impossible to tell from an official source how much the Zimbabwe dollar was really worth against other currencies on a particular day, which in turn disrupted international business transactions involving Zimbabwe dollars. Staff from WM/Reuters devised an indirect means of measurement that was termed the Old Mutual Implied Rate (OMIR). This took the daily price of shares in the insurance company Old Mutual that traded in the London and Harare stockmarkets and derived from it a notional daily exchange rate between the Zimbabwe dollar and the pound. Shares had much less strict capital controls than through the Zimbabwe banking system, so the shares were used as a vehicle for moving capital between currencies by buying stock in either London or Harare and then selling in the other location. The Old Mutual Implied rate was widely adopted benchmark rate for unofficial currency exchange until intervention by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe in May 2008 to prohibit the transfer of shares in Old Mutual, ABC and Kingdom Meikles Africa out of the country, therefore stopping their fungibility."

A child standing next to a rather unique newspaper headline.

Sushil and I at Sam Levy's Village, the main shopping centre in the white section of town. Our guide stressed to us several times that people from all over the world mix there.

The markets in the black sections were a bit more up-and-coming.

Well-decorated social housing.

Indeed, this is where we started our party!

A mobile DJ stage with Afro-techno music kept the party going on the streets.

The most famous of the Chiremba Balancing Rocks, made so by its appearance on the ZimDollar, including the Z$100 trillion note.

The outskirts of Harare are literally built on and amongst the rocks at the edge of the park.

A headline announcing the introduction of bond notes, a parallel currency being introduced to mitigate the shortage of USD.

A newspaper insert explaining how bond notes would work...what could possibly go wrong?!

The lack of USD was apparent in the condition of the bills that were in circulation.

ZimDollars, worth more as souvenirs than they ever were as currency.

Nondiscrimination laws are not quite up to Western standards.

A rather appropriately named intersection.

Shaun H. Coley ~ Shadwell ~ Tower Hamlets ~ London E1 ~ UK ~ shaunism.blogspot.co.uk

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Tuesday, 27 December 2016

[The Life of Shaun #543] Four out of five ain't bad

Requisite on a trip of any length to South Africa is a safari. Sushil didn't get to do one on his first visit to Cape Town, so we added it to our itinerary. But first it was a quick overnight in South Africa's administrative capital, Pretoria.

Unlike most countries, South Africa has three capital cities. This is a result of "negotiations between the British Empire and the defeated Boer republics that ended the second Anglo-Boer war [creating] the Union of South Africa...Parliament meets in Cape Town, the former capital of the British Cape Province. The administration is based in Pretoria, the capital of the Boer republic of Transvaal, and the judiciary is based in Bloemfontein, the capital of the other Boer republic–the Orange Free State". However, since 1995, South Africa's highest court, the Constitutional Court, has been located in Johannesburg, adding another layer of complexity to the bureaucracy. Most embassies are located in Pretoria, and it is often considered the de facto capital.

However you slice it, as Johannesburg boomed, it merged with Pretoria into a single megalopolis, and many of its residents commute down ten-lane highways into Johannesburg's business districts to pay the mortgages on their leafy suburban homes. Dominated outside the modest downtown grid by large roads and ho-hum shopping centres, I would charitably call Pretoria one of those cities that is better to live in than to visit; it is pleasant, orderly, clean, green and prosperous, but like Stein's Oakland, there's just no there there.

The Voortrekker Monument towers above the city to commemorate the Dutch colonists' successful great trek from Cape Town into the interior.

This panel inside sensitively depicts the slaughter of 12,000 Zulus by the Voortrekkers.

Pretoria, from the monument.

A large complex of flats in the city centre has sat unfinished for many years as the developer and city council are unable to resolve differences on who should own them post-completion.

Pretoria was merged with several adjacent municipalities, called the City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality, after the pre-colonial name for the area. A bill was recently passed to officially rename the city itself to Tshwane as well. Not totally unjustified, but much like with India's scrubbing of colonial names from the map, often not considered by the renamed locals to be their most pressing unmet need.

Mama Sharifa: coming soon to a red state near you.

Church Square, Pretoria's heart.

At its centre, the statue of Paul Kruger, the first President of the Union of South Africa, has been gated off to protect it from the protests of 2015, aimed at removing reminders of and monuments to white, colonial and Apartheid leaders.

Nelson Mandela in front of the Union Buildings.

At our Pretoria hotel, they take South Africa's creation of a post-racial society very seriously.

From Pretoria, it was about a five-hour ride to Kruger National Park, where we stayed for two nights for our safaris. The implicit goal of most people on safari is to see the Big Five, a name given by hunters to the five largest and most dangerous African mammals: elephant, rhinoceros, buffalo, lion and leopard. In the private game reserves bordering Kruger, it can be easier to see all five as the populations are not totally left alone to fend for themselves, but in Kruger, it's all a matter of luck -- luck which we were somewhat thin on. The people who went out the day before us saw all the big five at least twice. But when our turn came, it ended up being the hottest day of the week, which meant the animals weren't moving around much, so we were much less likely to see them about. We managed to see all but the leopard, our sightings providing gleeful moments of relief on the hot, windy drive along the park's roads. Quite exciting at first, by the start of the evening Sushil and I were ready to be back in camp for a cold beer, a cool shower, and a good night's sleep before heading back to civilisation in the morning.