Five Weeks In One Backpack: Week Three

I am home. I have also awoken from my sleeping coma and gone grocery shopping, though I have a nightmarish quantity of laundry still ahead of me to do before I can really consider myself settled back in. As always, returning home was wonderful and I have to resist the urge to start immediately writing about my return rather than my time away.

After LST and GTOT, I took an overnight bus to Durban to meet Josh, who flew in to visit me for a couple of weeks. The bus ride was uneventful, or at least would have been, except that it began to rain, which is when the driver discovered that the windshield wipers weren't working and so pulled over and called a mechanic to come fix them. I was sleeping soundly and probably would have slept through the entire incident (one of my hidden talents is the ability to sleep in all circumstances), except that there was a white family seated next across the aisle from me who were very unhappy and very vocal about it. They expressed their frustration by being incredibly rude to the Black Greyhound employees. Finally, another white woman on board essentially told them to shut up, which seemed to give everyone else on board the courage to say the same. Other than other Greyhound trips, I haven't really had to confront too many racially loaded incidents like this one as Giyani is fairly monoethnic. However, out in other parts of the country, there is the constant haunting reminder of South Africa's tumultuous past and the PCV's inevitable uncomfortable role somewhere in between.

Arrived into Durban safely and still far too early in the morning, just happy to be somewhere where I could take a hot shower. Josh and I had a great time in Durban. We didn't spend too much time at the beach, which has unfortunately become much more polluted and crime-ridden than it was when dubbed the "Golden Mile." We visited uShaka Marine World, a Sea World-like place with dolphin shows and penguin feedings, plus a very cool aquarium. We toured the Kwa Muhle Museum, Durban's tiny apartheid museum, where we learned, amongst other things, the history of bunny chow, a meal consisting of curry inside a loaf of bread, a dish unique to South Africa. Evidently, under apartheid, Indian restaurants weren't allowed to seat black customers and the styrofoam take away container had yet to be invented, and so bunny chow became the first form of take out food. We went to Victoria Street Market in the Indian District, and I imagine that we wandered around more malls than Josh was expecting. Sorry, no Durban pictures, I was paranoid about carrying around my camera.

Next stop was Cintsa, a beautiful, sparsely populated area far south along the Wild Coast. The backpackers was a bit noisy, but the beach was beautiful. We spent a couple days just vegging on the beach and by the pool before going to Inkwenkwezi Nature Reserve, which contains all of the big five (according to it--we saw no cheetahs).

Inkwenkwezi was a nice happy medium between going to a zoo and going to the massive Kruger National Park. The Reserve did game drives, so it knew just where to take us. They also had only a few specimens of each animal, so there weren't too many surprises to be found--we pretty much just drove with some other vehicles, for example, to the place where the rhinos were grazing that day. The lions were kept in a separate enclosure (presumably to prevent them from eating precious zebras), which we got to see, but unfortunately we weren't able to go inside as four of the lions were lying in wait at the entrance, ready to attack. We did however get some great pictures of lions hunting tourists. Last stop at Inkwenkwezi was the separate elephant reserve with tame elephants. Tame is not so exciting at first glance, but it did mean that we got to feed and pet them!

Next entry: Port St. John's