Midsemester Adventure IV | Durban, Johannesburg, and Kruger National Park

I got a little sidetracked the past couple of weeks, but here's the final installment of the midsemester trip posts!

Our tours of Durban and Johannesburg were a bit of a whirlwind, as group tours tend to be. Durban is a fairly large city on the coast of the Indian Ocean (so warm!). We arrived around dinner time, checked into the Happy Hippo Backpackers, and went in search of food at a nearby touristy shopping center. We only had a few hours before we had to leave the next morning, so we got some breakfast and went for a walk on the beach. You'll notice a theme of eating at nice restaurants whenever we got the chance...the fast food on the road was a little rough toward the end of the trip. 

Thanks for the picture, Kristin.

On the way out, we stopped at an Indian market. It was thoroughly overwhelming, kind of like a shopping mall only with vendors who would literally pull you into their shops if you showed the slightest interest. You could buy everything from curios (tourist bric-a-brac, some of which is made in Africa, some in China) to frilly bed linen. The entire place smelled wonderful from all the spice shops, my favorite part.

I also met a man from the US who was an African art dealer, and he was able to tell me where a lot of the art in some of the curio shops came from. You see a lot of little paintings from Kenya (very stylized and colorful depictions of people, villages, and animals), bead work from Zimbabwe, and masks from traditions all over the continent. I wanted to buy something that was authentic to South Africa, and he showed me beautiful bowls made from colorful telephone wire that come from the Zulu townships surrounding Durban. I bought one, and I wish I had picked up a few more.

Then it was back to the safari bus and on to Johannesburg, where we spent two nights in a hostile just outside of the city. We spent a day touring Soweto, South Africa's largest township. Nelson Mandela used to live there, and Winnie Mandela still does. Desmond Tutu has a home there as well. We visited the Freedom Charter Monument, which marks the place where the Congress of the People was held to compose the document which had a huge impact on the new South African constitution.

Soweto is most famous for the student uprisings that occurred in 1976 to protest the introduction of Afrikaans as the main language of instruction in local schools. We went to the Hector Peterson Museum, which memorializes the young students who lost their lives in the uprising.

We also went to the Apartheid Museum. We had one hour to go through a museum that deserved at least half a day, but it was very well done and presented a poignant, cohesive picture of life during apartheid and the struggle to overthrow it. I'll write more about this later (it deserves its own post).

We left bright and early the following morning for Kruger National Park, one of the largest game reserves in South Africa. Only a small potion of it is easily accessible to humans, giving the animals lots of room to roam undisturbed (that's how I got over the HUGE impact of tourism in the areas where we were). There are specific areas where people are allowed to "camp" in beautiful little chalets that have air-conditioning, full kitchens, and swimming pools. It was like going to summer camp, honestly. The sites are fenced-off, mainly to keep animals out and over-eager tourists in at night. During the day, everyone drives around in their cars in search of the "Big Five" (lions, elephants, rhinos, leopards, and buffalo). I was skeptical about how many animals we would see with all the cars driving through the park, but we saw almost all of them, except for lions. I think the giraffes were definitely my favorite.

After two days in Kruger, we drove back to Johannesburg to catch a flight back to Cape Town. As we got off the plane and made our way back to K-House, it was an odd parallel to the first time we flew into the city. This time, we knew exactly where we were going, and it felt like home.