Lots of new stuff

Ah, the glories of a fast WiFi connection! I've been busy with three new posts: my arrival in Arusha and two posts to show you some photos from Ihla de Mocambique and Ibo Island (including the 'birds'). So keep scrolling....

Photos from Ibo Island

Here are a few selected photos that show the ghostly beauty of Ibo Island, Mozambique.

The dhow trip to the sand bar, with Anna and Paulina.

(Apologies to the bird ringers if I make a mistake, but) Emerald Cukoo and Blue Waxbill. The ringers at work under the Flamboyant Tree in the bush veld.

Spectacled Weaver, Gorgeous Bush-Shrike, Scarlet Chested Sunbird (same niche as a hummingbird).

The Bird Ringers - Manobra, Phil, Bruno, Malcom and Pieter - having set the nets on the tidal flats, are waiting for the tide to go out and the sun to set. Not a bad way to spend the evening.

Photos from Ihla de Mocambique

Here are the long promised photos - just a few of my favourites - from Ihla de Mocambique, the capital of the Portuguese colony of Mozambique until it was moved to what is now Maputo a century ago.

A narrow alley

Water carriers

A warehouse, and a formerly grand home now inhabited by "renters" (note the laundry drying on the railings).

The governor's palace, now the museum. The grand, white hospital, in ruins but still in use.

The original fortress.

Like the commercial

Remember that TV commercial a while back? A guy in tattered clothes, hair unkempt, bushy beard, washes up on shore in an old boat. He walks into the lobby of a fancy hotel and pulls a particular credit card out of his pocket. Within a few tightly edited scenes, he’s a ringer for James Bond. All thanks to the card.

That’s how I felt this morning. In the almost two weeks since I left Johannesburg, I’ve been in some very atmospheric places. Mozambique Island, Pemba, Ibo Island, little Moshi on the slopes of Kilimanjaro. But atmosphere also comes with lots of dust, hot humid rooms, thin sheets and towels and somewhat dodgy water.

By this morning, as I boarded a public bus for the 80 km ride to Arusha, riding with several Tanzanians who use their cell phones like megaphones, and two Brits in the back row who were racing each other to see how many beers they could down before noon, I felt more than a little tattered, a little shaggy … a little aromatic, despite several hotel laundries.

The bus stopped at the terminal, but I managed to convince the driver to continue on 2 or 3 blocks and drop me closer to the hotel I had booked, so I wouldn’t have to pay for a taxi. In a cloud of exhaust fumes, this cranky, cracked, baling wire and duct tape bus pulls right into the Porte Cochere of a polished teak and marble hotel, and out my bags and I tumble. I stamp the dust off my hiking boots, pat down my tousled hair, and smile at the uniformed young porter who has picked up my backpack. His name is Godwell and he smiles back and says “Karibo”, welcome in Swahili.

Within an hour, I’d had lunch in the fancy restaurant, had rewashed the worst of my clothes in the hotel sink (damn right at $2 per undershirt for the hotel laundry!), and was settled down to watch a mindless American movie on Satellite TV. Something about three teens driving through a winter forest pursued by a mysterious Cadillac.

I’m now sitting on a padded lounge chair beside a twinkling turquoise tiled pool, Gin and Tonic by my side, posting this message on the hotel’s WiFi network as the light drains from the evening sky.

It’s nice, but ya know, I kinda miss the atmosphere.

Oh, and here are a few shots from Moshi, including sunset on Kilimanjaro, a sidewalk watch repair man, and sidewalk tailors:

Off the Map on Ibo Island

The tiny Pygmy Kingfisher flashed through the dry bush veld, dipping and weaving in search of its morning meal, flashing brilliant orange and deep turquoise feathers in the hot sunlight.

Nearby, the persistent call of the Gorgeous Bush-Shrike rose above the calls of other birds. Suddenly, the Kingfisher stopped dead, suspended in mid-air, strong filaments encircling its head and wrapping around its wings. The more it struggled, the tighter the filaments became, digging deep into its shoulder.

As it hung suspended, exhausted, barely a breeze stirred the hot morning air. No one would know what the little bird was thinking but as the tall drab olive figure approached quietly, it began to struggle again.

I crouched nearby under a spreading Flamboyant Tree, my legs cramping and beads of sweat hanging on my upper lip. I wondered for a moment how I had ended up in this predicament.

After soaking in the architectural heritage of Ihla de Mocambique and being whisked through the expat eccentricities of Pemba, I had flown to Ibo Island, climbing down from a small Cessna and falling straight into a nest of rabid ornithologists.

I encountered them at the bar in my hotel and was immediately whisked into their lifestyle of late nights and even earlier mornings. Their leader, a tall, broad, handsome Indiana Jones of a man was mercurial, charismatic. His three acolytes were: a dark-haired Afrikaner, a bear in drab olive with a steady smile and the most florid ‘rrrr’s imaginable; a shaggy Englishman with a flushed red face and the demeanor of a severe yet kindly school teacher; and a tall, lean mystery man with dark eyes and a soul patch and a hard-to-place accent. The little gang included a circle of much shorter local men with ebony skin and serious faces and several slouching, global teens.

The four had blown into town a week earlier to ring birds – catching them in the bush at 4am as the sun rose, and on the mud flats at 5pm, as the tide rolled out. Each bird that was caught in their mist nets was banded (ringed), identified, measured and weighed and then carefully examined for clues to its age and moult pattern.

They let me tag along – their birder groupie - and shared with me some of the most beautiful birds I had ever seen; the Emerald cuckoo, Striped Kingfisher, Gorgeous Bush Shrike (with the primary colours of the Mozambique flag), the Scarlet Chested Sun Bird, Melba Finch, Blue Waxbill, Black Throated Wattle Eye, Madagascar Bee-Eater – 26 species in all in 2 short days. I learned how to spot feathers that are damaged in the nest or on 15,000 km migrations from Siberia, saw evidence of glue used by children to trap birds for the pet trade, and understood how moulting can be delayed by the need to migrate. I felt their excitement when they reached into a white cotton bird bag, just brought back from the nets, and extracted a bird deemed hard to catch.

The local men were all rangers with the Querimbas Archipelago National Park – trainees who were patiently given opportunities to ring, identify, and age the birds. The man with the hard-to-place accent turned out to work in Tourism and Hospitality with the Mozambique government and put in yeoman service translating and explaining to the rangers – although he seemed far too hip to be a civil servant.

For most of the week, the five of us were actually the only tourists on Ibo, until the Dutch girls showed up.

Ibo is far off the usual tourist route. It was, until the 1920s, the capital of the northern Mozambican province of Cabo Delgado and is now a bizarre remnant of the former Portuguese Colony. Today, the wide, white sand main street is lined with hulking ruins of high, one-storey buildings, empty windows behind broad, low-slung porches. Some had lost their roof and several walls were in the process of melting back into piles of stone.

On the second street, narrower, and shaded by mature trees, the long, low porches met in a continuous nave along one side. Some of the dwellings appeared intact, if empty, but many more were facades shielding open interiors with huge trees. Further along, the buildings had melted away into wall fragments – true ruins that looked more like the aftermath of Armageddon.

But there were also reconstructed and renovated homes interspersed amongst the desolation. The three hotels – Cinco Portas, Miri Watiri and the elegant Ibo Island Lodge led the way with crisp white walls, red tile roofs and beautiful carved doors. Despite the lack of electricity and the isolation (accessible only by small charter planes or traditional dhows that cross from the mainland on high tides), there are many who believe that this ghostly, ruined town has the potential to be a magnificent tourist destination. There are others, the local communities among them, who believe that the hulking, empty colonial buildings are inhabited by ghosts.

My favourite part of the visit was walking alone down the middle of the sandy main street, under the bold full moon, stark black on white shadows animating the buildings on either side, the quiet murmur of voices from the porches, either gathering ghosts or a few brave locals huddling in the cool night air behind the railings.

In the end, I spent 4 full days here,
- Wandering aimlessly through the ghostly colonial town and the bustling coral stone, mud and thatch villages around the edges;
- hiking through the mangroves to the ruined lighthouse facing the open Indian Ocean,
- being invited to enter an enclosure to watch 14 women (and one very drunk man) practice traditional dance and song routines to the sounds of 3 drummers using octagonal metal drums;
- hiring a dhow with Anna and Pauline, the two strong confident young medical students from Holland, to snorkel off a white sandbar miles out into the turquoise ocean;
- and always eating whatever the fishermen happened to bring in that day – prawns, octopus, lobster, squid, and huge chunks of some white fish.

And of course I got to hang out with my new posse, my "buds", the world class bird ringers. Yup, me and the boys and the birds. I was in awe and very happy to be included.

Oh, and the Pygmy Kingfisher, it was expertly extracted from the net, unharmed, ringed and before it was released, placed on its back in the open palm of an elderly local woman who chortled happily as it lay momentarily, playing dead, before it flitted off into the bush.

Out of Spendid Isolation

I've come a far way on this long, long day.

I started the morning in the spendid isolation of Ibo in Northern Mozambique. I awoke on an island without electricity, bathed in sweat at 6am under my mosquito net. The two Dutch medical students had walked to the beach at 4am to try to get a dhow to take them to the main land before the tide went out, and my posse had headed to their own chartered dhow at 6am. So I was the last tourist on the island. (More about these people in tomorrow's post).

A young man drove me and my packs to the airstrip on the back of his motorbike, slithering along the loose sand track and waiting with me in the silence of the bush until we heard the motors of the small Cessna coming in to pick me up.

Three flights and 12 hours later, my bags and I arrived intact on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro in Northern Tanzania. I've settled into a solid little business hotel on Aga Khan road in Moshi, and ate Dahl and rice while watching a Bollywood music video channel.

And instead of the 35 degree temperature this morning, I'm enjoying a cool 23 degree breeze even though I'm almost on the equator. I know the snow capped mountain, the highest in Africa, is out there... I look forward to daylight tomorrow and the chance to see it.

At every turn, the diversity of experiences on this trip surprises me.

You meet the most interesting people: Pemba

In need of some cash for the next phase of my trip – out to Ibo Island, which apparently doesn’t have electricity, much less an ATM – I decided this morning to take a trip into Pemba town. On the Lonely Planet map it looks like a smallish town with 5 or 6 main streets, but as the taxi took me to the intersection I had requested, it became apparent that it was big and bustling.

I was dropped in front of the Standard Bank, and thought I’d better do my sightseeing before stopping at the ‘money machine’ in sight of many interested eyes. The main intersection had a few 3-5 storey concrete buildings, and there was a ‘strip mall’ development just to the north with two other banks – BIM and Barclays. The map had shown an ‘escarpment’ and a big church, so I set out on foot in search.

But beyond the main intersection, the roads and the town soon seemed to crumble away. Within a block in each direction, I found high security walls, small concrete buildings, litter choked alleys and rough bamboo shops. For the first time on the trip, I felt uneasy.

Spotting 5 other white males, probably Portuguese employees of some aid organization, I managed to amble along just a few feet in front of them, relieving my probably-unjustified sense of paranoia with a pretend posse.

And then, just as I reached a dusty, impromptu ‘shoe market’, a beaten up black truck veered off the road and a friendly face called out to me. Like a knight on a white steed, Michelle scooped me up and took me on a whirlwind of errands and bars with views.

I had met Michelle over lunch the day before. An American who has lived in Mozambique for almost 2 decades, initially running a tourist facility down south, she is now ‘hanging out’ in the guest house next door to mine as she prepares to move to Argentina. She is a smart, witty, confident woman with with her own elegant beauty and a wonderfully positive view of the trials and tribulations of living in a 3rd world country. But she claims to have grown tired of being a "wealthy" visible minority, and tired of having to haggle over everything from food to official papers. She wants to find a place that offers cooler temperatures, fresh water, rolling hills and invisibility.

Like her, many of the people she introduced me to in Pemba were in some form of transition. Bruce, her passenger in the truck this morning, is a handsome, dark-haired South African with startling blue eyes whose contract in Malawi had dissolved leaving him penniless. He was looking for work in Pemba while waiting to hitch a working ride across to Madagascar on a yacht.

Pieter, the 51 year old, who runs a successful dive shop on the beach and has built the beautiful 2-room guest house next door around a 1,000 year old Baobab tree, is planning to complete the last phase of rooms in a year (or 2, or maybe 6 months) before selling the place and moving to South America as well. Peru maybe. In the meantime, he had just been given a lovely wooden dhow that he might recondition for cruises. Unfortunately, as we drove by it later that afternoon it was in the process of sinking.

At our first stop on the tour, we stopped at a very elegant bar/café high on the escarpment with “the best view of the bay” and clearly in a better part of town. It was also the place to buy western delicacies you couldn’t find elsewhere – like fresh lettuce and frozen meats. There Michelle introduced me to a square jawed, steel-eyed Afrikaner named Arthur who had sailed his dhow into the harbour below that morning. It was a gorgeous live-aboard expedition boat that he had just finished rebuilding after an unfortunate run-in with the authorities had left it beached and breaking up. This storey sounded very familiar. Within minutes, I realized that his boat down in the harbour was “Fim do Mundo”, the Ibo-based cruising dhow that had drawn me initially to Northern Mozambique. I had longed to find myself on a traditional (yet comfortable) sailing dhow cruising for several days amongst the deserted white sand islands of the Quirimbas Archipelago. I knew that his unfortunate run in with the authorities had put him out of business, but I was on my way to Ibo in the hope of finding an alternative.

I hadn’t realized that he had revived the business, but frustrations with his incompetent skipper had caused him to shut it down again just the week before, cancelling bookings through December.

Arthur was, without a doubt, a comic book character. He had been in the South African military, but without a war, what good was that. He had run a guest house, started this ‘live-aboard’ cruise business and now was buying and renovating properties on Ibo Island. Along the way he had had run-ins with local power figures. Anger management issues, he claimed. But he “knew how to handle himself” and had come to an ”agreement” with those he needed. I didn’t know whether this involved his military experience or his superior negotiating skills, but he certainly exuded the vibes of a hardened mercenary.

In this little corner of Northern Mozambique, the characters are larger than life. The ‘rules’ are frustrating for some, but for others, it’s an opportunity to set your own rules. Survival is a common theme. “This new generation has no clue how to survive in a place like this” Arthur growled at one point.

Not to say that there are none of the ‘next generation’ here. My dinner companion last night was a delightful and earnest young man from England, managing a partnership between ophthalmology departments and based at a private university in Nampula. In fact, everyone else seemed to be arriving from or departing to some international aid program – young, clean cut Europeans in sandals and tidy cotton clothes.

But my own romantic view of this adventure – the dissolute Englishman drinking Gin and Tonic in the courtyard in Cochin – makes the ‘characters’ far more fun.

If Ihla de Mocambique was about the ambience, Pemba is about the people that move through it.

(PS: Sorry, still no ability to upload photos. May have to figure out how to make them smaller. I'll probably be out of contact for the next 5 days on Ibo Island. Apparently it doesn't even have electricity.)

Ihla de Mocambique: Photo essay without photos

An old Mozambique hand (aged 20-something) tells me that bandwidth here fluctuate uncontrollably. Another told me that not long ago, an illegal Chinese trawler had cut the fibre optics cable across the bay and all communications was down for 5 weeks.

So rather than struggle (so far without luck) to upload the 12 photos I’ve selected to show everyone the beauty of Ihla de Mocambique, I will paint a few word pictures. When I get to Tanzania, I’m hoping I’ll have better luck with the photos.

So imagine this:

- 3.5 km off shore, in the open waters of the Indian Ocean, is a long narrow island city, only 3 blocks across at its widest point, and built up from seawall to white sand beach.

- At its north end, a hulking Portuguese Citadel, made from black square-cut coral stone from quarries at the south end of the island and transported here on the heads of slaves.

- Crowded in the lea of the Citadel, an old Stone Town – narrow, winding streets of loose red sand lined with the ruins of an ancient colony.

- The centre piece is the former Governor’s Palace, an immense red villa built in the 1600s and still full of the exquisite suites of furniture left behind when Mozambique moved its capital to Maputo a century ago. I’m the only visitor this day, and removing our sandals to preserve the carpet, my guide and I pad barefoot through the reception rooms, dining room, ballroom, and bedrooms poking 400 year old beds to see how comfortable they are.

- The Jesuits were here – a large, whitewashed and barrel vaulted church with the Barrocco gilded altar they plant in all colonies to display their wealth.

- Then there are two parts to Stone town. The first is the Unesco projects - reconstructed, painted and polished to near Disneyfication – including the Slave Regisry and the Telecom building. The rest of town forms the second part – ruins and near ruins, many of them displaying the proud remnants of once grand homes and shops. Some are inhabitable, and show signs of human presence. Others are open to the sky, crumbling walls of black coral stone and red earthen mortar. Plaques proclaim them heritage sites, awaiting a benevolent buyer to save them.

- Beyond Stone Town is the Hospital, a massive stroke of ego built over a hundred years ago in style clearly inspired by the plantation houses of the Mississippi – massive temple steps leading up to giant porticoed porch, two stories of proud square windows, and a urn-topped cornice. But broken windows and crumbling walls leave it open to the elements. The amazing thing is that it is still a “functioning” hospital. Wandering around back we see people lying in beds, attending to by family members.

- The final element of this odd place is Makuti town, five rough and tumble villages of mud and thatch huts, each built into one of the deep quarries that produced the stone for the citadel. This is where most of the city’s population lives, many Mancua speaking locals but also a number of people from other regions to fled to the island’s relative safety during the post-independence Civil War. Unlike stone town, these villages are full of life, with children playing, vendors selling food from their doorsteps, seemingly everyone with a cell phone in their hands.

- At the south end, the island ends in an enclosure of Hindu cremations and 3 cemeteries, one Christian, one Indian Muslim and one African Muslim.

But that is just the physical city. I have vivid images in my mind.

Walking home from dinner one night, I see a young mother and her child sitting quietly in a darkened doorway to a half-building. As if a bomb had hit it, half of the front wall and most of the second storey are missing, but there’s enough of the roof left to provide some shelter and a lit candle inside suggests that this is home to the forlorn pair on the stoop. Next to it, a polished 2 storey “Central Café” is said to be the completed renovation project of a European couple hoping to capitalize on a growing tourist trade. It is a war zone of sorts.

Every morning and every evening, the main north-south street sees a steady stream brightly wrapped women and ragged children carrying huge water containers on their heads, making their ways home from some tap in Stone Town. I’m approached by children in the streets, generally to smile and wave at me, and occasionally to give me a hug. But sometimes, they point to my water bottle and then to their lips. The well water tastes salty.

In the heat of the day, everyone seems to wilt. Young men …everyone here seems young … sit in the shade of big trees, slumped in unison side by side. Looking in doorways of the half-structures, I often see women sitting on cloths on the floor, holding children or plaiting each other’s hair. There are a few places in town, where I have to step into the street because a family is taking a nap on the broken sidewalk, to catch the stirring of air off of the ocean.

As the afternoon fades into a golden sunset, the turquoise water beyond town, the white sand and the soaring palm trees conjure images of a south sea paradise. It is an odd, ruined, promising town desperately in need of a saviour.

For now, it is a town for adventurers. In the hotel pool one night, while white winged bats skim the water near our heads, I meet a 67 year old Parisian woman who has only 2 more African countries to check off on her list. Her last trip was to Iraq where she felt very safe. “A woman is of no consequence there”, she tells me. Then, as the light fades, I spend an hour talking to the new ED of a European charity who took up his post only 3 days earlier and has little optimism about his task to curb the spread of HIV, malaria and cholera among a population that has no written form of their language. The Walkers are a delightful, older couple from Arizona who are successful business people but seem to have spent much of their lives doing things like trying to back-pack into China over the Himalayas. He has written a book about their adventures. Right now they are doing consulting work on Agri-business (him) and HIV/AIDS (her). .

I hope I’ve created some image of this place. Keep these images in mind and when next I get a broader band-width, perhaps in Northern Tanzania, I will publish those 12 images.

Next stop, a few hundred km up the coast to the Pemba, the beach front capital of Cabo Delgado province.

Ihla de Mocambique 1

I’m not really sure where I am, but I know I have begun a journey to another time, another place.

As I write this, it is 7pm and I am sitting on a covered terrace of the Hotel Escondidinho on Ihla de Mocambique. Although we are over 3 km out into the Indian Ocean, the air is still heavy with humidity and only the faintest stirring in the air. A small trickle of sweat is running down my back between my shoulder blades.

This hotel must once have been a grand colonial villa. The garden and terrace merge almost seamlessly into the interior - red tile flooring, white adobe arches, white-washed, rough-hewn beams forming high ceilings. I’ve eaten my simple grilled prawn and coconut rice looking out into the darkened garden, only the shadow of palm trees against the star studded sky.

Having arrived after dark, my half-lit impression of my own room is of grandeur from another era – Colonial Portuguese architecture and furnishings, accented by imposing, dark African masks and implements. A vast, mosquito netted bed set between two huge windows, opened inwards to catch whatever breezes they can through heavy screens.

I started the trip at 4am this morning, in a chic business hotel built over the airport terminal. Through a succession of flights (Jo-burg to Maputo to Beira to Nampula) the airports got progressively smaller, hotter and easier to navigate. Security follows no such logic - Maputo, the capital, is casual. We wander through beeping metal detectors and pick up our carry on from inoperable x-ray machines. However, tiny Nampula requires detailed bag searches, pat downs, and for some poor souls, a quick trip into a side room. I felt I was wandering further and further off of the beaten track.

The two-hour drive from Nampula to the island took us through a landscape virtually untouched by the colonial powers. From the air, I had seen no roads; only a lacy network of footpaths, hut clearings and subsistence fields. Hulking elephantine shapes rose from the flat ground at intervals, barren, oddly-shaped, disconnected. On the ground, the primary architecture was mud brick and thatch.

As dusk fell during our drive, many of the women and children walking by the roadside were threaded their way home from streams and hand pumps balancing heavy plastic containers of water on their heads – children as young as 5 or 6 carrying their share.

We descended to the coast and the island became apparent in the half darkness, a very few lights tracing a low line across a choppy body of water. The road is suddenly a single lane, concrete bridge, 3.5 km in length and only a few feet above high tide. Turn-offs at intervals allow cars and 'bakkies' to pull over and let those coming in the other direction pass.

The city we entered, once an Arab shipping port, once a major slave trading centre, capital of the early Portuguese colony until the late 1800s, is enveloped in darkness. In the light of the headlights, I can only make out crumbling mud walls and a cobbled road along the seawall.

The driver deposited me in the pool of light outside the hotel, and here I sit, wondering what I will discover at sunrise.

Into the Green Hills of Swaziland and back to Jo'burg

A solid veil of rain moved across the estuary and into the city obscured the tall buildings in Maputo’s downtown. Sustained flashes of theatrical lightening and the low bass rumble of thunder sat heavily over our heads for what felt like hours. In the Baixa (lower) district by the water’s edge, the streets ran red with soil washed down from the hillsides.

The storm paused long enough for us to stroll the two blocks to our now favourite ex-pat Portuguese restaurant where we drank beer and Vino Verde and ate plates of fresh seafood and chips and were taught a few Portuguese words by the coltish Mozambique waitress.

The rain had started again when it was time to return to the hotel, so we dashed through the deluge, sharing tiny collapsible umbrellas, co-ordinating our vaults over water filled craters in the broken sidewalk and laughing like school children.

The next morning, the temperature had dropped to a lovely 24 degrees, but the clouds still scuttled overhead, black and brooding.

The city seemed deserted for a Wednesday morning. A few runners in numbered bibs ran a marathon race along the broken pavements of downtown, raising their own hands to stop vehicles when they had to cross against a light. It is not a published holiday, but Lula de Silva, the Brazilian President is visiting and special arrangements may have been made to honour him … or to reduce his inconvenience.

We drove south into the foothills of the Lebombo Mountains, and as we climbed, the temperature dropped. Yesterday, the people walking along the pathways had worn clothing suitable to protect them from the burning sun, today’s travellers walked in sweaters, coats and knit caps.

We crossed into Swaziland at a high pass, a town built around a massive Portuguese church; quick formalities in pristine modern counters.

At this point, we entered a different world – forested hillsides, narrow verdant valleys, rushing streams, and brilliant flowering Jacaranda and Flamboyants, at the peak of their purple and red colour.

The traditional earthen huts here still had the thatched roofs, but were often accompanied by rougher constructions – grabens made of sticks and filled with the red sandstone rock that littered the landscape.

Our hotel for the night was the Matenga Lodge – in a setting that felt like the rain forests of Monteverde. When the clouds cleared in the morning, we also saw that we were in the shadow of the gruesome Execution Peak, where Swazi kings would throw miscreants from the cliffs.

The handicrafts of Swaziland are well known for their quality and ‘fair trade’ local support, and Francisco did his best to help out the various co-operatives here.

From Swaziland, we returned to Johannesburg, crossing the broad open plains replete with grazing and croplands. When we crossed it on our way to Kruger a little over a week ago, it the landscape was desiccated and thirsty. With the first rains, the once bare earth is covered in a delicate carpet of tender new shoots, the streams are flowing again and the farm ponds now contain some water.

Our last day together in Johannesburg was a very sobering one. We visited the exceptional Apartheid Museum, which traces the history of the racist policy in South Africa through vivid photos, direct commentary and a great deal of symbolic design. News reels, documentaries, taped interviews with Nelson Mandela and other leaders of the opposition brought it all alive. First person accounts, ‘memory boxes’, and the reactions of other visitors made it all very personal. There were times that both Fran and I had to shield our eyes from the violence of the regime, and other times that we were brought to tears by the sacrifice and loss suffered by so many people. Desmond Tutu, mourning the 69 “official” deaths of the Sharpsville Massacre said ‘we understand there is a price to pay Lord, but why does it have to be so high?’

The Museum is a starting point in understanding how such a monstrous policy had evolved. But it is also a fitting place for hope that despite such outrages, inspired leadership can bring about change and lay a foundation for a more equitable society. South Africa has so far to go – the school groups lined up to get into the theme park next to the Apartheid Museum were still strictly segregated along race lines (more because of ‘economic’ apartness – where they can afford to live), but in the mere 16 years since Apartheid fell the country appears to have developed a functioning democracy, reasonable opportunities and a healthy social conscience.

This country has much to be proud of.