Between the internships

I finished at CARE Mozambique just before Christmas, and I’m starting with Oxfam in South Africa on the 11th of January. I’ve travelled a bit in between, but rather than listing exactly where I went and what I did I’ll just mention a few things of note.

The first event of note was being mugged at knifepoint in the mid sized South African city of Nelspruit (no, Microsoft Word, Nelspruit, not Newsprint). After walking around carefree around even dodgy-looking places in Mozambique, I guess I was a bit more confident about safety, and on my first day back in SA (Christmas Eve) I was walking down a busy street at 9am when three guys surrounded me, held the knife to my throat (didn’t hurt me luckily), emptied my pockets and told me menacingly never to come to that part of town again. White South Africans later confirmed to me that that area of the town is not for white people, ever. What a country.

I was treated with a bundle of Christmas kindness, though, when a man called Jono who worked in a phone shop I visited to buy a new phone helped me to sort out everything, drove me around to fix things up, then took me to the town I was planning to go to the next day, as he was heading that way to visit family for Christmas.

I ended up spending way too much money on activities, tours and criminals in South Africa and had to cut my spending, eating nothing but peanut butter and bread for breakfast and lunch for four days straight while in pretty, mountainous Swaziland.

Unable to justify the ridiculous price of a tour in Johannesburg, I went to the shopping mall to see the film Invictus about Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) and the 1995 Rugby World Cup, and how Mandela used it politically to work towards bringing South Africa together after apartheid. It was a great film, and afterwards, while I know very well that South Africa is a long way away from racial harmony, it was so magical to walk out into that mall and see white, black, coloured and Asian shoppers everywhere - a place where no racial group would feel out of place (although the divide between rich and poor in SA is another story).

I flew to Livingstone, Zambia to visit Victoria Falls - they are really spectacular as you would expect. I was hassled by a few Zimbabwean souvenir sellers who had climbed over the park fence and accosted me while I was alone - I was quite scared I would get mugged again the way they were talking to me, so I paid $10 for a copper bracelet I wasn’t interested in at all. The Zambian curio sellers outside the park gate try a different method - a friendlier but deeply manipulative strategy I’m surprised I haven’t seen elsewhere in the world. These guys flatter you with their knowledge of your country, rattling off Prime Ministers’ names way back to Malcolm Fraser; they try to establish a rapport with you before even talking about their stalls; they ask you to sit down, and when you refuse they insist, saying it’s part of their culture for guests to sit down (very clever ploy); and when the deal is done they hand the souvenir to another nearby seller to wrap it for you, and while he wraps it extremely slowly, he invites you to look at his own store.

I saw the obligatory wildlife in Botswana, being charged at by a couple of hippos which was nice (once we knew we were safe). I did the tour with two obnoxious Danish couples who kept asking questions like how much elephants’ tusks weighed, and denying they were an endangered species because they wanted to hunt them.

Trying not to spend much more, I am spending my final days in the backpackers in Zambia not doing activities but trying to do some reading and writing (a new short film concept…) before meeting Monash Uni people on Sunday for the next internship.