amsterdambabe

Yeah I’ve been busy, sorry Apart from being busy, at first I had no internet while travelling, which was because I didn’t have the proper tools, I was just using a mobile phone. Which was very slow and very expensive. Now, thanks to some tech-savvy guys I met in Durban, I have this:

It's a 3G card

and it allows me to do what I’m doing: It’s early morning and I’m sitting on a hill in Mozambique watching the sun rise. And it’s beautiful! But I’m getting ahead of myself, back to the story:

After leaving the Drakensberg behind, I got to Durban in the late evening, booked into my hotel and had a look around. Durban is very different from Jozi. There’s less of a buzz…or rather, there’s a different, more relaxed type of buzz. It’s a picture-postcard beach/holiday city:

Durban beach

And what I’d totally never expected, is that there are so many Indians. No silly, not with mohawks. Indians from India. It seems they were brought here by the British to work on the sugar cane plantations.

Influences of India

But as I’ve come to expect in the short while I’ve been in South Africa, there’s also the other side of it:

Informal settlement

“Informal settlement” is the South African politically correct euphemism for a slum. And there are informal settlements everywhere, sometimes literally side by side with really wealthy neighbourhoods. A world in one country, but also a country of extreme contrasts.

But so I bumped into these guys on the beach, who invited me to go to Mozambique with them. Which hadn’t been the plan, but it’s only a 4-hour drive and it sounded like fun. And it’s been awesome! Gotta go eat breakfast, I’m starving….more later.