Vagabonding in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, without plan or destination.
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Table Mountain in Cape Town
Cape town is South Africa’s second-largest city after Johannesburg, and it’s safe to walk here. The main landmark is Table Mountain overlooking the city, so called because a large section is flat on top. A circular cable car with a rotating floor goes up to the top. There are many viewpoints connected with paved trails,…
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Scenery
It’s a long way from Oudtshoorn to Cape Town, 500km. It’s part of the Garden Route but it doesn’t look like a garden. Rolling hills, a big sky, mountains, few trees, one monkey. The southernmost point of Africa, called l’Agulhas, is nearby but the road there is bad and there is no bus. Too bad,…
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Kango Caves
There is a huge cave system near Knysna, 2.4km long, of which I visited the first 600m. The rest is accessible if you can fit through a hole that is 27cm wide; I couldn’t. The halls and passages are impressive. Huge cathedral-like caverns with curtains of stalactites and stalacmites; sometimes the two merge to form…
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Garden Route
The garden route is a section of South Africa’s southern Indian Ocean coastline hetween Port Elizabeth – renamed to Gqeberha last week – and Cape Town. It’s not really a garden but it’s a very scenic drive. Gqeberha is not especially attractive. It has long sandy beaches and a hill with a pyramid built by…
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Pretoria
Pretoria is the capital of South Africa. Downtown feels like a smaller version of Johannesburg including the To Let signs, aimless people at street corners, brutalist architecture, and dilapidated little parks with dead grass and buildings missing their roofs. But it also feels friendlier, especially after I found the pedestrianized Helen Joseph Street where street…
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Pilgrim’s Rest
That’s the Name of a village a couple hours northeast of Pretoria. It also feels like stereotypical small-town America, this time really time the white picket fence type. Take a look… They also have tourist trap down by the river. This is one of the first places where gold was found in South Africa, kicking…
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Kruger National Park
This is one of the great African protected parks, and safari destinations. It’s large, over 20,000 square kilometers and again that much in neighboring Mozambique. I joined a jeep tour and traveled over 250km in the park, getting within a few km of the border to Mozambique. Lots of elephants, giraffes, zebras, antelopes, and buffalos.…
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Blyde Canyon & Potholes
Blyde Canyin is the third-largest canyon in the world, cut by the Blyde River. There is a trail along the edge of the cliff with great viewpoints. It was a little hazy though. On the other side are the three Rondavels, cylindrical peaks that look like rondavels, the local word for round straw-thatched huts. A…
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Dangerous?
Ok, there’s no arguing with statistics, but everyone I have met in Johannesburg was then nicest and mist helpful person imaginable. Everyone – police, street cleaners, shop workers, skateboarders on the street – is smiling, greeting, eager to chat. I guess there must be rougher neighborhoods than the ones I have visited. I am now…
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Johannesburg Zoo
After all the time spent in the city it’s pleasant to spend time in the Johannesburg Zoo. Quiet, green, big old trees, nicely landscaped, with large tracts where amimals can roam freely. It’s a really nice place, although it would be much nicer if they had more animals. “This enclosure is currently unoccupied” signs are…
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Soweto
The name means South-West Township and that’s its location from central Johannesburg. During apartheid, black people and immigrants were forcibly relocated here. Today over a million people live here on 210km², it’s the largest township in Africa. Parts look nice and suburban, but really are overcrowded with several families sharing a home. Others are just…
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Johannesburg, South Africa
Johannesburg is South Africa’s largest and most developed city. It’s also the most dangerous. The neighborhoods are very diverse – leafy residential, industrial, and the large downtown area which feels like Broadway in Los Angeles, not like Africa. When getting off the bus it’s best to ask the nearest policeman or security guard where it’s…
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Pilsen in Czechia
Pilsen is a small city not far from Prague, the Czech capital. It’s all about beer. In Germany, any lighlt beer is called a Pils, or so I am told. But its old downtown is very pretty and unmarred by modern architecture. Didn’t do the beer tours, not that interested in alcoholic beverages…… Read the…
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Cours Julien
This is my favorite place in Marseille. A very large square with a fountain, no cars, lined with great cafés and restaurants. It’s always packed with outdoor seating, musicians, playing children, eclectic art stores, and people sitting together and enjoying the Mediterranean sun. Street art is everywhere, in the square and the adjoining streets, which…
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Cassis
Cassis is a fishing village on the Mediterranean Côte d’Azur in the south of France. It gets a lot of tourists but has mostly kept its charm from less crowded times. The old harbor is a string of French (what else) restaurants serving fresh fish. And there is a lot of natural beauty stretching to…
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Tartu, Estonia
Tartu is the second-largest city in Estonia, the northernmost Baltic country. It’s wonderfully relaxed, with quiet roads, few cars, and lots of green space, public and private. Everyone is friendly and speaks English, and the national currency is the euro. Estonia is a very old country, but had to deal with invaders and occupation forces…
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Jozani Forest
Jozani is Zanzibar’s largest forest. It’s a dense jungle without human management, except they run guided walking tours. The highlight are probably the red colobus monkeys that jump from treetop to treetop at high speeds, but they also have miniature frogs that fit on a thumbnail (at the tip of the leaf below), black monkeys,…
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Diving at Paje
Another opportunity to dive, this time at the opposite end of the island. More corals, more fish. I was with a group of newbies which gave me more opportunities to explore. Saw a giant lobster, a turtle, box fish, and all sorts of strange spiky sea stars and soft and hard coral. The Nemos are…
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A long road to Paje
Nungwi is at the north end of Zanzibar island, Paje is near the southeast end. To get there it’s necessary to connect in Zanzibar City, which involves a long motorcycle ride because each line has its own bus station. The “bus” to Paje was really a Thai-style songthaew, a truck with two facing benches along…
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Nungwi
Nungwi is a town capping the northern tip of Zanzibar island. All the beach hotels and bars cluster right at the ocean. Instead of a second and third row like in Kendwa, the rest of the town is where the locals live, with very little attention to the tourist industry. Almost all houses are single-story,…
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Beaches of Kendwa
Kendwa is all about beaches. What isn’t on the beach is boring, endless walls that enclose the resorts that are open only to the beach. There aren’t even souvenir shops more than 100m from the beach. If you don’t come to the ocean then the ocean will come to you, at high tide some shops…
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Scuba diving
There is an One Ocean dive center just around the corner from my hotel, and I went out with them for two dives. It’s off-season and I was the only customer, so I had the divemaster to myself. The water temperature is 30 degrees, visibility is very good, and at a depth of only 16…
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Zanzibar
I am back on the island, now in Kendwa near the northern tip. Kendwa is all about its beaches, beach pubs, fishing boats, and beach boys. “Beach boy” is the official term for a young man who wants to sell something, or who plays annoying music and wants money. No idea what other services they…
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Massai
Four-wheel drive trucks have their limits. Ours was a a wet grass field so soaked that it was more like a swamp. The rear wheels sank in and were just spinning in the mud. A group of Massai (aka Maasai, an ethnic group in northern Tanzania and southern Kenya) came to help, bringing rocks and…
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Baobabs
Tarangire is the last park on my circuit. It’s more about the landscape than the animals, although they do have the usual elephants and things. The largest trees are the baobabs, huge trees with an emormous barrel-like trunk. Six postings down you’ll find photos of the Madagascar type; here they are more the type that…
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Serengeti
Serengeti is a large national park, over 30,000 square kilometers. It’s all grassland with very few and occasional small rocky hills call kopjes, usually occupied by lions. It’s flat grassland all the way to the horizon in all directions. The hrass is green because the rainy season has started; a month earlier this was all…
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Safari
Ngorongoro is a national park in the center north of Tanzania. The main attraction is a huge intact volcano crater, 610m deep and 260 square kilometers inside. You can seen the crater rim from any point inside. It’s a bowl of wildlife. I was visiting with a small group of six, in a 4WD truck…
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Hakuna Matata!
Hakuna matata means “no problem” in Swahili. I took an early morning flight to Arusha on the Tanzanian mainland with Auric Air. The goldfinger in charge of the x-ray regretted that sunscreen can’t be in cabin baggage because it’s flammable (what?) but — sotto voce — for a small fee he could let me pass.…
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Spices on Spice Island
Got a driver and ventured out to a Spice Farm, a popular tourist destination, after helping the driver to push his car to a gas station when he ran out of fuel. The farm is really a large forest where they grow cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, pepper, cardamom, vanilla, jackfruit, coconuts, yellow and red banana (red…
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Zanzibar, the Spice Island
Zanzibar is part of Tanzania in east Africa. Stone Town is the historic part of the capital, and it feels like a large number of old buildings had been randomly scattered and densely packed near the ocean. There are almost no streets, the haphazard layout allows only very narrow and never straight alleys. It’s easy…