Outjo and the long drive through the desert

No one is allowed to be out in the game reserve at night but the camp gates open at 6:50 am for optimal early morning wildlife viewing. Animals are early risers and in the high grass I swear I saw the long spotted tail of a cheetah. We immediately scrambled a top the roof of our car for a better look but the cat had already disappeared! For the most part however the park was serenely quiet with herds of grey gemsbok wading ghostlike through the morning mist. At checkout at the lodge I flipped through the guest book and was shocked at all the critical comments. After every three or four entries of your typical compliments and thanks would be an extremely spiteful entry attacking the food, the service, or the condition of the roads. One entry even made the horribly racist suggestion that the lodge implement some white management. Other guests in the book rushed to the staff’s defense, insisting in the margins with capital letters and triple underlines that the bigoted ‘Mr. Bauer’ go home and take his racist attitude with him. The very last entry read, “Super-Duper. Please if this place is so objectionable to you, don’t come back as you bring your own fragile, overreactive neurology with you.” Thank you to Mr. A. Fellows from Vancouver, Canada for so perfectly summarizing and assessing the most bizarrely intriguing and offensive guest book I’ve ever read.

From Etosha we stopped over for lunch at the town of Outjo. The environment in Outjo was surreal and even hostile. People hung outside the local supermarket looking wary and hungry. Boys fighting in the parking lot were broken up by a police man with a giant whip. At a listless crafts fair across the street a man came up and enquired our names which he then began to scratch into his forearm with a razors edge. He didn’t press deep but I hastily told him to stop. At the roadside I saw three Himba women sitting under a tree with their babies. If anyone has seen the movie ‘Babies’ the baby from Africa is born to a Himba woman. The wikipedia run-down on the Himba is that they are an ethnic group closely related to the Herero who live mainly in the northern Kunene region of Namibia.They are a nomadic, pastoral people who have miraculously maintained their traditional dress (or lack thereof). The Himba wear only a loin cloth, some jewelry and metal bangles around their ankles to protect them against snake bites in the bush. The woman are famous for rubbing their bodies in otjize, a mixture of butter fat and ochre. The mixture dyes their skin a permanent, luminescent orange symbolizing the earth and their own life-giving blood. They also braid their hair and cake it in the ochre dye, giving them thick, stiff, russet-colored dreads. The Himba women glowed a radiant orange in the sun as they aggressively sold their small crafts, tying bracelet after bracelet onto my unwilling wrists. I bought two carved out of cow horns and walked away with their orange powdered finger prints all over my hands and arms. The perfumed skin dye is used as a substitute for washing and the Himba women have a potent, acrid, almost smoky body odor. From the moment of meeting them onwards I have been revisited at random by the arresting memory of their smell.

As we walked through Outje school children came flooding into the streets as they were dismissed for the day. From one side of town came the black school children and from the other came a stream of white school children. The white children looked like they were straight out of the foothills of German folklore. With their tan trousers, suspenders, and leather book bags they looked like something off the set of a Sound of Music remake. There is also something incongruous to see a stream of blond heads and blue eyes set off from all the black faces in town. On the whole these kids were beaming with health and privilege as their parents idled by the roadside ready to pick them up in air conditioned SUVs. The pattern, I’ve found, is the same at every stop where the majority of the forlorn-looking small-town population is black.  Then there is a white German sub-population that is unmistakably wealthier and owns the German bakeries, restaurants, beer gardens, and B&B’s which are in turn filled almost entirely with white, European travelers. For anyone who is unfamiliar with the history, Namibia was Germany’s one big territorial claim in Africa. In 1883 a German trader named Adolf Luderitz bought land from a local chief on the southern coast of Namibia and founded the city of Luderitz. Eager to gain colonial possessions abroad, Germany annexed the territory and named it their own South-West Africa. Germans immigrated as soldiers, traders, diamond miners, and colonial officials and continued to live in the territory even as Germany lost their holding in the aftermath of WWI. The territory then came under the control of South Africa until its own independence in 1990. Today about 6.4% of the 1.4 million population of Namibia is white, mainly of German descent. The largest ethnic group are the Ovambo weighing in at about 50% of the population. The Herero make up 7.5%, a small statistic which conceals a massive tragedy. The Herero would have made up a far greater proportion of the population if 100,000 of their numbers had not been ruthlessly exterminated in the first genocide of the 20th century. In 1904 Samuel Maharero lead his people in a rebellion against German colonial rule. The Herero were defeated and driven into the desert where most of them died of thirst and starvation. The United Nations declared the event a genocide in 1985 and the German government issued an official apology in 2004.

Before leaving Outje we stopped off at a German Bakery, literally a high-walled sanctuary of coffee and free wifi. All the diners are white and the dusty streets are blocked from view by the leafy trees and gurgling fountain in the paradisal beer garden. Although my heart sings at the sight of a cappuccino and reliable internet connection, my stomach also tightens with a confused mix of guilt and shame at my inclusion in this unintentionally exclusive environment. Our implicit inclusion is reinforced by our appearance and German surname, both of which elicit greetings in German which we are linguistically ill-equipped to reciprocate. Although I am grateful for the warmth and generosity expressed by white Namibians, I am equally bothered by the mysterious wall I feel between myself and the black Namibia population. I feel as though some mysterious matrix of automatic assumptions and latent resentments subtly denies the possibility of a perfectly natural and comfortable personal interaction. Curiously, this barrier is noticeably less pronounced in Botswana even as the socioeconomic, racial, and cultural gap remains just as wide. My head swarms with possible explanations but I ultimately feel ill-equipped to answer for this peculiar but palpably felt difference. My intuition however points overwhelmingly to their divergent colonial histories. The presence of a colonial history in Namibia and its conspicuous absence in Botswana accounts in turn for the presence or absence of the curiously felt racial barrier between myself as a white American and a black Mostwana or Namibian.

From Outjo we kept pushing south through the small dusty town of Khorixas before turning onto unpaved C35, our highway to the coast through miles and miles of bleak desert. The land was flat and uninhabited in all directions, a vast, remote, and indifferent expanse. Empty place that fills you with melancholy. Only slight color variations in the sand seemed to mark the passing miles. Faced with so much time and space my thoughts became slow and heavy brooding upon themes of isolation and neglect.  Every few miles we saw corrugated tin houses set back from the road, simmering unsheltered in the merciless glare of the midday sun. Wooden shacks selling small crafts by the roadside sat uninhabited as sad totems to a meager economy and pervasive deprivation. The few people we did pass motioned imploringly for our business, our food, or our water. They looked abandoned in and by the world. My dads mood wasn’t as affected but he noticed mine and suggested I try driving to shake my despondency.  Learning to drive stick for the first time shifted my mood from first gear listlessness to sixth gear terror. There was a lot of sudden stops and starts but not a single living creature around to judge. Scrub and sand finally gave way to the mountains of the Damaraland. The reassuring bulk of the mountains on the horizon line helped anchor my lost sense of space and time. We overshot our turn off and drove up to a B&B on the edge of Uis. It was surreal and almost unsettling to drive into a courtyard of potted plants and find a friendly receptionist in the middle of the desert. Three absurdly friendly Dachshunds scrambled into my lap as I sat there dumb and still disoriented from the desert. I was unexplainably relieved when my dad voted to drive on to another spot for the night. We turned back into the desert and drove straight into the granite embrace of the Brandberg mountains. We drove down a narrow dirt path surrounded on all sides by rolling plains burning gold in the light of the setting sun. Herds of Springbok leapt gracefully across the plains and we found a small band of horses grazing by the roadside. We stopped to take pictures, especially of the chestnut foal who hung shy and fragile in his mothers shadow. We stood there in splendid isolation reveling in the light of the burning sunset as uncounted moments of purest appreciation passed by. I’m hesitant to identify just one moment to call the best from the trip, but if I were to choose, this was the best. Sunlight filtered through the glass-bottled beers in the car as we drove through the slow-motion scattering of a herd of cattle in the road. Once the sun fell behind the mountains their towering peaks doused the burning plains in giant cool shadows. Our accommodation for the night was the White Lady Lodge, named for local ancient cave paintings of a mysterious pale female figure. We drove up as the sky turned a luminous royal blue. Being the off season we ate dinner on a pleasantly deserted porch front in the company of the stars and the crickets.

On Safari in Etosha Pan!

The next morning we were up with the sun and on the road to Etosha Pan! On the way we passed Otjikoto Lake, the deeper of only two natural lakes in Namibia. The word Otjikoto is Herero for “Deep Hole” and the lake is apparently home to the psychedelically colored cichlid fish who, in the absence of natural predators, can afford to be so evolutionarily reckless. The lake did come under siege in 1915 however when retreating German troops dumped canons, rifles, and ammunitions into the lake to thwart the encroaching South African army. Towns become scarce this far up north and the entrance to the game reserve stood as a lone archway rising out of the surrounding plains. At the entrance we gave an older gentleman a lift to where he worked at the kitchens in the first lodge. He sat in the back, silent and bemused at our astonishment as we came across a herd of Zebra right by the side of the road! Further down we faced-off with a giraffe standing smack in the middle of the road. Eventually the giraffe let us pass and loped off slow-motion like to the bush. The slow, surreal rocking motion of a giraffe galloping by gave me a feeling similar to that feeling of backwards sliding you get when a train passes your stationary car. There are three lodges within the park to use as rest stops, Namutoni to the west, Halali in the center and Okaukuejo to the east. Namutoni is a white-washed German fort looming up out of the flat plains. In 1904 seven German soldiers unsuccessfully attempted to defend the fort against 500 Owambo warriors. I have little sympathy for the German colonial occupation but I imagined myself for a moment as one of seven men facing a 500 strong onslaught of rightfully enraged warriors. Looking out from the fortress walls across the plains made menacing by my imagination I could feel their dread and cut the daydream short with a shiver. Today the fort is surrounded instead by battalions of semi-tame mongooses that scamper boldly underfoot.  We entered at the westernmost point of the park and drove along the southern rim of the salt pans to the eastern gate. Driving through the reserve we passed herds of zebra, blue wildebeest, gemsbok, giraffe, red hartebeest, and springbuck plus some other herbivores beyond my powers of identification. It’s calving season in Etosha so we also got to see the tiny versions of almost all of the above! It is difficult for me to express how heart-wrenchingly adorable it is to see a fuzzy baby zebra trailing its mother. The really young ones have a fuzzy reddish outer-coat with manes that stick up straight like punky little mohawks. The baby springbuck are the most delicately beautiful creatures I have ever seen with huge innocent eyes and legs like spindles. The blue wildebeest looked like grey old men with knobby knees and wispy beards. Etosha Pan is a vast, flat saline desert that during the wet season this time of year is converted into a shallow lagoon inhabited by flocks of pelicans and flamingos that stand like thin-legged sentinels in the wavering heat of the horizon line. The San people have a legend that the pan is a ‘lake of a mother’s tears’ created by the pooling grief of a mother lamenting the death of her child.

We drove for hours along the single passably maintained dirt road with our windows down and safari-appropriate instrumentals blasting from our sound system. We hardly passed any other cars until peeling off onto a narrower side road almost completely consumed by a pool of rainwater. A mini two-door sedan approached the water and we watched with comic certainty as it practically ‘floated’ to a stop halfway through. A tall thin man almost as large as the car itself stepped out and came over asking sheepishly for help. He had a thick Austrian accent and a very technical approach to problem solving. Both he and my dad stood shoeless in a foot and half of mud pushing the car while I stood by laughing and documenting the struggle with my camera. Ultimately the puddle won out in the man vs mud showdown and our Austrian friend had to call the base camp for assistance but not before genuinely thanking us for our help!

The interior of the park was curiously devoid of animals, making the herds of zebra and giraffe at the entrance feel like a set up. We got so comfortable cruising through a barren landscape that we almost hit a giant turkey-sized bird sitting in the middle of the road. The car lurched and I looked up just in time to see its giant clawed feet clearing the top of the front windshield. Driving all day through miles of unpeopled Savannah can make you giddy for human contact. At a lookout we drove up next to a friendly but gruff German couple. Small talk in Etosha consists of what kinds of animals you’ve seen and while the Germans had seen elephants and lions all we had to offer was a jackal ten kilometers back. After a few moments of measured silence the German said, “Oh ok. We’ve seen hundreds of those.” That night we stayed in the westernmost corner of the park at Okaukuejo rest camp in a little chalet with beds surrounded by functionally elegant mosquito nets. Luxury in the bush.

On the road in Namibia!

Dad set an alarm for 6 am, which was fine except for the fact that he was trying out all the different alarms on his phone and had set our wake up call to “barking.” Breakfast down in the dining room was set out neat and tidy for the guests with a puzzling selection of fifteen plus jams and a covered basket of breads. At checkout two giant dogs came galloping out of no where looking like Namibian versions of a Doberman and a German Shepherd. Both were misleadingly menacing-looking and came up with their tongues lolling and eyes imploring for affection. Sandwiched between a shaggy golden shepherd and olive-eyed doberman I was in heaven. An older asian women came up, clearly as enthralled by these two beautiful animals as I was. It turns out that she and her husband are volunteering at the Harnas Wildlife Foundation for the next two weeks where they will be rehabilitating big cats. I made a mental note to   make this the destination of choice should I ever come upon hard times and need to retreat to some far-off volunteer location for some serious self-reflection or self-loathing. B1 is one of the only major highway lines leaving the capitol and we drove due north towards our final destination for the night, Otjiwarongo. About 70 km from Windhoek we stopped off at the small town of Okahandja. Okahandja is the administrative center for the Herero people, a major ethnic group here in Namibia. With not too much to see in this small town we stopped for a quick, very sweet cappuccino at the Backerei Dekker and Cafe, a German establishment filled with local customers warmly accustomed to one anthers presence. Back on the highway we passed maybe a half dozen “Kudu Crossing” signs (this is as we listened to 103.2 Kudu FM, a “western music mix” erring on the side of melodramatic hits from the 90s that take me straight back to middle school) Kudu’s look like large, grey antelope with large twisted black horns. Fun fact, each twist indicated about two years of life. Finally we drove into Otijiwarongo, a town first established as a German military garrison in 1904. We pulled into town just as school was letting out so the streets were filled with children dressed in their stockinged school uniforms. We considered spending the night at a complex of french cottages already home to a number of tropical birds. While dad talked to the receptionist I talked to an African grey parrot who came boldly outside his cage and side-stepped along an outstretched tree branch to commune with me more directly. Ultimately we decided to keep driving on the the next town but sat down for lunch at the recommended Kameldorn Garten. This quaint little cafe set far back from the commotion of the street reminded my dad of a miniature German beer garden. We sat under a trellis of climbing vines and took our time slowly enjoying fresh salads and a chocolate milkshake in the middle of a plant and sculpture garden. The next village was Otavi. We drove through the community behind the main town which consisted of rows and rows of tin roofed huts teeming with children, dogs and chickens. The children were quizzical and the parents bemused by our presence in their neighborhood. Veritable gardens of potted plants arranged on the front patios added a creative touch to this poor but vibrant community. Several kilometers more and we reached Tsumeb, our last town for the night. We stayed at the Minen hotel, an intensely German-feeling hotel on the edge of a large green park. Before dinner we went out for a run around the neighborhood as sunset streaked the sky pink and orange. At dinner my dad and I were struck by a particular mood, and to the rest of the guests must have come across as a pair of giddy, ridiculous Americans which despite all outward appearances hadn’t had a drop of beer or jagermeister. We ordered the local mushrooms upon the advice of our soft-spoken waiter who motioned to the nearby park where they grow after the rains. Back in the room I watched as much of the Oscars as my heavy eyelids would allow for an incongruous dose of America’s most glamorous cultural icons on our last night before entering the Namibian bush.

First Day in Namibia!

 

With the thick hotel curtains pulled closed against the morning I could have slept for hours in the feigned darkness until my dad swept them aside at 8 am to start the day. Our flight to Windhoek left at noon so we used the morning to revisit Nelson Mandela Square and scope out some morning croissants and a bookstore. The breakfast place we’d seen yesterday was closed, a soul-crushing discovery for two hungry, caffeine-deprived Americans. I had mildly greater success at the bookstore but struck out on my first three requested authors: Jonathan Saffron Foer, Dave Eggers, and David Foster Wallace. Never heard of them, out of stock, and the Pale King due in next week. Be warned that literary selections in South Africa can be limited, unless you’re looking for the most obvious of classics selections or a bulging muscles and torn tunics style romance novel. I did however buy a copy of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, an assigned reading that I’d always regretted blowing off in high school. The novel is paired with Conrad’s short story The Secret Sharer, a line of which I remember absolutely falling in love with when I first read the story a couple years ago. “The tide of darkness flowed on swiftly; and with tropical suddenness a swarm of stars came out above the shadowy earth, while I lingered yet, my hand resting lightly on my ship’s rail as if on the shoulder of a trusted friend.” Beautiful. With my slim copy of the classic in hand we walked past the coffee shop from earlier which was just opening its doors to Sunday business. We bought hot croissants directly from the oven but had no time to eat them before running to catch the “No Food or Drink” train to the airport. From there we carried all of our luggage plus our absurd box of croissants to the airport through successive phases of security checks and multiple metal detectors before enjoying the crushed and defeated box of now-cold croissants in the international flights terminal. The flight to Windhoek was relatively painless except I felt crowded out of my seat by a particularly fidgety albino. Albino’s are curiously common in Southern Africa. Ghostly pale and in my experience all curiously shy; a spectral and demure presence sitting next to you on the bus or passing you on the street.

When we arrived in Namibia a handsome man with severe burns up his forearms rented us our car and we drove directly along the solitary highway to our hotel in Windhoek. The landscape in Namibia is much like the landscape of Botswana but infused with greater color. The scrub and desert in Botswana appears flat and parched compared to the more vibrantly green plains and mountains of Namibia. Windhoek is a slightly enchanting city whose beautifully evocative name captures its quality of elevation and openness. The city is all palm trees, giant white clouds in a giant blue sky, and buildings painted in light creams, tans, and yellows. We spent the night at the Uhland hotel, a clean and quaint B&B. Our hotel was overwhelmingly charming, out-charmed only by the German-Namibian woman at the front desk. When she heard that we were road-tripping through the country she got extremely excited and generously gave us a pile of maps and books. With a thick red pen she marked the ideal driving route heading north then cutting west to the Atlantic and returning due south along the coast. Along the way she marked all the worthwhile sites, best B&B’s, and quaint towns not to be missed. My dad and I were overwhelmed by her helpfulness and our plan for the week spontaneously came together after only twenty minutes worth of animated conversation. We had arrived in Windhoek with only a car and a wide-open week and now we had a plan. The woman’s final suggestion was to eat dinner that night at Joe’s Beer House, an infamous local fixture. To get there she told us to take Robert Mugabe street then turn onto Nelson Mandela Lane, directions that I relayed to my dad as stay straight on dirty old dictator and make a left onto beloved world leader. Or at least that’s how I would have directed someone. You can literally read Namibia’s international relations on the street signs. Historically cosy relations with Zimbabwe and Cuba are spelled out in Robert Mugabe Street and Fidel Castro Boulevard. Cuba backed Namibia’s liberation struggle against South Africa and to this day remains a close international ally. The ruling parties of Namibia and Zimbabwe have also been close since independence as both undertook anti-colonial movements against white-minority governments.  

Joe’s Beer house was a highly memorable experience. I don’t even know how to begin describing the place–it is one massive, eclectic cluttering of stuff!! Chunky, communal wooden tables glow in warm yellow lantern-light. German-Namibians fill the tables and line the bar cradling giant, foaming mugs of amber beer. Stuffed animal heads stare down upon guests eating thick steaks of exotic game meats: Zebra, Ostrich, Kudu, Springbok, Oryx, and Crocodile. Vegetarian options are understandably more limited but I did enjoy a bowl of groundnut soup that had a deliciously chalky and potent flavor that I had never quite tasted before. It was also the ideal environment to try my first Jagermeister, which tasted to me like liquified licorice. My dad and I left well-fed, fully satisfied, and vowing to return. 

Full Day in Joburg

For all its charms our hotel room had two transparent flaws. The first being see-through bathroom walls. The insufficiently opaque glass looked directly into the shower, a highly inappropriate design except maybe for honeymoon suites. The second is the unofficial wake-up call supplied daily by the construction site outside our window. Nothing says “Wake-up and welcome to Joburg!” like fifty jackhammers at eight in the morning.

One person did however single-handedly redeem Johannesburg’s standards of hospitality. A year ago on my way to Mauritius I’d met a friendly South African in the seat next to me on the connecting flight through Johannesburg. He is a native of Joburg and gave me his email along with the promise that he’d show me around if I ever came to his city. I had emailed him the night before and woke up to the sweetest most helpful email.  He was out of town for the weekend but wrote up a detailed list of things to do and signed off with the insistence that we not miss his favorite comedian performing that night. Our day in the city began with breakfast at Mug and Bean, a coffee house chain they also have in Botswana, beloved for its bottomless cup of real brewed coffee. Next, we wrangled with the public transportation system to visit Rosebank a district of  touristy shops and markets. From here we cabbed it over to a smaller, less touristy town called Greenside. The town felt drably industrial with unexpected touches of art and color among the concrete. People sold beaded wire animal figurines on the streets and we even found a colorfully quirky-looking coffee house. An intriguing pear and walnut smoothie was the perfect later afternoon pick-me-up. I got a quick hair cut that came with a complimentary cappuccino before heading back to our hotel in Santon. When we climbed up out of the underground train system the weather had made a dramatic turn for the worse. Torrential rain had everyone corralled under awnings and marveling at the sheer ferocity with which water was thundering down from the sky. There was this one concentrated jet of water running in a current off the roof that you could have literally showered under.

The comedian we bought tickets for is a local South African named Kagiso Lediga and he was performing at a casino called Gold Reef City. The place was gaudily attractive, full of lights and the cheerful, staccato noises of money lost and gained. We ate dinner inside at a seafood restaurant where I somewhat guiltily enjoyed my sushi next to a giant salt-water aquarium full of fish. The sushi was delicious despite their lidless and unblinking judgement.

Kagiso Lediga was hilarious. Our cab driver had burst out laughing at the mention of his name, “Yah that man! He is very funny! Very funny man!” The whole crowd was physically incapacitated with laughter. Even the distinctly South African jokes that went over our heads had the rest of our bodies shaking with laughter. You have to picture Lediga with his absurdly long legs and eccentric spiky hair. For all his gangly goofiness he somehow coordinates his huge frame in a fluid series of antics and impersonations. The hardest I laughed was when he was knocking on Lesotho (that small land-locked technicality of a country inside of South Africa). Saying you’re from Lesotho when you’re in South Africa is like saying you work at a McDonalds inside a KFC. In Lesotho the traditional dress is a blanket. How lazy do you have to be to wake up in your bed and already be dressed? Also, if South Africa ever decides to take over Lesotho all they have to say is “You’re surrounded.”

Last day of school and arriving in Joburg!

Collage work loads come in cycles of boom and bust. The boom always falls on the eve of a vacation and my last day before break went something like this. I was up early for a forced few hours studying before my 7 am Setswana test. However no amount of caffeine or concentration could goad my sluggish early morning brain to recall the polite expressions, simple sentence structures, and miscellaneous vocabulary we’d learned over the past few weeks. The worst was that I forgot ‘lesome’ or the word for 10. This crippled my number system from 10 to 90 since 20 is expressed two tens, 30 is three tens, etc. I would probably get a 10% on this test and not even be able to say it. Struck down by Setswana I went directly to my 8 am class where I gave a group presentation before the class. It went well up until I was grilled by a seven minute silence at the end of the class during the ‘question and answer’ section. Directly after class I sat down to start and finish a ten page, 1.5 spaced paper. I was working under a 10 pm deadline when the library printing station closed and spent a solid day feverishly researching and writing about Namibia’s monetary policy. I have a perverse and masochistic talent for working under pressure so the paper was possible but painful to write. A pathological procrastinator never learns. When your whole self is switched ‘ON’ with all systems running you tend to just keep going. This is how I stayed up through the night talking with friends, packing my bags and catching a 4 am cab. (For most of you who are unaware of my short vacation plans, this mysterious early morning cab right is not the beginning of some sinister and morally-corrupting experience but merely my ride to the bus rink to leave for South Africa. I was meeting my dad in Johannesburg and from there we flew to Windhoek for a weeklong road-trip through Namibia. It was the ultimate father-daughter vacation and this is the first of multiple installments documenting our experience!) I watched sunrise through half-closed eyes as the bus pulled out of Gabs and headed for the border. I instantly fell asleep only to be awoken 20 minutes later for the obligatory passport check at the border. We had to physically walk across the border and re-board the bus in South Africa after waiting in lines and filling out some paperwork. In my sleepless stupor it was nearly impossible for me to comprehend this process and my every cell craved an uninterrupted few hours sleep. Total exhaustion makes for the best sleep and I was dead to the world until we pulled into Joburg seven hours later. Everyone I had talked to warned me that Joburg is notorious for petty crime. The bus rink especially is a ‘sketchy area’ they’d say with a sharp inhale of breath and sympathetic shake of the head. Despite the hype I was adopted by a kindly older woman on the bus who probably recognized my ‘sitting duck‘ status and helped me find a cab to the hotel. I was defensive and braced to meet some rough characters in this big unfriendly city but was time and again proven otherwise. My cab driver put me at ease and acted as my unofficial tour guide as Boyz to Men crooned on the radio and the sights whipped by. I arrived at the Radisson Hotel a few hours before my dad and collapsed with overwhelming gratitude upon a giant, clean white bed. In fact, I have to take a moment to describe how giddy with relief I was to enter a clean, air conditioned room. Luxury is something that can only be truly appreciated after its long absence. I have never been so charmed and amazed by cleanly starched sheets, the crisp hum of air conditioning, and the inviting softness of a puffy white pillow (topped with a shiny wrapped chocolate no less). I slept until the strident ring of the telephone went zinging through my dreamless mind. “My Liana!” The voice exclaimed on the other end. My dad had arrived! We went out for dinner that night in Nelson Mandela Square, a glitzy modern megamall with a central, open air square ringed by restaurants. I ate sushi for the first time since leaving the states and made a mental note to order as much fish as was possible before returning to my landlocked African homeland. Back in the room I curled up with my laptop and watched the documentary “Staying Alive in Joburg” to see a different face of the city, one far removed from the hotels and the megamalls and one that I was anxious but unlikely to see.