Don't Bump If You Can't Grind

Where do we start?!?!?!?! Spring break 2010… one month late (South African style, of course). While we could write for years on all of the interesting/fun/adventurous/random things that we did/saw/learned/experienced, we won't bore you with the details. Or maybe we will… we will have to see how this blog goes…
On our break we went to Swaziland, Durban and the Drakensberg Mountains via the Baz Bus: a mode of transportation geared to young, broke backpackers that takes you all around the country and drops you off RIGHT in front of your hostel (no messing with trains to a bus to a cab to find your hostel with this South African treasure!). A pretty sweet deal if you ask us! We picked up the first leg of our Baz Bus tour in Joburg after an early morning (6:00 am!!) trek from Botshabelo. It took us about...umm...all day (9 hours) to drive from Joburg to Swaziland...but the drive was unbelievably beautiful! We passed through every type of landscape you could possibly imagine: from flat, browning plains, rolling green hill, rocky mountains, to pine forests...we saw it all.

Chapter 1: Swaziland. Or should we say, the Kingdom of Swaziland. Oh yes, that’s right. As in, there is a king. And here is our picture with him:



Swaziland looks like a lush, tropical paradise. And it is amazingly clean, no litter anywhere, and all of the public bathrooms were spotless (and if you know us, you know we know bathrooms). And the people? Wow...super nice, friendly, and helpful. We did a safari on horseback, single-handedly supported their economy for the next 5 months (gotta love those African crafts markets-especially the jewelry made out of elephant hair!), walked A LOT, and took a walking tour of the city hitting up some museums, the previous King's palace, and a village. On the tour, we went to this man's house in the village who quit his job to dedicate his life to uplifting and empowering youth and women through the arts and music. In the Swazi culture (much like the way things are going in the States), the arts are not recognized as important, and therefore, kids are not encouraged to develop those "right-brain" skills. By turning his home into an art gallery and teaching art & music lessons, this man is trying to inspire the kids to think outside of the box, open and expand their views, and to resist becoming another AIDS statistic...because he views the biggest problem in the country to be "intellectual poverty, far worse than economic poverty"-Lucky, Stick 'N Mud Art Gallery. His words and work really moved me and filled me with a sense of hope. He said, "We are all the Mandelas and Obamas, we just have to find a way to let it out"...and that he is! In fact, one of the kids that he's been working with recently one a country-wide art contest which includes a full-ride to the Arts institute of Swaziland. Really, really cool!

Me, Lucky of Stick 'N Mud Art Gallery & my cool new painting


Ilene, the horse whisperer


Ayla on Serengeti & Ilene on Lizzy. We got like THIS close to zebras and water buffalo!


Welcome back to South Africa! At the boarder between Swaziland & SA


Chapter 2: Durban. On the way to Durban, we heard the most disturbing radio commercial ever. The jingle went: "Soloooomon, the self-sacrificing salmon!” It was for canned tuna/salmon. Pretty much the most ridiculously hysterical thing we'd heard in an long time and unfortunately for us, the jingle was damn catchy, and a week later we are still singing it. Onto the important things: Durban, as a city, is pretty much in shambles as the government is trying to fix every road for the world cup. Hi, do you know it is 54 days away?!?! We had to take detours every five minutes on our driving tour of the city. And after coming from clean, clean, pristine Swaziland, Durban was a landfill. There were mountains of trash building along the curbs in the streets...and vacant, run-down buildings along the beach. As they say in South Africa, "shame, man, shame." Also of interest, the government has changed all of the name of the roads, away from their English names and back to traditional African names, which are kind of long and hard to pronounce, and our taxi driver was less than excited about this decision. However, we thought it was cool, and saw it as a necessary step in shifting power back to Africans.

In Durban we went to the art museum and natural science museum. And we learned that honey bees navigate using the sun, and only female mosquitoes bite you. We wandered across a strike by municipality workers demanding better wages (go Community Organizing!!!). We met a lot of really nice people in Durban, including: the “Opposition Politician” who explained the strike to us, the Greek man with a deli that gave us free dessert and continuously called his niece ugly to her face, and the nice Indian man who worked in the sporting goods store that filled our water bottles. Yay for friendly people! We spent some time on the beach, and then ate at a cool restaurant where they paint your face in traditional Zulu style.

Community Organizing: South African style


The beach by uShaka Marine World


Zulu face-painting


The next day we took a 7 hour tour that covered almost everything there is to do in the city. We saw the coast, the harbor, a market (complete with crafts next to the meat market with sheep’s head and innards) saw the Cato Township, the Indian Township of Chatsworth, the Hare Krishna Temple of Understanding, the Indian market where we had lunch at our guide’s wife’s restaurant...spicy and delicious!!, drove by the largest mosque in the southern hemisphere, went to the Botanical Gardens, and lastly to a museum about the history of the Cato township.

Part of Durban's Golden Mile of beaches (view from View Point)


Sand Artists on Battery Beach...check out the Big 5


A close-up of Cato Township, one of the largest African Townships in the country


Who stole the cookies from the cookie jar? Krishna stole the cookies from the cookie jar! Artwork of Krishna in the Hare Krishna Temple of Understanding


Curry....yummy! Pretty much we could only eat a few bites before our tongues caught on fire.


Lunch with our Tour Guide


The bark of an eucalyptus tree at the Botanical Gardens. Who ever saw such a colorful trunk?!?!


Flowers in the Botanical Gardens: quite representative of the bright and beautiful people of South Africa


Chapter 3: Drakensberg Mountains. They say that the mountains look like the landscape in Lord of the Rings. We would probably agree if it hadn’t of been the beginning of winter and the greenery was now brownish. But hey, we can use our imaginations. The first Boer explorers who saw the Drakensberg Mountains said they looked like Dragons (hence the name, Drakensberg in Afrikaans). Here, we saw 800 year old bushman cave paintings. Awesome. Except for the noneco-friendly tourists in the past that poured water and coke on the paintings to make them look better in pictures, and thus washed the paintings away. UHHH! Anyway, the history of the paintings dates back 5,000 years.

Bushman Sand Cave Painting of animals


The next day, Ilene took a much-needed personal day complete with a small hike, meditation and yoga out in the middle of nature, reading in a hammock with the mountains in the distance, and time spent in the sun by the hostel's pool...and Ayla almost fell off a mountain. Multiple times. She went on a tour to the top of a mountain that has the world’s second longest waterfall. But fortunately, I'm happy to report, she survived and is sitting next to me as I type this blog.

The mountain Ayla climbed, called the Amphitheater...Ilene just took a picture with it


Views of nature during my Yoga-at-the-Drakensberg Practice


Chapter 4: two nice Jewish boys in Joburg. We had to stay one night in Joburg because we got in too late for the orphanage to pick us up, and lucky for us, our friends at Botshabelo have the hookup with two nice Jewish boys who live there. They took us out to dinner and drinks, and then we got to stay at one of their houses. Stand-up shower and free internet. Need I say more?

Devin & Tony: wherever you go, there's always someone Jewish

We finally arrived back at Botshabelo on Monday, and while it was nice to travel and experience something new, we are glad to be back to our "home away from home." The End.

PS: If you are wondering about the title of this blog... the only mode of public transportation in South Africa is "taxis," which are little mini vans that cram the people in and follow a route. In Durban we discovered that they had pimped out their taxis, and given them wild names such as "Dont Bump If You Can't Grind," "X-Convict," "Seducer," "Sexy Attitude," "Souljah," "G-Thang," etc. And some of the taxis are like traveling dance clubs: you can hear their music blaring a mile away...or should we say kilometer away.