Traveling Geeks

Ballooning Over Oldest Mountains in the World

Nic Haralambous coverage of our blogging balloon trip over the oldest mountains in the world, located in South Africa’s Magaliesburg. Video uploaded to one of his many gigs, Zoopy, South Africa’s YouTube.

Below is a shot of owner Bill Harrop and his wife who founded the operation in 1981. Today, their ballooning grounds sits on beautiful South African countryside. Departure time? 5:30 am baby. It’s an early one, but they deliver with a welcoming champagne full buffet breakfast after you land. It’s not too difficult to see from the photos below how authentic and character-rich Harrop is – a joy to listen to and watch.

A fun hammy shots in the air and on the ground…..

Group shot in front of the deflated balloon which took eight strong men to manage and tie up. (all with a smile on their face)

And front a distance…….ah yes, amazing views. The color of the sky was breathtaking….

Zapiro characters come to life on Zoopy

I have long been a massive fan of Zapiro’s work. He is subtle and harsh at the same time, can be filled with innuendo or blatant points poking fun at everyone and anyone who he believes deserves a bit of poking. The man is a genius and is recognised widely as such and hated by […]

Old Jerusalem on Shabbat

I spent the day meandering through old town Jerusalem today. Below are some of the many shots I took between Ben Yahuda Street and inside the wall.

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What a Horrible Day of Travel!

JD came from New York and beat me by THREE HOURS. beer now. coherent blog after. politika . domain owner parental blocker . dns information where is domain hosted domain dns server . ip tech info i cloud web archive . website down . apache web server word cloud .

The Soweto of 2008

I walked through Soweto at night earlier this week, the township most whites feared and dared go near when I lived here in 1984 and again almost ten years later – before the first free elections.

We stayed in Kliptown, again off limits a dozen or so years ago. Once only full of delapitated buildings and shacks, some R375-million has been put aside for Kliptown’s revival, R293-million from Blue IQ (a very interesting woman is their CEO who I’m trying to get a meeting with) and R30-million from the City of Johannesburg. Project areas include the upgrade of the Kliptown railway station, a market, the relocation of people in informal settlements, new houses, and a new 250-bay taxi rank, which is already complete.

In the early mid-eighties, I managed to go to Soweto, a very difference experience than what we witnessed this week. In the early nineties, my ex-husband and I stayed with his brother in a wealthy white Johannesburg suburb.

Like all white families in Joburg at the time, they were surrounded by locked gates, bobbed wired fences and walls. The whole city seemed to be surrounded by walls, except for of course the neighboring townships which were largely tin-roofed shacks with poor sanitary conditions and no electricity.

We were staying with them because we were young, had little money, and couldn’t afford to rent or buy on our own. My brother-in-law’s wife ran a successful catering business and he had a corporate job, and while both were successful, they were feeling the effects from sanctions as we were we since we had to contribute to the expense pool. Expenses were high across the board, landline phone charges through the roof and it was tough to get a lot of well known western brands. We shared baths and limited our laundry visits.

Everyone talked about the impact of sanctions at the time and also added, “the outside world doesn’t realize that sanctions really hurt the blacks more than it does the whites.” They’d complain, some touting that others don’t understand “our situation at home.” We hung out with English South Africans, Afrikaners and everyone in between.

There were those who really wanted change, some because they were embarrassed by their government, some for ethical and humanitarian reasons, and some because it was trendy to “integrate,” which was starting to happen in 1992 and 1993.

Even though there were some South African whites who were ready for change and pushing for integration, many didn’t know where to start since “equal exchange” with black South Africans was so foreign for them. Where does one begin? How does it work? What will happen to us along the way? There was still a lot of fear despite positive reinforcement from people who wouldn’t have budged on their political views five years earlier. Yet, I also felt a lot of hope.

We’d sit in big and small gardens in a variety of white suburbs and drink champagne, eat strawberries with cream and gorge on cheese from around the world. We’d have braais, play games and jump in large swimming pools which were surrounded by neatly groomed gardens, all tended to by their black gardeners.

While we sipped our champagne, our wine and downed our Castle beers, we’d often see smoke clouds coming from Soweto — likely Kliptown, only a kilometer away. You would hear gunshots at times and yet, people ignored what was happening around them, at least in public. It’s not as if they didn’t care, but some were afraid, so simply didn’t want to focus on a fear they knew wasn’t going away, and some were tired of discussing it.

In more diverse jazz clubs in some of the growing funky mixed parts of Joburg, whites in their twenties and thirties would often talk about change. They weren’t prepared to leave the country but they weren’t prepared to march, speak out, or write articles.

Among these white South Africans, some might venture into Soweto or another township, knew people there, either because they started to develop a friendship or because their maid or gardener lived there and they might have helped them out from time to time, whatever help meant at the time. Quilt? Duty? A genuine lending hand? It could be a lift somewhere, money for school books or uniforms, a letter of some kind or another.

Even for progressives, Soweto wasn’t a regular place to hang out however, with the exception of a radical few who needed to learn more, see more, understand more……

Today, Soweto has paved roads and looks more like a run down part of New York City than the township it was. While there are modern urban remnants, poverty and crime is still prevalent as it is in other parts of Joburg, including a central downtown area called Hillbrow, which we used to go to as teenagers on a Friday night to go ‘clubbing.’ Not safe today, but Soweto seems to be, at least according to many.

Below is a video clip of a market closing in Soweto around six in the evening the day after we arrived.

As for the countless faces of Soweto, look for an upcoming blog post with nothing but amazing faces from various parts of this sprawling suburb…..

Simon Barber Sings Rikiti Tikiti Tin

South African International Marketing Council’s (Brand South Africa) Simon Barber sings Rikiti Tikiti Tin on a blogger bus through South Africa.

I need South Africa more than it needs me

I don’t often take part in chain blog posts, but this one I quite enjoyed and Rafiq tagged me so what else could I do?
To set it straight to start with, I blog about South Africa. South Africa is in Africa and Africa is a moving, culturally rich and incredibly curious continent. So to begin, […]

The Power of Imagery: The Death of Hector Pieterson

Hector Pieterson in the arms of Mbuyisa Nkita Makhubu, his sister, Antoinette Musi, running alongside. Photo by Sam Nzima, 1976.

My good friend Sameer at WITNESS is leading an online conversation in commemoration of today’s 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Here’s the question: What image opened your eyes to human rights?

Last week, as part of the We Blog the World tour in South Africa, we visited the Hector Pieterson Museum in Orlando West, Soweto. If you have never cried at a museum before, here’s your spot.

Street behind Hector Pieterson Memorial Museum.

Hector Pieterson was 12-years-old on June 16, 1976 when he joined his fellow students to protest Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in the South African townships. As they were singing Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, refusing to stop their approach, police open fired. Today it is known that Hastings Ndlovu was, in fact, the first student gunned down by police, but it was Hector who became the martyr and icon of South Africa’s liberation struggle because he was captured in the above image by photographer Sam Nzima.

Nzima wasn’t the only person to take photographs that day, but he was the only one to get them out without being confiscated by the police. (He stuffed the rolls of film in his socks.) His photographs were immediately published in The World, which led to widespread riots and protests all over South Africa. Hector Pieterson was, largely, South Africa’s Rosa Parks. Just like the Civil Rights Movement in the US didn’t begin with Parks, neither did South Africa’s liberation struggle begin with Pieterson. But both icons mark the tipping point when built-up pressure exploded into movements that would never step back.

I highly highly recommend that one day you make the trip to South Africa and spend at least an entire day in Soweto. There is nothing like being there, surrounded by all its history, for yourself. When we were outside the museum our guide pointed to a woman walking down the pathway. It was Hector’s sister, Antoinette Sithole, the very same person screaming in Sam Nzima’s famous photograph.

Antoinette Sithole walking through Orlando West, Soweto.

It’s amazing to see such history walking around in real life. But … in the meantime, Babak and Ismail have put together a truly incredible map mashup of the events that took place on June 16, 1976. Before you start clicking around on the map, however, I’d recommend that you read through their blog as well as the online book, “I Saw a Nightmare …” Doing Violence to Memory: The Soweto Uprising, June 16, 1976 by Helena Pohlandt-McCormick.

Bonus: Check out this video by Ray Lewis of Graeme Addison, a South African journalist who was on the scene at the Soweto uprising of June 16, 1976.

Masada and The Dead Sea

There were four things that left an ‘emotional’ impact on me the first time I came to Israel: living on a kibbutz, walking from roof to roof in old town Jerusalem with stray cats, swimming in the magical Dead Sea and hitchhiking north to south and then back again.

I went to the Dead Sea today, which included a stop at Ein Geidi, an oasis near Masada and the caves of Qumran.

Masada was not what I remembered.
Nor was Ein Gedi or the Dead Sea.

What happened was the inevitable – tourism. Western style tourism that is. Is there any other kind? With tour buses, strong metal fences to keep you gated in and a trolly to take you up and down. We hiked Masada’s Snake Path way back when – it was the only way to get to the top. Today, it feels more like Aspen — the $7 lemonades, $2 postcards and $20 entrance fees. domain owner And countless air conditioned buses arriving in droves.

But like most breathtaking wonders, even with renovations, gates, modern stairs and restroom signs, you find yourself turning your head just the right way for a moment. And there’s that second moment where you hear the silence.

The moment you move into that place, you need to get creative with your thoughts and images right away. My first were of Herod the Great in 37 BCE looking across the voluminous desert from his fortress. And then again, in 66 CE, when the Jewish-Roman War began.

I imagined hiding in one of the 66 CE bedrooms, that were about the same size as my childhood bedroom and every bedroom I’ve ever had in England and New England bar one. In other words, small. air distance calculator Where were the closets? A woman has to have closets, even Iudaea Lucius Flavius Silva’s wife needed a closet.

When you get to the top and feel the historical awe of it all. It wasn’t identified until 1842 and not excavated until 1963, which included the remnants of a Byzantine church dating from the 5th and 6th centuries CE. i cloud . where is domain hosted 5th and 6th centuries you say to yourself and look away, across the desert, away from the buses and climbing tourists, the cameras, the ice cream cones and sun hats.

I gave a playful glance to the trolly driver, a 30 something year old Israeli man named Amir. My colleagues didn’t even notice. site rank . Silence on the way up, noise on the way down.

Below are shots of a fabulous journey along the desert road from the southern tip of the Dead Sea. Israel’s roads are easy and since the country is so small and all the signs are in English, Hebrew and Arabic, the odds are with you. wall cloud Zohar junction, take a left and you’re getting close.

We rented a zimmer, opened a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon from Ella Valley’s wineyard and took in the sounds of active crickets and birds full of energy in the night.

IN the Dead Sea (am I the only one who thought it was cool to keep the oily salty water all over my body for the entire day without a fresh water shower?)

The Ein Gedi which on some levels has turned into the Fort Lauderdale of Israel. Yet, these salt deposits and mineral formations are hard to ignore.

At the top of Masada

On the Masada Jerusalem road

Children in that in between space between East and West Jerusalem

A Bedouin on the Masada Jerusalem road

Masada

Dead Sea Action

Photo love: Israel (aka Travels w/Renee)

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