Gelli goes South-ish

Standing on the deck of the m/v Green Cape in the harbour, I half watched Cape Town going about it's business and the occasional cable car gliding up to Table Mountain in the distance, and half watched the loading of provisions on to the ship via a large metal cage. The flatbed truck parked below was overflowing with all the essentials. A few sacks of potatoes came up, followed by 2 sacks of onions, several boxes of eggs and, finally, well over 200 crates of assorted booze.

It was going to be one of those sorts of trips.

To be fair, I could see it coming – looking at the manifest when I initially boarded, something had already told me that spending the next 18 or so days on a ship with 1 German, a South African and 25 Poles (all men, and mostly, large men) would not necessarily be the ideal place to detox...

Part of the loading of alcohol in Cape Town

The m/v Green Cape is my home for the next 18ish days. She is a mixed usage freighter, owned by a German company, MACS, with, as noted, a mostly Polish crew and is flagged in the Marshall Islands. She makes a regular round trip between Europe (4 or 5 ports, always including Rotterdam, Hamburg and Antwerp) and South Africa (5 or 6 ports, some of them twice, and with the occasional additional double run) plus sometimes Walvisbaai, totaling roughly 50days.

She was built in Italy almost 30years old, and is due to be retired/scrapped and replaced within the next few months. She is only scheduled for one more trip after this, although rumours suggest she may survive a while longer as the Chinese company who are building her replacement have gone bankrupt, and in these economic times priorities change slightly.

Her age makes her design slightly unusual to the now common mid-size container ships, in that she has space for some containers behind the tower/cabins. Also, and much more unusually for a ocean going freighter, she has a vehicle deck with full ro-ro capability. On this voyage, we leave Cape Town with a lower hold full of coal, the upper hold containers, plus a dozen or so petrol tankers on the vehicle deck, and another 50 or so containers on deck. At Walvisbaai, we are due to gain another 135 or so containers for a total of 500ish. At total capacity, she can handle about 300 containers on deck, plus 500 or so below and whatever she has in the hold and vehicle decks.

And for me, she is now home.

Goodbye, Cape Town

It was my last night in Africa, and, to be honest, I was not necessarily looking forward to what must inevitably come next. The 3week journey was not the issue – indeed i am actively looking forward to it – rather the destination: Europe. Europe is now in winter, which means that it will be cold, wet, grey, miserable and constantly playing Slade Christmas songs. It also contains lots and lots of evil people, who unaccountably believe that if they are going to be paying me, then I should be working for the money. I mean, who on earth came up with such a deranged idea? And the fact that I am not even allowed to go home to Sweden, but instead am being forced to go to a strange country – one that I have absolutely no wish to live in – not of my choosing to work for a while hardly adds to my excitement.

With funds low and with no wish to attempt to acquire more, my final night was in a way anticlimactic: I had a takeaway dinner from, of all places, Nando's. But it was cheap and that works for me. I then retired to sit in the bar of the Long Street Backpackers, where after the masses had mostly gone out, I fell into conversation with a really cool Zimbabwean guy, called Fortune. Which seemed to cause much hilarity (and confusion) to pretty much anybody else that entered the bar.

The barman/receptionist insisted on introducing us to everybody who entered as, quite accurately, Rich and Fortune. But you could tell by the looks of some of the faces, especially non English speaking natives and new arrivals, that they really couldn't understand what was going on and assumed it was some kind of strange joke...

Somehow, It seemed a fitting end.

An old traveling adage says that it is time to go home when you start to look like your passport photo. In my case, it is time to go home when everything, including yourself, is broke(n).

What will eventually be 15months away and 9months traveling around Africa, has taken it's toll. My Osprey Kestrel 32 rucksack, bought specially for the trip, did reasonably well but has been showing rapid signs of deterioration in the last month or so: Stitching around the zip on one side has been coming alarmingly away, and there is a small but growing hole in the base. With luck it will survive the journey back, but it will then be retired/donated or returned under warranty as faulty. My small canvas daysack has started to irretrievably come apart, as has a small bag/pouch used to keep assorted odds and sods together in my main bag.

All my underwear has holes in, and one pair has more holes than material remaining. Both pairs of trousers are showing signs of requiring urgent attention: One has lost the button and a zip and gained 3 holes, one in the rear end. The other has a kaputted zip, paint stains and has lost stitching from all pockets, pretty much rendering me a walking sieve. Neither will ever be the same colour they began with. My sandals and towel can both be smelled several kilometers away, and are probably classified as hazardous waste under most international treaties. The heals of my shoes are disintegrating fast.

Surprisingly, most of my tops are still reasonably OK: A few pulls in the stitching, and some obvious discoloration to be sure, but none are likely to get me arrested or thrown in a homeless shelter on sight. My sleeping bag is also fine. Even more amazingly, though one pair are now almost dead, most of my socks have survived in tact, although the white pair are very definitely no longer white.

Unsurprisingly, though, my rope is still in excellent condition

Of my more hi-tech equipment, my camera died in Namibia from a probable combination of seawater and sand, though its replacement is standing up well apart from superficial scratches and dents. Musically, my ipod had one dead pair of headphones (much better than my last trip, where i seemed to kill headphones almost weekly) and the scroll pad now has a delay of several seconds, and the buttons are increasingly struggling, in what is probably a fatal poblem. The solar power charger is now very temperamental. My EEE laptop has no working mouse buttons anymore, and also had one 48hour death when it refused to do anything at all but is otherwise fully functional, as is my external HDD, both of which have been a pleasant surprise. The external mouse died and has been replaced, and all of my USB sticks (3 at last count) have picked up PC Malaria – viruses – except for the one that I lost on St. Helena. All phones, excepting the stolen one, are still happily working.

What that basically means is that on my return to Europe – wherever I end up - I will have to undergo an extensive period of disposal, burning, repair and probably allot of shopping to fix, rebuild and replenish my kit before it is needed again for the next trip, which, is as yet undetermined but will hopefully be very soon.

And both my bank manager and boss are starting to make increasingly unsubtle and suggestive comments that perhaps i should return and become an unproductive member of the working drones again.

Yes. Sadly. It's time to go home.

This picture doesn't have anything to do with the entry, I just happen to like it!

I'm not sure exactly why, but this, my second time in Cape Town was nowhere near as much fun as the first. Partly it was the company I now kept, or lack of it. Maaret had obviously been with me last time but was now in Pretoria about to fly back to Europe. Adrian was also away, and whilst last time there had been a good group of people in the hostel to hang out with, on my return it just wasn't working for me. Then there was the fact that the novelty and initial 'wow' factor of Cape Town had obviously worn off. Plus, I had many chores to do in only a couple of days and the undeniable realisation that it was pretty much all over: In 2 or 3 days I would be leaving Cape Town on the beginning of the end of my trip.

With all that in mind, perhaps it is more surprising i did not spend the whole time crying or committing suicide than anything else.

But Cape Town itself seemed to have changed allot as well, even though it was barely 2weeks ago that I had been here. A shipment must have come in (or I looked really bad), as I was suddenly being offered drugs every 50metres or so on Long Street and even elsewhere. And the number of beggars had also sharply risen – i was even accosted by somebody from California (or perhaps with a California accent) who looked dodgy as hell and gave me a long sob story about attacks in a minibus (which do happen) and kids going hungry as passports had been stolen, and how I as a foreigner was the closest the had to a friend at that moment.

The one tourist thing I had left to do – Visit Robben Island – had to be dropped due to a lack of tickets, although I did somehow successfully get all my chores done to my own surprise (Yay, Hospital, Yay. And Yay, spending lots of money, Even Yay-er), as well as enjoy a couple of last good game dinners (Mmmm. Springbok steak and warthog ribs).

The little things that I had sort of brushed off about South Africa, the car guards everywhere out to conn to you, the fact that you have to pay for absolutely everything: Entrance to nothing is free, plus the beggars, touts, and the financial system as already mentioned all started to get on my nerves a little, and I started wishing it would all end.

I am still not entirely sure if i like South Africa (as a whole) or not.

Even that very morning, hostel staff were trying to dissuade us. 'Why are you going there?!', they cried. They even offered to phone our car rental agency and arrange for us to drop Ruth somewhere else, such as Johannesburg, and we had to physically leave to prevent it. The object of their scorn? Bloemfontein.

When the disparate states were being moulded into the country of South Africa back in 1910, as a way of keeping the states a bit happier and not concentrating power in one place, they decided upon a 3capital system. Thus, even though it is not necessarily logical, and is expensive in terms of people moving around and requiring accommodation in several places, even today South Africa has 3 capitals: Pretoria is the official capital, and home to most of the diplomats and embassies, etc; Cape Town is the legislative capital, where the government meets, and Bloemfontein is the judicial capital, where the laws are made and courts sit.

There is, pretty much everybody agrees, not much to see or do there and no real reason to visit as a tourist: hence the comments from the hostel staff that morning. In our case, it was simply somewhere reasonably easy to get to after the wedding, between Pretoria/Jo'burg (where Maaret had to go) and Cape Town, where I was going. It basically out of fairness to prevent one us having a long/expensive journey/drive alone, whilst the other person had little or no trip. And for all its lack of pretty much anything, Bloemfontein is a city large enough to have a useful car rental office for us to leave Ruth, and central to South Africa's road network meaning lots of bus connections.

In the end we didn't see much of Bloemfontein at all, and nothing that we did see was really exciting. We took a back route there, pretty much following the Lesothan border through the countryside, and arrived just in time to leave the car before the office shut. Thus having dropped Ruth, we sorted our bus tickets, left our bags at their office and then went to a shopping centre to wander a bit and then eat. Exciting, huh?

With that it was back to wait for our buses – both due after 11pm, and both over an hour late. Bloemfontein's central location mean buses from most of the South coast cities, plus and Cape Town all pass through enroute to/from Gauteng, and many do it late at night. It is one of the few bus stations I have been where the busiest time is 22-4am. Eventually, of course, both buses appeared and that was that.

Thus, for the second time this year, Maaret disappeared to catch a plane back to Europe whilst abandoning me to the care of an African hospital. I really should see a trend by now.

An irrelevant picture to this entry, chucked in for no obvious reason