Before flying to Durban we went on a guided tour of the black and coloured townships of Cape Town. It was a very interesting to see the conditions which a large part of the population had to endure, but we also learned that the situation was not hopeless and improvements were certainly happening. After spending the night in Durban we travelled back to Swaziland to stay at an orphanage in Nhlangano which was run by Borgny, a relative of ours.

Day 22 - July 18

The "Walk to Freedom tour" was supposed to start at 0830, so we got up at 0715 to have time to eat breakfast and prepare. When we came down into the kitchen it turned out that someone else had been eating from our bread. We could have lived with that, but not with the fact that the culprits hadn't wrapped it properly afterwards, thereby enabling a a cockroach to slip inside and crawl around on our bread. We immediately suspected that the "antisocials" were the guilty ones. It had to be them or the Super-backpacker since there were nobody else around.

In any case, we had somehow lost out appetite for that particular bread, so we went down to the 7-11 down the street and bought a new one. Fortunately, there was still plenty of time for eating breakfast before the tour started

The guide from Legend Tours arrived at 0820. First we drove around to pick up the other people who were going on the tour. There were two Dutch girls, a guy from London and an American family from Kentucky. Our guide was a strange but funny guy. His name was Frank, he was black and had grown up in Soweto. However, I became slightly suspicious of his moral character when he confessed to being a Man. United fan. I tried to make him aware of his error, but he could not be convinced. Actually, he had never heard of neither Liverpool nor Arsenal, so I guess he didn't follow English football too closely.

Despite his bad taste in football, he actually turned out to be a very good guide. The first thing we did was drive up to the Muslim area in Cape Town. It was located in a hillside with a very good view of the city center and Table Mountain. The houses were really colourful and everything looked very nice. I had never seen such steep roads anywhere before (though I haven't been to San Fransisco), and a few of them were almost scary.

Leaving the Muslim area we drove through the downtown area which was almost empty on this sunday morning. Coming through the city we stopped at a place outside called District Six, where there wasn't much to see. There was a large open area here now, but Frank explained that this had once been a lively community. However, during Apartheid the people living there had been forced out of their homes and the whole are demolished. They had been relocated to where the government meant they ought to be living, classified according to race.

After District Six we drove around the mountain to the townships. We first stopped right outside a township called Langa. Frank showed us some tents on a green area between the township and the motorway, and explained that some young boys from Langa were living there. Apparently it was an old tradition that boys were sent out into the wilderness and had to prove themselves by finding their own food etc. This tradition seemed to have persisted, even though they didn't live in the bush anymore. Instead the boys were sent into this area of a few hundred square meters, bordered by the motorway and a huge power plant! There obviously wasn't much wildlife that they could hunt for food around here, so surviving was not easy! Frank explained that this was one of many example of old traditions getting in the way of progress.

We then drove into Langa itself and stopped in some street while Frank started telling us about this place. The street was lined up with several very small houses, often with a shack outside in a small garden. Frank explained that during Apartheid the houses were rented to black men who were working in Cape Town trying to support their family back in the socalled "homelands". When Apartheid was abolished, many families had moved from the homelands and into the cities, meaning these houses had to accommodate large families, which they were much too small for. This was the reason for all the shacks next to the houses. They were just an emergency solution as the families had to stay somewhere.

However, Frank pointed out that the people living here were continously improving their houses, and that if we were to come back six months later, there would be real houses where some of the shacks were now standing. This was also evident from looking around the street. For example, in one place there was a very long house, belonging to a doctor. He had probably bought up all the properties around him and used them to extend his own home. According to Frank, the people who lived in this area were actually quite lucky as they had room for extending their houses. They were not really poor, he said.

On driving a little bit further into Langa we came to a quite busy street where we all got out. We followed Frank into a socalled "migrant hostel". Again, this had been rented to black workers during Apartheid. There appeared to be three persons living in each of the very small rooms here. It was not very clean and looked very crowded. The people who lived had no extra space where they could put up shacks to accomodate their family. Consequently, their family had to live somewhere else. We would soon find out where.

There had originally been exactly the same type of hostels across the street, but these had been renovated and now looked really nice in bright colours. They had also been rebuilt from hostels into proper houses, which however had the disadvantage that there was not space for the same number of people inside, and some families were forced out. Each family had been given their own rubbish bin, which seemed to make an enormous difference. On the "new" side of the road everything was clean, while on the "old" side rubbish was floating around everywhere.

The streets around here were really crowded with people. I guess if you live in one of these hostels, there's nothing much to stay inside for. Lots of people were selling various stuff, including meat which was just lying outside, and probably not very safe to eat. We felt kind of embarassed walking around recording video and taking pictures, but Frank said it was OK to do so, and that people here were just happy for "the world" to see the conditions they were living under.

Getting into the car, we drove only for a few streets to arrive in an area which Frank called the "Beverly Hills" of Langa. The housing changed quite abruptly to much larger houses, all looking very nice. Frank explained that this was where the professional people like doctors and lawyers lived. There were hardly any people walking the streets in the "Beverly Hills", while across the road it was really crowded. We now realized that the townships were not at all a homogenous slum, as many people seem to believe.

There must initially have been an open field between "Beverly Hills" and the motorway. However, this was no longer the case as it was now crowded with socalled "informal housing", which is a nice word for "shacks". This was where people put up their houses if they didn't have a garden to put them up in. There were no roads in between the houses, no water, no electricity, and those living there had no address. I had never thought about how important it was to have an address before Frank explained it. Without an address it is very difficult to tell anybody where you live, in case you require assistance from the police, a doctor or somebody else.

On our way into Cape Town a few days ago, these shacks were all we could see from the motorway, so we implicitly assumed that conditions were similar all over the townships. It was nice to discover that this wasn't true at all, and although conditions weren't good, they were in some places much better than we had expected. In fact, Frank was quite optimistic for the future.

Langa had been a black township. We now left Langa behind, crossed the motorway and entered the Cape Flats and the coloured neighbourhoods. My initial impression was that things looked much better in this area, at least the houses were much bigger and nicer. However, Frank explained that drugs, gangs and violent crime was a much larger problem here than in the black areas. According to Frank, everybody had to join a gang for "protection", and these gangs were at war with each other constantly.

In one of the townships called Guguletu, we stopped in the side of the road near a petrol station. The place didn't look particularly interesting until Frank told us that an American student called Amy Biehl had been killed here some years ago. None of us had heard of her, but apparently this murder had been quite a big story in the news. She had come to South Africa to help the black population in their struggles, and had been putting in a lot of work for their cause.

However, one day there had been a black demonstration which had gotten out of hand. Some of the protesters had decided to take their anger out on the first white person they saw, which turned out to be Amy. When the news about Amy's murder spread to the many black people who knew about her work, they reacted angrily by seeking out the guilty ones and punishing them severely.

Frank claimed that as a consequence of the reaction of the black majority to Amy's murder and the blind violence against random whites, it was now completely safe for white people to walk around in Guguletu. Amy's parents had later founded the Amy Biehl foundation to continue her work.

We drove around in some other coloured areas. In one place where they had electric streetlights, a lot of people had reconnected the wires from the lights through to their homes, and were thereby stealing electricity! However, this set up looked quite dangerous as the wires were often hanging so low that anybody could just reach out and touch them.

In another area the government had demolished the old buildings and built new small houses. Again we saw that shacks were creeping up around the houses, and eventually the shacks were improved and finally merged with the initial house to make one big home for the whole family.

According to Frank, it was very important for the blacks to take responsibility for their own lives. It was no use sitting around complaining that everything was the fault of the white population. The individuals themselves, not the government, had to take action. It was better to teach a man how to fish than just to give him a fish, he said. This seemed to be very wise words, even though they were coming from a Man. United fan.

Now the tour was over and we drove around the mountains and back into the city. Frank dropped the other guys off at the Waterfront and drove us back to St. John's. We both found the tour to be very interesting, and at 130R each it was excellent value for money as well. Frank had been a great guide and really contributed to making it an interesting experience. We really felt much more optimistic on behalf of the black population after the tour, which was something we had never expected in the first place.

Tomorrow we were leaving Cape Town and flying to Durban, which meant we needed a place to stay there. This was the first point on our agenda. Looking through a leaflet which Erroll had given to us, we found a place called "Nomad Backpackers" which looked quite promising. They were quite cheap at 120R for a double room, and they also did free transfers to the bus terminal. We phoned them to reserve a room and spoke to a nice woman called Leigh. They had an available double room for tomorrow night, but unfortunately they were unable to pick us up at the airport. However, if we called them when we arrived at the airport , we could take a shuttle bus downtown and they would pick us up there. She even complemented me for having such a nice name - Teland!

During our last meal with Drifters, everybody in the group had written down their contact information on a piece of paper. This was supposed to be photocopied and distributed to everyone, but we never got a copy since we left for St. John's so early. We therefore went down to Drifters now to obtain the address list now, but nobody seemed to be around at the moment. At least there was no reaction when we rang the doorbell.

Having only eaten breakfast today, we were now really hungry. We therefore walked down the street and entered the first fastfood restaurant we came across. It turned out to be a Subway restaurant, so we both had a sub with all kinds of good stuff inside.

Our original plan had been to go up Table Mountain after the "Walk to Freedom Tour". The weather this morning had been splendid, the best we'd seen in Cape Town so far. However, it had suddenly changed so that now the clouds were hovering just below the top of the mountain, making it pointless to go up there to view the city. Instead we decided to go down to the Waterfront area again.

We walked down to the ocean, where the bus was running, and got on the first bus to the Waterfront. This turned out to be the noisiest bus we'd ever been on, a miracle that it was functioning at all! The sound was ringing in our ears long after we'd left the bus!

We decided to catch another movie and bought tickets to "Plunkett and Maclaine" at 1715. None of us had ever heard of it before. Since there were a few hours before the movie started, we went to visit the famous Aquarium which was also located inside the Waterfront area.

It was a huge and very nice Aquarium. They had all kinds of exhibitions with fish and stuff from the sea. I'm sure it was possible to learn a lot from this place if one has the time to walk around and really study everything, but unfortunately we were only able to get a brief impression of most of the exhibitions.

It turned out we had arrived just in time to witness the feeding of the sharks. The sharks were all inside a huge aquarium with lots of different fish and other creatures. Two divers came down and fed the sharks with (dead) fish. Especially amusing was a turtle which seemed to believe it was entitled to more food than everybody else. It tried to eat everything it came across, including the food which was meant for the sharks!

After the Aquarium we dropped by Cyberworld to use one of the vouchers we had received with the Star Wars tickets. We tried one ride called "Doomed Castle". It turned out to be a simulator of the kind where you sit inside some vehicle which shakes somewhat to give the impression of movement, while you watch film on a large screen with 3D-glasses. The illusion worked quite well, but was not really that exceptional.

We picked up some popcorn and other snacks, and then it was time for the movie. It turned to be average. Like a lot of English movies, in my opinion, it was very boring in the beginning but got better towards the end.

After the movie, May Tina wanted to buy some new hiking boots, so we went to a shoe store inside the mall. Even though it was Sunday, all the shops in the mall were open all day! Finally, we went back to Cyberworld and used our last voucher for a ride called "Escape from Nemo", which was very similar to "Doomed Castle" except that a different film was being shown on screen.

We decided to eat dinner at the Waterfront and opted for some small place called "Tel Aviv" inside the mall. My falafel was okay, while May Tina said her Kebab had been the best ever!

At 2030 we took the bus back to Sea Point. Once again, we didn't feel very comfortable walking the few blocks from the bus stop back to St. John's, but nothing happened this time either. At St. John's everything was quiet as usual. We relaxed for a while, and updated our diaries before going to bed at 2200.

Day 23 - July 19

We got up at 0800, made our own breakfast in the kitchen, and went down to the Drifters Inn in one final attempt to obtain the address list. Unfortunately, it was nowhere to be found, but Wilhelmina promised to obtain the list from Kurt and fax it to Drifters in Johannesburg so that we could pick it up there on our last day.

Back at St. John's we just hung around waiting for our transport to the airport. Erroll had arranged for something called the Backpacker bus to pick is up, and it promptly arrived at 0925. After picking up some other guy from a hostel downtown, we drove directly to the airport. The driver kept having a dialogue with himself about other people's driving, with which he was not very pleased! May Tina thought he was quite scary and was glad to be alive when we got to the airport. The ride cost us 60R each.

The airport turned out to be quite small, so checking in and finding our gate was no problem. We were flying with a company called Sun Air, which we'd never heard about before booking the tickets. Although the plane was a little late, we were satisfied with the service we received (but after flying Lufthansa, anything will seem good!). We landed in Durban almost on schedule at 1300.

The airport in Durban was also very small, and it didn't take us long to pick up our baggage and find the arrival hall. However, on trying to phone Nomads to confirm our arrival, we only got response from a fax machine. Since the shuttle was just leaving, and the next shuttle wasn't until an hour, we decided to get on it, and just make our own way to the hostel.

After a twenty minute drive, we got off somewhere in the city center. We couldn't recognize anything from our previous visit to Durban (but then we had only been to the beach area). The place was very busy and there were people all around. It looked quite safe to us. We walked a few blocks in an arbitrary direction until we found a taxi. The taxi ride cost 25R and took us outside the center and to a suburban area. The taxi was in rather bad shape compared to what we're used to in Norway, but at least we got to where we wanted.

Nomad Backpackers seemed to be a normal house which had been converted into a hostel. We got the only double room they had. The two other rooms were dormitory style with quite a lot of beds. Unlike St. John's, this place seemed to be quite full.

We were told that the area was safe to walk around in, so the first thing we did was walk up to a shopping mall only a few hundred meters up the road. >From there we phoned Drifters to confirm our arrival time on of 2040 on July 26 at the bus terminal in Johannesburg. However, now there was an unpleasant surprise in store for us. Drifters had found out that it was not safe for them to pick us up downtown so late at night, so they wouldn't do it after all! What was this? Had Drifters been taken over by Lufthansa while we were on tour?

They explained that their vehicle would probably been broken into and we would all get mugged! Instead they recommended that we should just take a taxi instead! However, if this place was so dangerous that Drifters, who run tours all over Southern Africa with the slogan "Roughing it but loving it", are afraid to come there, we didn't really feel like walking around there looking for a taxi!!

After speaking with Drifters, we suddenly remembered that we had forgotten to take our malaria pills today, so we quickly went back to Nomads to get this done. While at Nomads, we explained our problem to the guy who seemed to be in charge there at that moment. He said that he knew a lot of travellers who had been mugged at that bus terminal, and he couldn't understand why they didn't put in some security guards there! This, of course, made us feel a lot more relaxed. Can't wait to walk around there late at night looking for a taxi, can we?

We didn't really want to cancel our reservation at Drifters because we had paid for the rooms in advance, and it would probably be a lot of hazzle getting the money back. We decided to give Drifters one last chance before finding another place to stay. We called Drifters and suggested that they picked us up in the small town Midrand, which on the map didn't look much further away from the Drifters Inn, instead of Johannesburg. At first the woman (Crystal) at Drifters was opposed to the idea, but then she suddenly changed her mind, and said that they would make an exception for us and pick us up in Johannesburg! However, jokingly she said that we would have to buy her a chocolate as a reward. It was great to have finally have all details sorted out.

It was now getting late in the day, so we decided not to bother with going down to the city center. Instead we decided on visiting a Botanical Garden in the area, which was supposed to be very nice. Getting directions from the guy at Nomads, we set off walking up the street. However, after walking back and forth for some time, we were getting really confused as there just wasn't any Botanical Garden where our map said it should be. Surely this was due to the Botanical Garden spontaneously disappearing, and had nothing to do with our map reading skills :-) In the end we gave up and just went back to the mall.

We bought some supplies for tomorrow and then went to the cinema inside the mall. There we decided to watch "Mod Squad" at 1715, and bought some chocolate, popcorn and drinks to really to enjoy ourselves. Unfortunately, the movie was nothing special.

Coming out from the movie, we noticed that it was too cold outside to walk around in shorts, so went back to Nomads to put on some more clothes. Then we walked around the streets for a while, looking for a place to eat. We felt perfectly safe walking around here although it was dark and not too many other guys around. This was probably only due to us having been told that the area was safe.

We finally decided to eat at a restaurant called "Circus Circus", located inside the mall. I ordered a Chicken Salad and got more salad than I was able to eat. Also, service was incredibly fast, in fact we'd never been to a restaurant with such rapid service! We were really impressed!

After dinner we went back to Nomads and relaxed a bit before going to bed at 2200.

Day 24 - July 20

We got up around 0700. May Tina had not slept very well because of some noise during the night. At the moment the place was rather quiet, though, because most people seemed to already have left on the Baz Bus. We made our own breakfast in the kitchen and prepared some food to take with us. Then we just sat around waiting for a while.

There were two dogs hanging around at Nomads and the smallest one was the cuddliest dog we have ever seen. It immediately came over to us and rolled over on the back because it wanted to be stroked on its stomach. It just wouldn't go away from us! It was the second cutest dog ever!

At 0830 we were driven down to the Greyhound bus terminal by a guy from Nomads. We were kind of relieved to see that it was located at a completely different place than the local bus terminal, which Kurt had pointed out as the worst area in Durban. The bus turned out to be very nice as well, much better than we had expected after riding with Greyhound in Florida.

The bus left on schedule at 0900 and we had a long ride ahead of us. The reason it took so long was that it didn't follow the motorway, but instead went along small roads in Zululand. The scenery was quite nice, mostly quite open in yellow and green colours, and we seemed to be going up and down small hills a lot of the time.

There were televisions on the bus that provided some entertainment, but we weren't really paying much attention. Finally, at 1610 we arrived in Piet Retief and got off the bus. The town was not very large but at least there were a few streets and some shops. We were very excited about meeting Borgny and finally seeing where she lived. We had heard many stories but now we would see it with our own eyes!

We had expected to spot Borgny there at once, but she was nowhere to be seen. After waiting for fifteen minutes without her showing up, we were starting to get a bit nervous that there had been a misunderstanding, or worse, that something had happened to her.

However, finally she arrived, and it turned out she had been sitting in her car just around the corner from where we had been waiting. She hadn't seen the bus coming because it had come up a different street than the one she was paying attention to. Anyway, we were all really happy to see each other!

We drove back to Swaziland, this time crossing at the border at Mahamba. The border was very quiet and all formalities were settled in no time. To be honest, I was quite surprised to see how smoothly the formalities at the border went every time. We never had any trouble with officials during the whole trip, which was a pleasant surprise.

From Mahamba it was only a short drive to Nhlangano which was the town closest to where Borgny was living. The town center was not very big, only a few streets, and seemed quite empty when we drove through it. After coming through Nhlangano, we left the main road (which was currently undergoing construction) and drove on a dust road through some forest. The road was really dusty, it had this sort of red dust, and as a consequence the trees close to the road were quite red as well.

I guess we drove for about 10km before reaching Borgny's place. None of us had even seen a proper photo of the place, so we were really looking forward to seeing it for real. The whole area had several houses and was fenced in. The largest house was the orphanage and some of the kids came running out to open the gate when they heard the car approaching. They seemed very excited to see us!

We were pleasantly surprised by Borgny's house. It was very nice and cosy inside! For some reason we hadn't expected her to have much technical equipment, but she turned out to have both TV, video, satellite dish, PC and a game console (for the kids). Quite a few of the kids were in her livingroom, busily watching some TV series on satellite when we arrived.

Both of us were quite hungry now, so we all got something to eat in the kitchen. It was almost like being back in Norway, with Norwegian books on the shelves and Norwegian decorations on the walls. Being here was almost unreal! Borgny had been living here for 45 years and we had only met her a few times earlier on some of her brief visits to Norway. We had, however, always heard a lot about her work down in Swaziland, but seeing it with our own eyes was just incredible! We had always admired her courageous decision to leave safe Norway behind and travel to a strange foreign country to help other people, and after seeing the conditions in Africa we admired her even more!

One of the houses just stood empty, so we would be staying there by ourselves, which was very convenient. Each of us had our own bedroom, so it was quite some luxury compared to some of the accommodation earlier in the trip. After unpacking we went back into Borgny's house and relaxed for the rest of the evening. However, we were both so tired that even at 2100(!) none of us could hardly keep our eyes open, so we went to bed really early that night.