Katie and Tommy: Around the World

While we were a little sad to leave the beautiful and comfortable hostel in Port Elizabeth, we anxiously and excitedly left for Durban. Durban was dramatically more humid than Port Elizabeth, with good reason– it’s significantly farther north and receives more of the warm Indian Ocean currents. By sharing a taxi with an elderly couple, we were able to save a few rand. It was an interesting experience riding in the taxi, observing the street signs. Understandably, the black majority has over the past decade been attempting to “reclaim” as many sectors of the country as possible. Therefore, street signs are being changed from names such as George or Victoria to more local names (often, a new sign sits on the old one, with a red line crossing it out). In the case of our hostel, Point Road was now Mahtma Ghandi Road, reflecting Durban’s significant Indian population. The major Black ethnic group here is the Zulu people. Afrikaans is fairly uncommon in comparison to the Western Cape though English is still fairly well spoken.

The hostel is worth mentioning because Katie and I loved the style in which it was built. It was a former warehouse/industrial building and that theme was carried through into the new hostel as well, with lots of unfinished metal and concrete floors, accented by bright colors and African motifs.

Seeing as it was Sunday, we tried to find a Catholic church to attend mass. We ran into problems however when we discovered that despite having a population of nearly 4 million people, only three catholic churches existed in the city. Though one was actually close to our hostel, it was completely sealed off by a large barb wired fence. Calling revealed that they had only one Sunday mass, 8:00 AM, and no other masses would be held until Tuesday. The only other church that we could locate was in a terrible neighborhood, so we felt it most prudent to wait till Tuesday’s daily mass.

We went to a shopping area called the Workshop, which had many restaurants and a large flea market. Durban’s Indian population has invented a fabulous dish called “bunny chow,” which we couldn’t wait to try. It consists of serving a curry dish inside of a hollowed out piece of bread. Delicious.

In the evening when attempting to charge the PDA, I realized that we had blown the step down transformer in Knysna. I tried asking the hostel staff where I could buy a new one, but frankly, had I shown them a Martian space gun, they probably would have been even less surprised.

Therefore, Tuesday morning was spent searching for one. We went to every hardware or electric store we could find. Not only was the concept of such a device wholly foreign to them, they could not even suggest where I could find a new one. I shouldn’t have been too surprised though– to call many of these stores “electronic shops” would be a stretch anyway. They mostly sold TVs, radios, cell phone accessories and were staffed by a non-technically educated staff. Considering that really only Americans would have a use for such a device, we thought why not ask the only other Americans we knew in the city—the staff of the US consulate. We were saddened to discover that they were in fact closed because of what the African guards referred to as an “American holiday,” and we realized it was in fact Martin Luther King Day. Later in the day, however, I passed by an Indian who was selling lots of inexpensive plug converters on the street. Though he did not have a transformer, he knew where I could probably get one—South Africa’s answer to Radio Shack. As soon as we walked into the store, A1Radio, and saw dozens of digital multimeters on display, I knew we had found our mecca. The staff immediately knew what we were looking for and, for only $7, we were back in business.

But what I haven’t mentioned is how we spent the middle of the day, between the US Consulate and A1Radio—laying on the beach reading books. Though we reapplied sunscreen regularly, we still got sunburned quite badly.

We had dinner at an Indian restaurant that Wikitravel recommended, and spent the 40 minutes prior to their opening at a beautifully quirky cafe next door called Bean Bag Bohemia.

Sleeping that night proved to be quite painful and restless as my back rubbed against the sheets, so the following morning, I ended up staying in bed while Katie went out birding to the botanical gardens.

Our major activity of the day was visiting the Victoria St. Market. It is in the middle of the Indian district and is essentially a huge flea market. The first floor of this market was filled with mostly tourist oriented items, but there were many interesting Indian shops selling spices, everything from curry and masala to “mother-in-law exterminator” and “KFC spice.” The other floors and areas around the market proved far more interesting, most notably the fish and meat market. There was a bit of a rotten meat smell lingering in the air and it seemed like there were more entrails or whole goat heads for sale than actual slabs of meat. Outside of the building, stalls were selling all kinds of bark, herbs, and animal pieces (including horns, hooves, and gutted birds), presumably for ritualistic purposes. We saw many ads for ritual healers in the area too. We were getting more stares than usual so we thought it best to leave and start heading more towards the beaten path.

A little tired of curry, we ended up settling on chicken/cheese schwarmas for our early dinners and caught a public bus back to our hostel and went to mass. In the church, there were paintings of the Divine Mercy and Our Lady of Czestochowa on the walls. Adjacent to them was a marble slab with an inscription in Polish. It was erected a few years in ago in celebration of 50 years of involvement between Polish priests and the Zulu people. From my conversation with someone after mass, Polish missionary priests have been in South Africa a very long time.

We flew to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania early this morning and arrived twelve hours later at our hostel.

Photos from Durban

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 6:17 am and is filed under South Africa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.