Hello everyone, Sadie's dad here. Sadie wanted us to blog about our trip to Lesotho and South Africa. I'll post some of our photos we took too. Sorry this is so long.
I just read Sadie's post about our visit and I just have to take issue with her descriptions of me. I was my typical charming and fun-loving self the whole trip. I can't imagine what she was referring to. It was really good to see Sadie. She looked good and sounded very happy and upbeat.
The trip was brutal though. We had traveled more like 36 hours straight before we made it to Lesotho. Then, Sadie made us drive for three or four hours all around the country. I can tell she has adapted to "Africa time". I adjusted pretty quickly to driving on the left side of the road (I already knew how to drive a stick shift), although my sense of spatial depth was off by about a foot. Lesotho has a lot of pot holes on every type of road - dirt or pavement - and think I hit every one trying to dodge them. Also, every town and city has speed bumps at pedestrian crossings that you have to slow down to cross. I didn't know this and I went over a couple too fast - fast enough for the girls in the back to hit their heads on the roof. Oops. After a few hundred kilometers, I remembered some of my Driver's Ed instruction and I started doing better.
It didn't take me long to ask myself, who thought a road trip in a foreign country, driving on the left side of the road with manual transmission, after traveling for 36 hours would be a good idea? I'm going to have to evaluate the decision making paradigm in our family. Let's just say, I had three backseat drivers telling me what to do. And many times, I was getting conflicting directions. The girls realized quickly, that I had to reset each time after we stopped somewhere - I took a couple of wide left turns where I should have been taking tight left turns - this would generate a lot of animated gesturing and screaming at me.
We met Tishina, Aparna and Molly the first day. They seem to be very nice and it is good to be able to put faces and personalities to the names. Tishina was with us from Maseru to Moyeni. I don't know what she thought of us, we were getting a bit punchy by that time. After two or three stops along our way, we headed out to Sadie's site. The final leg of our drive was on really bad roads with wash-outs and massive rocks to drive over. Yes, I was calling it a goat path. I couldn't think of anything worse to call it. We were driving a little Ford of some sort. We scraped bottom a couple of times, but other than that, all my years of pasture driving experience hunting thistles paid off. No one even had to get out and push.
The time we spent at Sadie's site was fun. A lot like camping. Arletta doesn't like camping. Sadie's room was small and it was a tight squeeze with all four of us. It took us a couple of days to rest up. We took a lot of naps and Sadie did a great job entertaining us and cooking for us. The site is beautiful. It is very rugged and reminds me a lot of the Southwest in the U.S. - low mountains, plateau's and bluffs. She is actually fairly close to the camp town of Moyeni. I think she could hike there over the mountain faster than driving. As isolated as her site is, there are people all over this valley. Many little structures called rondevals along the slopes. Farm animals all over - cows, pigs, goats, sheep, chickens, dogs and cats. Her cat Ralphie was a good kitty, but he doesn't have a girl friend. The other stray cat is male, so he has a boy friend. We met several of her teaching colleagues and students and Sadie demonstrated to us her new languages skills in Sesotho and some Xhosa (Kosa) while translating for us. She made her students introduce themselves in English for practice. Everyone was very friendly and I could tell Sadie has made good friends and is having a positive influence on her students whether she thinks so or not.
After resting up we took off on our road trip for Cape Town. We crossed the border to South Africa not to far from her site. The road immediately improved - no more pot holes. We made Grahamstown by about 4:00 p.m., found our B&B, then found a place where we had steaks. We finally had electricity, T.V. running water, plumbing and red meat. We took showers and went to bed. We had beds for the rest of our stay in South Africa. Since we were going to bed around 8:00 to 9:00 p.m., I was waking up around 4:30 in the morning. At that time in morning, the Har-Dee-Bar birds were cawing. They sound similar to crows, just a lot louder and more deranged. The Addo Elephant park was interesting. We saw a lot of the wildlife either on the drive to or in the park.
After two days we were on the road again and we managed to navigate to the town of Montagu. This was my favorite place on the trip. A pretty mountain town. I could have stayed there for a week. We hadn't been at our B&B fifteen minutes before the girls managed to find complimentary brandy in their rondeval and were sampling it. They were all smiles when I caught them. We relaxed for a little bit, then went shopping for food to cook on Christmas day. Our Christmas day dinner consisted of scrambled eggs, salad and wine. Chocolates for desert. Arletta, Sadie and I went to Christmas day mass at a small Catholic church. Sharity wasn't feeling well and didn't go with us. This B&B was the only place on the trip where we had internet connection. Everybody made good use of it.
Our final leg of the trip was a whirlwind tour of Cape Town. We managed to get into a hour long traffic jam along the beach on Boxing Day (day after Christmas). I think the entire population of Cape Town was on this one highway going to the beach. This really helped my disposition. We finally made it to our last B&B on Hout Bay. The next day Sadie showed us around Cape Town and we made to the part of the city where she was two years ago during her internship with the Red Cross Children's hospital. Later the same day we were on the waterfront and took a ferry over to Robben Island and toured the prison where Nelson Mandella was held. After the tour, we found a pub and had dinner - Sadie was working on the premise of keeping dad well fed. The following day we had fun on a wine tour of Stellenbosch and met James, another Peace Corps volunteer. Nothing starts a day like drinking wine at 9:30 a.m. James kept Sharity and I entertained with some stories of his first year. There seems to be a lot of poopy stories associated with being in the Peace Coprs. I agree with Sadie, the tour was enjoyable mainly because I wasn't driving.
We left Sadie at a Backpackers on Long Street on our last day. Sharity navigated me to the airport and off we went on our long flight home. Having the whole family together for an adventure like this will be more and more difficult to pull together in the future and I will always treasure the memories of this trip. Before we left, I was teasing Sharity that she was going to be a pain, just like all previous family trips. Apparently for this trip, I was the pain. Sharity did a great job and was a good buffer between Sadie's enthusiasm and mine and Arletta's exhaustion and stress.
Thank you Sadie and Sharity for this wonderful, unique holiday. But, I don't think I will be traveling that far again any time soon. Next Christmas, I'm staying home.
Rusty
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