Pretoria, South Africa

This is about my trip to South Africa and my visit with Warren--a friend I met three and a half years ago at an international program called Experience Canada in Ottawa. There will be more stories from the South African adventure updated in the next little while. At the moment, I'm back in France with classes, upcoming exams, and a visit from my sister next week!


Friday, December 21

By the time I had gotten my passport checked, gone through customs, picked up my suitcase and walked through the arrival door at the Johannesburg International Airport, it was 11:15pm—exactly 19 hours since I had left my room in Aix at 4:15 that morning.

It was so nice to see Warren’s friendly face waiting for me on the other side of that arrival door in South Africa. I met Warren three and a half years ago at a program in Ottawa called Experience Canada 2004. (In a nutshell: 20 Canadian students + 20 students from 10 different countries around the world.) He and I have kept in contact over the years and he visited me in Ottawa this past summer. Obviously, it was now my turn to pay him a visit in HIS country!

Stashing my luggage in the trunk of his car—or should I say “boot” in good South African—and attempting to open the passenger’s door lead Warren to ask me “are you driving?” Of course, silly me, South Africa (with no ties at all to the Queen), is one of the few countries that follows the British tradition of driving on the wrong—er, I mean the “left”—side of the road and of the car! (That would prove to be a difficult habit to break when, further into the trip, Warren taught me to drive a standard on the left side of the road, shifting with my left hand!)


We spent the night at Warren’s twin brother, Kyle’s apartment, and when we arrived, I met Kyle and Kyle’s girlfriend Candice. The two of them had just returned from an attempted trip to Mozambique. Warren and I got to hear the highly entertaining story of how their trip turned into a whole different kind of adventure, never actually making it to Mozambique, but instead, getting stuck in Swaziland with a broken down Land Rover and a creepy old man who’s nickname translated to washcloth. We stayed up talking for hours, but the day of travelling had drained me, so I fell asleep, had a nice sleep in, and woke up to the 25-degree sunshine on Kyle’s balcony at 11 in the morning!

Saturday, December 22

My first day in Pretoria was spent in the gorgeous summer weather (apparently the first day that it hadn’t rained since the summer holidays had started!). Warren took me around to show me a bit of his city and his life. We stopped at a really nice sport complex with fields, ponds, and all sorts of strange birds. We went to see the Union Buildings but couldn’t take a tour because, in the words of the security guards, “it’s a Republic... but it’s not open to the PUBLIC!” I swear they had used that line dozens of times, and yet they still found it hysterical. So we walked around in the gardens out front where there were a couple sessions of wedding photos going on, it was like being on Parliament hill during wedding season (minus the traditional costumes).


We ate lunch at Harrie’s Pancakes, which should really have been called Harrie’s “Crepes”. Canadian pancakes are called flapjacks in South African, while Canadian crepes are called pancakes. They were delicious all the same, and if I had paid what I have been getting used to in France, I could have gotten three times as much food (but then my stomach would have exploded). After, Warren took me on a tour of where he went to high school, Pretoria Boys High. Again, they definitely follow British tradition, or “Harry Potter tradition” as I can better identify with. It looked like a snooty, uppity, private, boys school, but even though they wear uniforms, and have “houses” and “prefects” and “head boys” and every possible sport team and club you could ever think of, they’re still just a public school (with a school building that was named a national monument, and used in movies—think: I Dream of Africa).


Since we had some time before our evening plans, which were being kept as a surprise to me, we headed back to his brother’s apartment and watched the movie “Grandma’s Boy” (that would be continuously quoted for the rest of the trip) with Kyle and Candice. We left right afterwards because we had to head to Warren’s house to drop of my suitcase before our “evening plans”—which Warren was refusing to tell me about. We dropped off my stuff at “home base” for the next couple of weeks, I changed my clothes, and I briefly met Warren’s mom before I was whisked out the door and back in the direction of Johannesburg. In the car, Warren pulled something out of his pocket and handed it to me—two tickets to see Lion King: The Musical!! The show had been extended twice since it had been playing at the MonteCasino in Johannesburg, and it’s no wonder why! It was FANTASTIC. I saw three musicals in New York last summer (I had wanted to see the Lion King then, but it was sold out), and they all paled in comparison to this one. The costumes were unbelievably clever, the set designers had done brilliant work, the choreography made you not want to blink, and the neatest part was that, since it was being performed in South Africa, they added a bit of South African and Afrikaans flavour to several parts! We went out for dinner in one of the casino restaurants before heading back home to Pretoria. It was an awesome night!!


Sunday, December 23

This was a busy day, but I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking this time. We started off the day by heading to the Sterkfontein Caves—the Cradle of Humankind. The tour guide was interesting and funny, too. And the caves were so cool (in more ways than one—it was 18 degrees in the caves while it was something like 30 outside)!



Warren testing the tour guide’s facts about it being fresh water. He was even allowed to hop the fence after the rest of the group had moved on. The verdict? “Tastes a little like the fruit punch that I had just finished.”



We ventured to a Lion Park after that. I wonder what customs would have said if I had tried to take one of the cubs back to France with me. I really wanted to.














We headed back to Warren’s, went for a quick swim in his backyard to cool off, a walk around the neighbourhood (which isn’t as common to do as it is in North America), and then watched the movie Goodbye Bafana that was on TV. It was the story of the friendship between Nelson Mandela and a prison guard that formed over the 27 years that Mandela was in prison as a convicted terrorist. The prison is on Robben Island, just off the coast of Cape Town. I didn’t get there this trip, but I’ll do that next time.


Quick Observations

It doesn’t take long to realize the many differences upon arriving in South Africa. Here is a collection of observations I made during my 18-day stay:

• South Africa is a third-world country with first-world cities. In fact, I was shocked that they called it a third-world country when I first arrived, because I had only seen the city. You drive for a few kilometers outside of the city, and you reach the townships. They’re chunks of land covered with people illegally setting up “living quarters”—for lack of a better term. Most of the time, it’s sheets of scrap metal propped up with anything they can find. The roofs are also sheets of metal and usually have bricks, or water jugs, or rocks scattered on top of them to hold them down against the weather.


• The houses in the cities all have walls around them. No one has a front yard that hasn’t got a fence or a wall surrounding it. (It’s actually quite similar in France, but I’m not sure if it’s for the same reasons.) However, in South Africa, the walls and the fences have even more security features including, barbed wire, spiked fence tops, or even electrical fencing. Any of the above is completely normal. And of course everyone’s got an alarm system in their house, and maybe even a couple of dogs, or more precisely, TWO dogs: one small yappy dog to wake everyone up by going nuts, and one large menacing dog to scare away whoever set off the little yappy one!


Warren’s driveway. Notice the electric fence that runs just above the wall.

• Everyone you see working will be black. I was told that the country was about 70% blacks and 30% whites. They have laws that would get a black person hired if, for example, a black person and a white person with identical qualifications were applying for the same job. They have rules saying sports teams have to have a certain number of blacks on them. Warren tells me he’s often one of the only white guys on his soccer teams. McDonalds is NOT a student job. It’s a full time job that enables the unemployed to be hired. It seems that everyone you see working, meaning public service jobs, is black. Don’t take my word for a fact, but it’s an observation I made.