Feb 9-07: The Garden Route Day #1

Photos: the drive from Cape Town to Plettenberg Bay, through the little Karoo area; Sophie the dog; views of the townships outside of Knysna

We left Cape Town this morning, and headed out for a 6 hour drive to Plettenberg Bay, a surfing community on the southern coastline, along an area commonly known as the Garden Route. I think the drive was lovely – I say I think, because we have now caught weather and it rained much of the day, so it was difficult to see very much. We drove through primarily an area called the Little Karoo, which is simply a word for what we’d consider to be prairie – except there are rolling hills, all in a golden colour at this time of year. Primary industry appears to be grain, cows and sheep, and some ostrich as well.

It appears that “The Plett” (as the community is known locally) sits on a HUGE expanse of coastline, with a beach that pretty much goes on forever. Have yet to wander down to the waterfront, although you can get a partial view of it from our cottage. The Plett is one in a series of holiday vacation towns along this coastline, which I gather is a magnet for vacationers during these summer months. And of course, surfer dudes.

Our rental cottage is a bit of a trip, run by a serious hippie chick. But, of course that goes hand-in-hand with the surf community culture of course. Oh, and she has two lovely dogs, they are some kind of terrier (Lakeland?), the younger one (Sophie) still a pup who loves to be petted and loved. So I have a surrogate puppy for a couple of days, which I am very happy about, can get my dog fix! We are staying in a place called the Stone Cottage, which is actually a large stone building (we are on the ground level, the owner lives upstairs), and there is another cottage next door. I believe the place dates back to 1910, built by her great-grandfather, and was the very first building the community, built as summer vacation cottage. It’s a funny cobbling together of little rooms, low doorways, a partially outdoor bathroom, big opening windows, and a lot of character and very cozy feel to it. And the best part is that they have a Jacuzzi in the yard just outside our door (Steve will be happy when he arrives today!). And at R1000 a night, it’s a serious steal for the 4 of us.

Steve is in Jo-burg again tonight, most likely finished up from his Botswana coal mine visit yesterday and today. He flies to the community of George, which is about an hour from here, so we’ll be driving out to pick him up in the morning, about 11:30 am. Then he is finished his work, and can relax and concentrate on his holiday! He’ll be able to spend 2 of the 3 nights with us here, which is nice.

So not much to report today, since it was largely a traveling today. But this gave me time to think about my trip so far, and some of things I have seen. I continue to be astounded at this land of contrasts, for that is truly what it is. In our travels so far, you often see people waiting at the side of the road (always groups of black people), they walk the highways trying to catch a ride to wherever they need to go – most are unemployed workers hoping for day labour (I guess companies often go and pick up day labourers this way). Then you occasionally see a truck, whose bed is jam packed with black workers. I see very little public transportation at all, other than in Cape Town. So I can only surmise that many, many people spend hours every day trying to get to and from work, or to get anywhere.

Today I also got a daylight look at the shantytowns near the Cape Town airport, as we drove out of town. They go on for miles, and can barely be called shacks. They are primarily metal cladding, constructed of found scraps, no windows, no paved streets, no plumbing, no running water. There are electrical poles that run up and down the lanes, so they have some electricity. Some of them are no bigger than a tool shed. If you saw a structure like that, you’d probably take it for an abandoned shack. Here, they are inhabited by literally thousands of people. And yet, they are completely uninhabitable, by any reasonable measure. I bought a lovely book in Cape Town that describes township life, and the different kinds of houses – the ones I had seen by the airport are the worst of the worse, the shantytown, erected by poor migrant workers who are flooding into the city looking for work.

As we drove here, every town, large or small, pretty much follows the same pattern. You will see farmhouses (larger ones for the owners, smaller shacks which I assume are for their workers), and then some middle class homes. As you come into the main town, the nicest homes are of course of the hillsides, or in gated communities, or along the shoreline. And then as you leave the town, the townships line the highway, usually on both sides. Big or small community, they are always a part of it. And always in the worst areas. In some cases, some of the shacks have begun to be replaced by small constructed “homes” – really nothing more than very small concrete houses with metal roofs (I gather this will be the plan over the coming years for most of the townships; although the pace of change is slow). But I suspect they have proper plumbing and although tiny and crammed in with their neighbours, are a significant improvement on the shantytowns. These people are the lucky ones. I had thought that the Cape Town shantytowns were particularly bad, but only as a result of their urban location. But we passed some outside of the resort town of Knysna, just up the road, that were barely structures at all – odd boards nailed together to resemble a box. Seriously, if you allowed your dog to live in such a thing in Canada, you’d be fined by the SPCA. And yet, this goes on here, and in many, many, many places.

Locally there are a couple of township tours – these have been designed to aid street children, day care etc. I find it astounding that in a country as affluent and stable at SA, that so MANY people still do not have access to even the basics, like food, decent housing and basic sanitation. There is no welfare (and probably why the personal and property crime rates are so high, people are quite literally desperate with nothing to fall back on). How white South Africans managed to turn a blind eye to this, for so long, is beyond me. It seems that considerably higher taxation is in order, to deal with this huge disparity, but I suspect that will not happen. The hot political topic of the day seems to be the rate of crime; and also drugs, as evidenced by some of our conversations with residents in Cape Town and Joburg. They seem to focus less on the root cause of this surge in crime.

As we arrived into Plettenberg, it was about 3:30 pm, and time for many of the workers to head home. Streets filled with black workers walking, and the station up the road, where shuttle vans congregate to drive people back to their homes in the townships. If nothing else, SA could go a long way to helping the plight of its poor people here by providing decent and cheap transportation. They must spend hours traveling to and from work every day…

The country seems to be one of an over-abundance of labourers, and ALL of them are black, it seems. We pulled into a gas station, and FIVE attendants rushed out to do the windows, pump the gas etc. The restaurants have multiple wait staff, and they are constantly cleaning up after you. Almost all home-owners have maids. Every mall, every street, there are people cleaning, labouring. And the service mentality is incredible, people anticipate your needs everywhere, they rush to serve you, from restaurants to grocery stores, I do not think I have ever known any level of service that comes close in Canada, anywhere. Yet these day-workers and general labourers are so badly paid. The book says that they earn on average R20 to R60 a day, which is the equivalent of about $2.75 to $8.50 Canadian dollars per day. The bread we bought at the grocery store last night was R5. My new digital camera is worth over 11,000 rand, so you can see why personal property crime is so attractive an option here. And I gather that unemployment in these township communities runs 50-60% or more. So the competition for any available jobs, and the simple need to find a way to feed one’s family, is high.
Well, time to leave the meditations on poverty & privilege for another day. Very, very tired, after a long day of traveling. I go to sleep both somewhat disturbed by what I have seen, and also with a renewed sense of our INCREDIBLE luck at being born Canadian, and living in a country where so much is taken for granted. Truly, we need to count