As I’d hoped, I’ve been having a lot of conversations with the people I’m meeting along the way. Some things I’ve heard and seen:

• Sitting with a couple Indian twentysomethings at a local bar, I asked, so, “What do you think of the new South Africa?” They replied, “We get to go where we want… and we get to speak to people like you.”
• At a market in downtown Durban, I stopped to watch a lively outdoor performance with several hundred others. I thought it might have been an evangelistic crusade. Someone was passing out flyers, so I asked for one. He grinned, then handed me a flyer advertising the amazing tribal cures of the witch doctor who was performing. He told me he was from Malawi, that he’d been traveling from place to place and that he was passing out flyers just to get a few rand to survive. He told me he wanted to come to America (and this is hard to say) to “work for a white man like me”.
• Looking for fish in the tidal pools at Umhlanga Rocks, I ran into two small Indian boys who were doing the same. None of us were having much luck, so I ran to a beach shop and got some nets for all of us. Their mother insisted that I join them for some Kentucky Fried Chicken and that I visit them at their home.
• Speaking to two white South Africans at a café on the beach, I asked about their experience in the new South Africa. After griping about how difficult it was for them to get their black African clients to pay their debts, they lamented the terrible reality that because of AIDS, the death rate in South Africa now exceeded the birth rate. I later heard on the radio that life expectancy in South Africa has dropped from 64 to 46.

And some observations… (more…)

For the last few years I’ve lived a sedentary life, mostly exercising my mouse clicking finger and little more, so I packed a full supply of Advil in anticipation of the inevitable aches and pains of throwing my flaccid body into the tumbling waves. Well, my first dousing was a simulated one, but no less painful for it. My luggage was delayed in London, so with no swim trunks or sandals, on my first day I headed to the amazing Gateway Mall to pick up some cheap clothes. Turns out that Gateway has a simulated surfing and bodyboarding machine that was too fun to pass up. This amazing machine creates a perpetual wave, with an awesome barreling break. I started off on a boogey board to get a feel for the force of the wave, and after getting spat out the other end several times, got the feel for it. But when I tried to upgrade to the surfboard, my luck was far worse. I just couldn’t get the feel for it during the twenty or so minutes left in my session, despite the kind attention of some of the experts on hand. During my session on the wave, there were three hotshots and myself. So, while they were pulling verticals and 360s, I was just trying to stay on my feet for a few seconds before being pulled into the vortex. It was humbling, but I assure you, I was all smiles on the other end. This thing is a riot, and I’ll probably get back there later in the week to give it another try. (more…)

They say that our smell remembers the best. Perhaps that’s why elephants don’t forget anything, why, with that big ol’ snout of theirs. Then again, I’ve never really believed that in any case. How could we really know whether elephants can remember any better than bees, lemurs, or the likes of us? But regardless, I’m always amazed at how precisely I remember a smell, and returning to a place that’s brimming with nostalgia and ancient memories occasions many remembrances. Every place has its smell, whether it be Colorado’s wonderfully aromatic crisp air or Los Angeles’ warm, smoggy, muggy cocktail. After arriving at Johannesburg’s O.R. Tambo airport I passed by a bakery and instantly its unique and unmistakeable scent took me back to the mornings my mom would take me to the bakery at Florida Center in Johanessburg when she was preparing a talk. It’s amazing to me the lucidity of this smell so many years on, and how it is so tightly bound to the memories of that place. Another wonderful and distinctive South African smell, believe it or not, is the smell of burning fields. South Africans regularly burn the fields to prevent fires from getting out of control and this scent in the air is wonderful. It’s something akin, I’d say, to the first whiffs of cut grass in the Spring in Colorado. (more…)

After working virtually all day, every day for as long as I can remember, I’m taking (count it) a full month of vacation to colorful South Africa. It seems an opportune time to blog about my misadventures there. It promises to be a tad more interesting than my normal goings on… “I just applied my 30th hard light filter in Photoshop”, or, “I just wrote a wicked CSS file”. (more…)