Day 24: Joburg Unraveled

Day 24

Today I'm in: Johannesburg, South Africa

Johannesburg, Joburg, Jozi, Mzansi... everyone's got a different name for this city.  Whatever you call it, I learned today it's not as scary of a place as I initially thought.  

I took a tour today with Voyo, a guide from Jozi Experience, a company that runs individual trips through Johannesburg.  He picked me up this morning at my guesthouse and we headed first for Constitution Hill, the site of the city's main prison during the apartheid regime.  Just about every political prisoner (black and white) in the area passed through the jail at some point during the 1970s and 1980s.  The jail is shut now and has been redeveloped into the country's supreme constitutional court. 

From there we crossed the Nelson Mandela Bridge, which connects the up-and-coming area of Newtown with the Braamfontein area, home to the University of the Witwatersrand.  Per Voyo, Newtown is becoming the neighborhood of choice for students, and there seemed to be a lot of new apartments and commercial construction happening there.  The bridge itself crosses the railyards north of the city and has a great view of the downtown skyline. 

We then headed into Joburg's much-maligned central business district for a trip to the top of the Carlton Centre, Africa's tallest building.  Most multi-national companies fled the CBD for the suburbs in the early 1990s and for much of the last 15 years, it's been synonymous with crime and chaos.  In the last five years or so, however, it's begun to turn around, and some companies have even moved their offices back, in order to take advantage of cheaper rents.  The contrast between the glass-and-steel skyscrapers of the 1980s and the street-level craziness of vendors and traffic was very real - there's no forgetting the fact this is an African city, even if the previous government tried to pretend it wasn't.  The CBD still has a ways to go, but the streets are generally trash-free and daytime crime has dropped significantly.  And the view from the Carlton Centre was pretty outstanding, too. 

From the CBD we drove north through a series of neighborhoods and a microcosm of present-day South African society.  We passed through Hillbrow, a high-rise suburb that is one of the most densely populated areas in Africa.  During the 1980s Hillbrow was South Africa's first 'gray area' where whites and blacks were permitted to live together and was viewed as the most forward and cosmopolitan place in the country.  Sadly, today it's degenerated into one of the country's worst slums, and the high-rise apartments have their windows smashed out and show evidence of fires.  Just a few minutes later we passed through the leafy and very wealthy areas of Parktown and Rosebank, where some of the nation's most powerful business and political figures live.

Finally we arrived in Alexandra, one of the city's townships.  Unlike some of the better-known black townships in Johannesburg (think Soweto) Alexandra was never really planned by the apartheid government - it just sprung up informally and was allowed to stay, even though it's a stone's throw from extremely upscale neighborhoods.  It was like entering a different country - goats and chickens in the streets, flimsy shacks made from wood and corrugated steel, people everywhere.  Voyo explained that Alexandra is most inhabited by migrants from neighboring countries like Zimbabwe and Mozambique, which is why it remains poorer and more depressed than Soweto, which is mostly comprised of South African citizens whose living standards have skyrocketed in the last two decades.  

We finished up with a trip to the Apartheid Museum in southern Johannesburg, which is very nicely done.  Visitors are randomly assigned a race (I was 'colored') and forced to use specific entrances and toilets while in the museum.  In general, the museum lays out the origination, development and defeat of apartheid in a very balanced and non-accusatory way.  The overall message is that the country is moving forward and not dwelling on the past (although certain agitators in the current government seem like they haven't gotten the message.) 

After driving all over town and becoming more familiar with the city, this doesn't seem like such a scary place.  Does that mean I can go for a walk at night by myself?  No way.  The electric fences, barbed wire and CCTV cameras still have their purpose.  And going somewhere like Alexandra on my own is probably a poor choice.  But it's not the crime-ridden nightmare it's made out to be, either. 

Day 23: The Next Episode

Day 23
Today I'm in: Johannesburg, South Africa

Well, 13 hours actually went by pretty quickly.  I slept for six of them (intermittently) and woke up off the coast of Madagascar, with only about 3.5 hours left in the flight.  We landed in Johannesburg at seven in the morning on what was shaping up to be a really nice day.  As expected I felt cold, dry air right when I stepped off the plane - it was only about 40 degrees when we landed, although it warmed up to about 65 later on.

I picked up my rental car in the airport garage and headed for my guesthouse in the city.  Even at rush hour, Johannesburg seemed very organized - drivers stayed in their lanes and kept to posted speed limits, unlike in Asia.  The city is very sprawling and is linked up by a complicated web of freeways and tollways.  Johannesburg was founded during South Africa's gold rush in the late 1800s and today the city is dotted with large heaps of gold mine waste, many of which are now covered in homes or warehouses.  Between the freeways and the suburban sprawl it felt very much like home. 

I'm staying in the Melville neighborhood northwest of downtown Johannesburg.  Melville is near the University of Johannesburg and the University of the Witwatersrand, two of South Africa's largest colleges, and so it's acquired a reputation as a trendy area for students to rent apartments.  7th Street is the main drag through Melville and is lined with hip bars and restaurants, but feels pretty relaxed.  The sidewalk overhangs and drive-up parking reminded me of small towns I saw in Australia.

Most people in the US know Johannesburg for its appalling crime rate.  By most reports, violent crime has dropped in the last five years, but it's still a city where you need to look over your shoulder.  There are a lot of shady-looking characters loitering on just about every street corner, even in fashionable neighborhoods.  Houses are surrounded by stone walls topped with barbed wire and electric fences, drivers are allowed to run red lights at night if they feel threatened, and every home and business pays for a private security service that promises an armed response in five minutes or less.  My guesthouse hides behind a thick plaster wall and electric fencing, and my room has a red panic button that will summon an armed-response team.

Despite this, life seems to go on as usual here and I haven't seen anything to suggest that people don't enjoy living in Johannesburg.  On this pleasant winter day I passed plenty of drivers with their windows open - something the guidebooks tell you never to do - and saw kids of all races walking home from school unsupervised.  You have to be alert here, sure, but not paranoid.  As is the case everywhere in the world, most people here mean well.

After a shower and change of clothes I drove to Rand Airfield, the capital city's general aviation airport, for a visit to the South African Airways Museum Society.  It's a group of former SAA employees and enthusiasts who have amassed a pretty amazing collection of memorabilia and an even more impressive collection of historic aircraft.  When SAA retired the 747-200 and 747-SP (two early models of the type) a few years back, the society convinced them to donate the aircraft, and so both are on display at Rand Airfield.

I met up with Barry Els, one of the society's directors that I'd been corresponding with for a few months, and got an up-close tour of several of both 747s as well as a DC-4 and DeHavilland Dove that are parked on the premises.  When we finished up there, we drove over to the main airfield, where several more historic aircraft - airworthy ones - are kept by Skyclass, a charter company that's a friend of the society.  There I got to go inside a DC-3 and DC-4, and admire a Lockheed Constellation that's under restoration.


Yes, that's right.  I spent 13 hours on a plane and still felt compelled to spend my day going inside even MORE planes.  This is where traveling by yourself is nice, because I don't think anyone else would want to do this, but I had a great afternoon.  Tomorrow I'll be going on a private guided tour of Johannesburg and spending some more time exploring various parts of South Africa's largest city.

Day 22: Goodbye Asia

Day 22

Today I'm in: Hong Kong SAR, China

Three weeks later to the day, I find myself back at the Hong Kong airport with five new countries under my belt and a lot of great memories.  I just arrived from Bali about an hour ago and am waiting on my midnight departure to Johannesburg.  It's going to be long night, but I feel ready for bed - Cathay Pacific business class, take me away. 

No pictures with this post since I was in transit most of the day.  It was pouring rain again this morning in Bali, so my plans to do a bit more wandering were scuppered, but I did go to an Indonesian post office to mail some of my Asian travel guidebooks (which I don't need to cart around for another 8 weeks) home.  It was actually a pretty easy experience... I was braced for mass chaos, but the staff were really helpful and made a custom-sized box for me.  No fuss, no muss.  

Some things I'll miss about Asia: 

- The friendly people.  Even the ones trying to scam you out of money are very cheerful. 

- The intensely flavorful and interesting food.  I will never get sick of eating Asian food of any kind. 

- The general feeling of security.  In Asia you can generally walk around anywhere, any time, and not feel unsafe.  That definitely won't be the case in Africa - it's time to be more on alert. 

- The organized chaos.  There are a thousand things happening in every direction at all times, but you never feel like things are about to grind to a halt or become dysfunctional.  

Things I WON'T miss about Asia:

- Sweating like a pig everywhere I go and having to shower twice a day

- Thrice-daily insect repellent application (although this will be necessary in a few spots in Africa)

- Traffic.  This was particularly irritating on Bali, where going anywhere - even just a few miles - takes typically three times longer than expected. 

- Street food that looks amazing but that you are too afraid to eat

The trip is only a third finished... so much more ahead! 

Days 20 & 21: Bali high (and low)

Days 20 & 21
Today I'm in: Ubud, Bali, Indonesia

I'm a little behind thanks to an internet outage at the hotel, so this post covers two days and will be a bit longer.   

I spent part of my first full day exploring Seminyak, the beach-resort town where I spent my first day and a half on Bali.  I have to say I wasn't really a fan.  Much of Seminyak consists of private villas with high walls, so getting around feels a bit like a rat in a maze, negotiating a lot of high-walled passageways.  The restaurants were all full of Australian tourists sipping espressos and tapping at their iPads.  On top of all that, the beach just honestly wasn't a very good beach.  The sand was kind of grayish, the water was murky and there were hundreds of beach vendors selling towels, "artwork" of questionable craftsmanship, flowers, bottled water, you name it.  Seminyak is apparently nicer than Kuta, the town with which it shares it beach, but overall this particular corner of Bali didn't really appeal to me.

I hopped in a cab later that day and spent two hours grinding slowly along traffic-choked roads to Ubud, my second destination here, which is a village on the slopes of Gunung Agung, the island's primary mountain.  Ubud is really nice - it's lush and green, set among rice paddies and coconut trees, and the entire town is deeply spiritual.  There are Balinese Hindu offerings everywhere - on the sidewalks, tucked into niches of buildings, in front of temples, in the windows of shops - everywhere you turn there are little banana-leaf baskets filled with flowers, herbs and rice as an offering to whatever spirits happen to be resident in that corner of town.

Like the rest of Bali, Ubud has been over-developed, and the town has swallowed up some of the surrounding villages, creating a patchwork of streets several square miles wide lined with guest houses, boutiques and restaurants.  There are a lot of tourists, but it's infinitely nicer than Kuta and Seminyak, even if there's no beach.  I'm staying at the Oka Wati Inn, a small hotel run by the eponymous Oka Wati, a local woman who built the inn on land her family owned back in the 1980s when tourism to Ubud was just taking off.  The rooms are done up with lots of Balinese carvings and teak wood, and the buildings overlook a small rice field behind the town's main road.

I got to spend last night in the company of a pretty large lizard that was on the ceiling of my bedroom.  I didn't notice him when I checked in, and by the time I spotted him (at about 10pm) the hotel office was closed.  He was basically a giant gecko (about a foot and a half long) so there was nothing to really be afraid of - in fact, he was probably eating any mosquitoes that were in the room.  All the same, I didn't really want to spend the night with him on the ceiling above me, so I spent an eventful hour trying to cajole him out the door.  Snapping him with a towel didn't work, creating a little pathway for him out of my dirty clothes didn't work, spraying him with hair product didn't work.  So finally I resigned myself to the fact that my single room was now a double.  In the morning he had left, hopefully without pooping in my suitcase.

Today I woke up to a downpour outside.  It rained very heavily all morning, so I relaxed on the balcony of my room, chatted with friends online and did a bit of planning for South Africa (where I'll be in 48 hours - crazy).  At lunchtime the skies brightened so I headed out to do some of the local area walks from my guidebook.  I spent a few hours wandering through rice paddies, small villages and along ridges above very thickly jungled rivers.  Once I got off of the main Ubud road there were no tourists, and I mostly passed locals carrying whatever fruit, vegetables or crops they had just pulled out of the fields.  All told I walked about six miles.

I finished up my walk at the amazing Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary at the entrance to Ubud village.  The name sounds like an incredibly hokey Asian tourist attraction (and it kind of is) but it was also pretty impressive.  It's a thick patch of forest on the edge of town that's home to a very large, very active colony of Balinese macaques who live in and around a few temple complexes.  The monkeys are not afraid of people at all - they lie across the pathway, run around your legs, and jump onto your shoulders from the trees.  They're looking for food, but they weren't as aggressive as the monkeys on Langkawi.  I had a few monkeys climb up my legs, but once they realized I wasn't going to give them anything they quickly let go.

So what have I been eating?  Tonight I had a pretty awesome meal at a cafe recommended by some friends who were on Bali a year or so ago.  I started off with a bowl of soto ayam - glass-noodle soup with shredded chicken and chili sauce - and then had mie goreng (stir-fried egg noodles with turmeric and lemongrass sauce) for dinner.  The menu at this particular cafe was huge and it was tough to pick, so I'm planning to swing through there again for lunch tomorrow.

Thus concludes the last two days in Bali.  I have most of tomorrow to continue wandering around Ubud before I catch my evening flight to Hong Kong and onward to Africa! 

Day 19: Borobudur and a bit of Bali

Day 19
Today I'm in: Seminyak, Bali, Indonesia


So I'm on Bali now, but I flew in last night and the majority of the day was spent exploring the Borobudur temple complex about an hour outside of Yogyakarta.  It was an interesting drive through rice paddies, palm oil plantations and a lot of chaotic villages with (surprise) tons of motorbike traffic.  The weather was amazing for a second day - no rain at all - and it was a pretty interesting trip.

Borobudur is one of the largest Buddhist temples in Indonesia.  The archipelago was a mix of Buddhist and Hindu before Arab traders began spreading Islam in the 13th century.  The version of Islam practiced in Indonesia traditionally incorporated elements of both pre-existing faiths, although this is changing as many mosques receive funding from Saudi Arabia and are beginning to take on a more fundamentalist tone (apparently the number of Indonesian women wearing headscarves has skyrocketed in the last two decades.)

Fortunately Borobudur survives and was the subject of a very intense renovation project in the early 1980s. The entire temple was dismantled stone by stone, cleaned, and re-assembled on a reinforced concrete platform that stands up against earthquakes and eruptions of nearby Mount Merapi.  This is also why it's possible to walk on all of the temple's levels, which wasn't possible before.

Borobudur is laid out in the shape of a giant mandala, or Buddhist emblem, and was designed to be climbed in a clockwise fashion.  The carvings on each level progressively symbolize the journey to nirvana, the Buddhist heaven - the lowest level shows unenlightened man struggling to survive, whereas the top level symbolizes an enlightened person's attainment of nirvana.  There are more than 400 Buddhas carved throughout the temple.

In other news, my celebrity status was cemented when I was invited to be in four different photos with school groups at Borobudur.  The kids would usually follow me around for awhile, then get one of their teachers to approach me and ask if I'd pose for a picture with them.  By the fourth time around I recognized the pattern and cut out the 'middleman' teacher, which I think surprised the kids a little bit.

When I finished at Borobudur, the driver took me directly to the Yogyakarta airport, where I boarded a flight for the short hop over to Bali.  My first impressions of Bali have not been very positive - the cab ride from the airport to my hotel (a distance of about six miles) took more than an hour as we crawled through slow-moving traffic in Bali's tourist hub of Kuta.  What I saw of Kuta looked just like the rest of Indonesia - mass chaos on the streets and more than a little bit of pollution and poverty.  The Seminyak area, where I am spending the night, is a bit more upmarket, but "upmarket" on Bali means contending with throngs of boorish Australian tourists, which pretty much describes my experience at dinner and while grabbing a drink at a nearby bar.  I'm keeping an open mind - I'll check out the beach today and later on I'm moving up the mountain to the more forested and more culturally-minded Ubud area. 

Day 18: Hey, Mister!

Day 18

Today I'm in: Yogyakarta, Indonesia

I wasn't sorry to see the smog-shrouded sprawl of Jakarta receding behind me today as I flew to Yogyakarta, a city of about a million people that forms the cultural heartland of central Java.  Once we were clear of Jakarta, the air cleared, revealing plenty of mountains, green rice paddies, small villages and twisting rivers.  By the time we started our descent into Yogyakarta (pronounced Joeg-ja-karta and called "Jogja" by locals) we were flying in clear blue skies with only a few scatted clouds - probably the most beautiful day I've had on the trip so far. 

Jogja sits on the central Javanese plain, in the shadow of Gunung Merapi, one of the island's most active volcanoes.  I can see Merapi from my hotel balcony (it's on the left, a bit hard to make out), which regularly spews out ash and sometimes even lava.  It's not erupting right now, however, and I hope it stays that way for another day.  Jogja was hit by a pretty severe earthquake back in 2006, although I didn't see any permanent damage while walking around today. 

The most popular method of getting around Jogja - for both tourists and locals alike - seems to be the becak, or pedicab.  There seems to be a glut of becak on the streets - everywhere I went today, becak drivers were calling out to me.  "Hey, Mister!  Where you go? Where you come from?" was the refrain every time I rounded a corner.  Despite walking several miles around Jogja today, I never took any of the becak drivers up on their offers - maybe tomorrow.  I did see becaks transporting some non-human items, like a refrigerator, a cage full of pigeons, a pallet of what appeared to be lettuce, and a table (pictured.) 

In addition to being called "Mister" everywhere I went, I was also stopped by three different groups of schoolchildren, who asked if they could interview me.  From what I could tell, they get extra credit in school if they practice their English with someone and provide proof for their teachers.  So three different times today, I was videotaped (using camera phones) while middle-school students asked me what foods I've eaten in Indonesia, how I would end Jakarta traffic (answer: nuclear weapons), and what souvenirs I might want to buy in the markets.  Their English was pretty good, especially considering I didn't even start learning a foreign language until I was their age. 

Jogja was a relief after Jakarta - it's still complete madness on the streets, but the skies were blue and the city is laid out on human scale.  Jalan Malioboro, the main shopping street, was bustling with people but still managed to feel like the main street of a smaller town rather than a huge city.  Before it was moved to Jakarta, this was Indonesia's provisional capital for a short while after independence in the late 1940s, but Jogja saves its hatred for the nearby city of Surakarta (also called Solo) which was the seat of a competing sultanate for several centuries during Java's dynastic period.  Today the compete for tourists, who come to visit the kraton (the sultan's palace, where descendants of the royal family still live, and which was unfortunately closed today) and the nearby Buddhist temples of Borobodur, where I'm headed tomorrow. 

I was able to visit the Taman Sari, or water palace, which was built by the sultan in the 1500s with help from a Portuguese architect.  This was the Javanese equivalent of Rome's baths, but reserved for the royal family. It's degenerated quite a bit since that time, but they are slowly restoring the complex and it does have a whiff of former grandeur about it. 

Like most cities I've visited on this trip, Jogja gets even better at night.  After dinner, I returned to Jalan Malioboro, which was even busier than before and crowded with musicians, dancers, jugglers, touts, becak drivers and even more motorbikes than before.   

As I mentioned, tomorrow morning I'm off to Borobodur, about an hour's drive away, where I'll be visiting the 12th-century Buddhist temple complex.  It's supposed to rival Angkor in Cambodia and Bagan in Myanmar, so I'm looking forward to it.  After that I'll have a few more hours in Jogja before catching my evening flight to Bali.  As expected, Indonesia has redeemed itself - I just had a bad introduction. 

Day 17: The Big Durian

Day 17
Today I'm in: Jakarta, Indonesia

If there is a capital city in hell, it probably looks a little bit like Jakarta.

If you go by statistics alone, this is one of the world's great cities.  With 28 million people in the metro area, it's second only to Tokyo as the world's largest urban conglomeration.  It's the undisputed center of Indonesia, which in itself is one of the world's most populous countries.  Its citizens refer to it as the "Big Durian" in a nod to New York's title of the "Big Apple."  The view from my hotel room (right) is only a fraction of the city.

During the two hours it took my cab to get from the Soekarno-Hatta airport to central Jakarta, it seemed like all 28 million people were trying to merge onto the highway connecting the two places.  The view from the cab - when we weren't surrounded by exhaust-belching trucks - was of human settlement as far as the eye could see - buildings to the horizon in all directions, cloaked in a layer of smog, punishing heat and unbelievable humidity.  This is a city of crumbling tower blocks alongside gleaming new apartment buildings, massive elevated expressways, and fetid, pestilential canals (a legacy of the colonial Dutch, who initially tried to replicate Amsterdam here before realizing they were basically digging malaria incubators.)

Once I got settled in my hotel, I gamely hit the street to see what I could of central Jakarta.  My guidebook diplomatically says that Jakarta "presents a challenge for the pedestrian."  The roads are lawless - traffic (when it moves) in all directions, nobody following the signals, honking horns, cutting one another off, driving onto the sidewalk (yes!), swerving crazily.  I've crossed streets in similar free-for-all places like India and Vietnam and never felt the same level of fear that I did today.  There are no crosswalks, no underpasses, no traffic cops.  Yet the sidewalks are heaving with people.  Your best bet is to latch onto a local at an intersection and cross when they do.  Jakarta is the largest city in the world without any sort of metro rail system, although they did put in a reserved-lane bus system a few years ago that has reportedly improved things considerably. 

The upshot to the mass of humanity is that it makes for great people-watching.  There's not much in the way of sights to see, but there are a million stories unfolding on the sidewalks, and the more I walked the more I realized that's what Jakarta offers the tourist.  Outside every run-down corner store, makeshift food stall and wobbly card table serving as a shop, there were people.  More than any of the other cities I've visited on this trip, Jakarta fits the archetype of the crowded, bustling Asian metropolis.  Bangkok comes close, but can't hold a candle to this.

So you can't judge a book by its cover.  In the same way that New York is a fascinating city but (for better or worse) is not representative of the entire United States, I'm sure there's much more to Indonesia than its largest city.  I'll find out tomorrow afternoon, when I leave Jakarta behind and head to Yogyakarta, the cultural heart of Java.

Day 16: One Day in Bangkok

Day 16 
Today I'm in: Bangkok, Thailand

Not a lot to report on today... I left Laos at lunchtime and flew back here to Bangkok, where due to flight times I have to overnight before flying to Jakarta.  Once again, since I have an early-morning flight and don't want to contend with Bangkok's notorious traffic, I'm staying near the airport, at the Queen's Garden "Resort" (that title is a bit dubious) in a neighborhood not far from Suvarnabhumi Airport.

This is the same place I stayed while en route to Chiang Mai about a week ago; however, this time around, I had more time to kill.  I wasn't planning to leave the hotel (I arrived here at about 3pm local time) but then I noticed there was a station of the newly-built Airport Rail Link only about a half-mile away.  I figured I may as well head into Bangkok and at least spend part of the afternoon and evening there.

Walking to the train was an event in itself.  I had to walk through the neighborhood about 15 minutes, and it quickly became clear that the area doesn't see a lot of Westerners.  Calls of "farang" (foreigner) went out as I walked by - none of them were malicious, just more curious than anything - and I had a following of about 10 little kids for a few blocks, all calling out "hello" over and over again.

The train sped me into the city in only about 25 minutes and I switched over to the elevated SkyTrain and headed for the Siam Square area.  I saw most of the sights in Bangkok on my trip back in 2008, and most of the really historical and/or cultural stuff is impossible to get to on public transit (unless you take your chances on one of the city's insanely crowded buses) so I spent a few hours wandering through the city's myriad shopping malls and down Thanon Sukhumvit, where I stayed on my first trip here.

Overall, Bangkok isn't my favorite place.  It's hot, crowded and a little on the seamy side.  It was good to get into town and walk around a bit, though.  Tomorrow it's off to Jakarta!