Doing tourist stuff

Thankfully we woke to blue skies. I asked Bosi to ring the manager so I could speak to her on the phone – the owner is away. After a heated exchange I hung up and received yet another comforting hug from Bosi, who then took up my suggestion that she move us into the cottage next door that had been vacated that morning. This lifted my spirits – photos here show it is quite pretty.
We then walked up to the local shops again and had an interesting hour or so with Vodacom getting a local sim card and data plan for our phones from a very very sweet young man – is it a sign of old age that young men seem so sweet and polite?? While our phones worked straightaway we were still not connected to the internet but were assured by young Nicholas that would only take an hour.
We had arranged with Bosi to book us a driver for 1pm so rushed back home to be collected by him to take us to the Apartheid Museum. A driver? Public transport is either non existent or dangerous to use, taxis not reliable, so the usual practice is to hire a driver and car. Another lovely young man, Michael spent the 30 minute drive doing a little tourist guide work as well which was great as it gave us a bit more information to add to getting to know the city. The Museum is very well designed, informative, and very depressing. After the Hurt Locker the night before I decided I had already seen enough of men killing each other so couldn’t bear to watch many of the movies. A full wall screening of the Soweto uprisings of the 1970s was especially unbearable. The museum is set out chronologically so by the time you get to the gallery devoted to Mandela’s release you are caught up in the joy and emotion of the crowds on the TV screen there.

In the Apartheid section of the museum, I was especially struck by the place that text held in the suppression of black people in that era. One wall has a list of the Acts and Regulations passed by the government over the years as they tried to legislate against any possible resistance to the system. And then there are the walls of pass books, licences, and permits that black South Africans had to carry. A letter giving a woman permission to travel 30 kms from her home to attend her son’s wedding, with the provision that she gave no speeches while in attendance. A video of a government minister explaining that pass books were very useful for the native as it gave him somewhere safe to keep all the documentation he needed to lead his daily life. An echo of this still remains – at Vodacom, the young Nicholas didn’t quite know how to deal with the computer system that asked him to enter my 13 character ID number when I kept telling him that I didn’t have an ID number at all – let alone one 13 characters long.
Bought our first fridge magnet of the trip, had late lunch at the museum café with our first sth African beer ( a lager v. nice), and then home and cooked our first meal in the cottage with not too much trouble.
Got to find out the name of the bird that is waking us up early in the morning. Raucous loud, nothing like I have ever heard before. Huh wouldnt you know it it’s an ibis – Hadada Ibis – dark rather than the white scavengers that haunt UQ food outlets but the noise is so much worse!