Visiting South Africa

About a month ago I returned from my unforgettable trip to South Africa. I visited our friendship school there with four other teachers. We stayed in South Africa 8 days. We saw so much that it felt much longer time. The local teachers took us so well that it also felt like we belonged there. We all experienced so much that it will take me more than one post to unload.

I start with the landscapes. Half of our trip we stayed in Pretoria area where the friendship school Arethabeng situated. Then we took a bus all across South Africa to Cape Town and stayed there for the rest of our trip. The views were beautiful and it definately was worth taken the 22-hour bus ride. The picture above is taken on the bus route. I love the mountains. We don't have them in Finland. Seeing mountains makes me aldo miss Colorado and the Rocky Mountains.

Here are landscapes from the Pretoria area:

This is Pretoria, the capital of South Africa:

We also visited Soweto and the former house of president Nelson Mandela. That area is the only one in the world from where has come two Nobel Peace Prize winners: Desmond Tutu in year 1984 and Nelson Mandela year 1993. There is nothing special in that area. It's a common township (area were blacks were inhabited) as you can see. Nowadays there are lot of turist there - of course.

On our way back from Soweto we also saw some strange huge shapes of land every now and then. We kept wondering what they are and finally heard the explanation. Those things were made out of the waste land from the gold mines! I figured that there must be many gold mines near by while those things were huge and there wasn't only one of them. One of the teachers told also that those waste land hills were made on purpose in between the townships and Johannesburg so that it would be even harder for blacks to get in there. How cruel can a human being be?

The bus took us through the Hex Valley which produces 60% of South Africas grapes. It was a very very beautiful valley and you could see miles and miles of those grape plantations.

The sad thing was that right beside those plantations you would see informal settlements like this and you realize that the poorest of the South Africa are those who pick the grapes. They sell South African grapes at the grocery store closest to us. Every time I buy them I feel bad. I get them so cheap because someone is picking them up with too little salary. Made me want to buy fair trade products even more! Afterwards I even read one blog that told about the HIV problem in that area:
The Hex Valley is a wine growing region – every year, more than 23,000 seasonal workers, largely from the Eastern Cape, migrate to the region to become grape pickers. 28 per cent of pregnant women in the Eastern Cape have HIV, which means that as people spread across the country desperate to find work, so too does the HIV virus.

Well, the landscapes on the bus route continued to be beautiful.



And in Cape Town we continued to enjoy the beauty of South Africa. Escpesially the Table Mountain was worth seeing!

This is the tourist harbour area. It was a huge contrast to be there after those days in Soshanguve township. The poor children from shacks had changed into the rich tourists from all over the world, sandy roads with fruit sellers on the roadsides had changed into fancy restaurants and shiny corridors of the mall. I didn't feel at home any more...