Don't Bump If You Can't Grind

**** the internet is being lame and not letting us post pictures, so we are going to post the text today and try again with the pics tomorrow....

Where do we start?!?!?!?! Spring break 2010… one month late (South African style). .While we could write for years on all of the interesting/fun/adventurous/random things that we did/saw/learned/experienced, we wont bore you with the details. Or maybe we will… we will have to see how this blog goes…
On our break we went to Swaziland, Durban and the Drakensburg Mountains via the Baz Bus- a transportation for backpackers that takes you around the country and drops you off in front of your hostel.
Chapter I: Swaziland. Or should we say, the Kingdom of Swaziland. Oh yes, that’s right. As in, there is a king. And here is our picture with him:

Swaziland looks like a lush, tropical paradise. And it is amazingly clean, no litter anywhere, and all of the public bathrooms were spotless (and if you know us, you know we know bathrooms). And the people- super nice and friendly and helpful. We did a safari on horseback, singly-handedly supported their economy for the next 5 months (damn you African crafts markets- especially the jewelry made out of elephant hair), walked a lot, and took a walking tour of a village. On the tour, we met a man who quite his job and is now dedicating his life to uplifting and empowering youth and women through the arts and music. In these villages the arts are not recognized as important, and the kids know nothing about it. This man is trying to inspire the kids to think outside of the box, open and expand their views, because he views the biggest problem in the country to be the intellectual poverty, far worse than economic poverty.

Chapter II: Durban. On the way to Durban, we heard the most disturbing radio commercial ever. The jingly went: Soloooomon, the self-sacrificing salmon!” It was for canned tuna/salmon. Unfortunately for us, the jingle was damn catchy, and a week later we are still singing it. Durban, as a city, is in shambles as the government is trying to fix every road for the world cup. Do you know it is 54 days away? Also of interest, the government is changing the name of all the roads, away from their English names and back to traditional African names, which are kind of long and hard to pronounce, and our taxi driver was less than excited about this decision. We thought it was cool, though. And after coming from clean, clean, pristine Swaziland, Durban was a landfill. There were mountains of trash building along the curbs in the streets. In Durban we went to the art museum and natural science museum. And we learned that honey bees navigate using the sun, and only female mosquitos bite you. We wandered across a strike by municipality workers demanding better wages. We met a lot of really nice people in Durban, including: the “opposition politician” who explained the strike to us, the greek man with a deli that gave us free dessert and continuously called his niece ugly to her face, and the nice Indian man who worked in the sporting goods store that filled our water bottles. Yay. We spent some time on the beach, and then ate at a cool restaurant where they paint your face in traditional Zulu style.

The next day we took a 7 hour tour that covered almost everything there is to do in the city. We saw the coast, the harbor, a market, complete with crafts next to the meat market with sheep’s head and innards, saw the Cato township, the Indian township of Chatsworth, the Hare Krishna temple of understanding, the Indian market where we had lunch at our guide’s wife’s restaurant- spicy and delicious-, drove by the largest mosque in the southern hemisphere, went to the botanical gardens, and lastly to a museum about the history of the Cato township.

Chapter III: Drakensburg mountains. They say that the mountains look like the landscape in lord of the rings. We would probably agree if it hadn’t of been the beginning of winter and the greenery was now brownish. But hey, we can use our imaginations. We saw 800 year old bushman cave paintings. Awesome. Except for the stupid tourists in the past that poured water and coke on the paintings to make them look better in pictures, and thus washed the paintings away. The history of the paintings dates back 5,000 years. The next day, Ilene took a personal day, and Ayla almost fell off a mountain. Multiple times. Ayla went on a tour to the top of a mountain that has the world’s second longest waterfall. The ledge we walked on was sometimes non-existant, there was no railing, and I am pretty sure that if I tripped I would have bounced down the mountain-side. I took comfort in thinking that it would be a quick death. I was really not prepared for the 3 and a half mile hike up, and then scaling a rock wall (without safety/security ropes) for a ¼ of a mile vertically. I know this excitement has put you on the edge of your seat, but fear not, Ayla is alive and typing this blog (with Ilene’s imput who is sitting next to her).

Chapter IV: two nice jewish boys in Jo-burg. We had to stay one night in Jo-burg because we got in too late for the orphanage to pick us up, and lucky for us, our friends have the hookup with two nice jewish boys who live there. They took us out to dinner and drinks, and then we got to stay at one of their houses. Stand-up shower and free internet. Need I say more?
We finally arrived back at Botshabelo today, and while it was nice to travel and experience something new, we are glad to be back home. The End.

ps- if you are wondering about the title of this blog... the only mode of public transportation in South Africa is "taxis," which are little mini vans that cram the people in and follow a route. In Durban we discovered that they had tricked out their taxis, and given them wild names such as "dont bump if you cant grind," X-convict, Seducer, sexy attitude, souljah, g-thing, etc. And some of the taxis are like traveling dance clubs... you can hear their music blaring a mile away, or should we say kilometer away.