Someone recently emailed me to ask about some tips about travelling to South Africa, which I did in 2004. Here are some pre-Flickr photos. These were kind of off-the-cuff, but I guess they highlight what I took away from that trip:
- This blog post expresses my frustration around not understanding how safe I was. I wasn’t worried that I was not safe, but rather that I was worried that I was worrying too much, if that makes any sense.
- Definitely go to Kruger National Park. That’s one part of the country where the aforementioned issue isn’t a problem. Assuming you understand the threat signifiers of an African elephant. But seriously, it’s an extraordinary place.
- Equally extraordinary are private game reserves. The one we went to was mind-buggeringly expensive, and we could only afford it because my stepmother secured the major discount for being a South African. I’m sure there’s a sliding scale of these reserves, but it’s a different experience than the public game park. If you’re going all this way, it’s worth going to one.
- If you’re planning on taking a lot of photos of animals, bring the biggest, best zoom lens you can afford and are willing to carry. The ‘best’ part is important because you’ll often spot animals in low light, and the cheaper lenses fail miserably here (I know, I own one).
- Frankly, Cape Town and Johannesburg didn’t do much for me. The latter is apparently quite unsafe, and the former (while beautifully situated) felt like a slightly sad version of Vancouver. I really enjoyed the smaller towns we went to, which were Arniston (a tiny fishing village) and Hermanus (a charming coastal town).
- Before Costa Rica and South Africa, I was skeptical of guides. Take advantage of them, as they’ll provide great local information and may be some of the only opportunities you’ll have to talk to black people (a difficulty I had with my whole trip). I’m not talking about big groups, but in many locations you can secure affordable local guides.
- The flight is killer. My stepmother has done the trip many times, and she always advises going west, through London (arg, Heathrow!) as opposed to east. If you can spend even two nights in London, it’s worth doing, as the whole thing is something like 40 hours in the air. I trust, by the time you’ll leave, water will be back on the permitted items list.
I almost edited the sentence ‘may be some of the only opportunities you’ll have to talk to black people’ to ‘may be some of the only opportunities you’ll have to talk to African people’, but there are plenty of non-black African people.
Maybe I should have written ‘to talk to non-Caucasian South Africans’? I suppose that’s more politically correct, but kind of obfuscates what I mean.
Methinks I doth protest too much.
UPDATE: My friend Ger sent along a link to a good Guardian article entitled How I never quite fell for South Africa. Maybe it’s just the BBC and The Guardian, but the British media seem to love the ‘departing correspondent’ angle.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
Darren: Why does your step mother advise you to route through Heathrow?
Is there that much of a time difference? Plus, Heathrow sucks, we have all being to London, and routing through Asia would give you a good opportunity to stop off in Asia for a couple of days.
Bobby: I’m not sure, to be honest, and, ironically, she’s travelling at the moment, so I can’t ask her.
-via asia is a much longer flight path And mother doesn’t want to kick around Asia for 2 days. Pretty simple.
Darren, I think you mean “best telephoto lens” not “best zoom lens.” For the same money, you can get a much better fixed-focal-length, wide-aperture lens for your camera than a zoom.
What I mean is, you’ll get a better 300 mm lens (that only works at that focal length) that works better in low light than an 80-300 mm zoom, which will necessarily compromise to get you the ability to go from semi-telephoto to full-telephoto.
The word you’re looking for is probably ‘indigenous’, rather than the fairly historically troublesome ‘black’.
Darren: Indeed, ‘indigenous’ is better, though a real belletrist could probably take issue along migratory lines.
i was a big fan of the town of knysna — it’s on a lagoon!
For South Africa in particular, I don’t think “indigenous” makes sense, since the black Xhosa and the white Dutch arrived in the area around the same time (the 17th and 18th centuries) and overwhelmed the truly indigenous people who lived there beforehand, then fought each other. And of course there is the large proportion of the population whose ancestors are from India and other nations, or whose background is mixed, which further confuses the terminology.