Ben Roesch's Blog

So we’ve been home for about three weeks now, but I’m finally getting around to posting the final entry about our trip to South Africa. After almost two weeks in South Africa, we finally got to the portion of the trip that convinced me that I wanted to go in the first place — the safari. After returning to Johannesburg from Victoria Falls, we had to spend a night in a hotel near the Joburg airport due to flight timing. The next morning, we got up and took a shuttle to the airport, where we waited for our flight in a private charter room and had drinks. We then boarded a small prop plane that fit about 10 people and took off for a 1 1/2 hour flight to the reserve. We made a few short stops before landing near our lodge on a dirt airstrip. We stayed at a place called the Arathusa Safari Lodge, which is located in the Sabi Sand Game Reserve, adjacent to Kruger National Park. This place was recommended by Renee at Rhino Africa and it was an excellent recommendation.  One of my favorite parts was that, since we were on a private game reserve instead of the National Park, our rangers were allowed to drive off road. This allowed us to get extremely close to many of the animals and really made the experience amazing. Apparently in many of the national parks in Africa you are not allowed to leave the path. I’m pretty sure it would be very frustrating if you saw some lions from a couple hundred yards away, but weren’t allowed to go get a better look. When we arrived at the lodge, we got checked in, had some welcome drinks, and then had lunch. Lunch on safari was a very communal   Read More ...

Getting to Zimbabwe On Sunday we had our flight to Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. We landed at an extremely small airport, complete with baboons roaming the grounds, and spent a while getting through immigration. We got transferred to our hotel, the Victoria Falls Hotel, which also had monkeys in the trees, and tried to walk down to the Falls. On our way, we were stopped by a member of  the Zimbabwe Tourism Police, who told us that there was a charging bull elephant near the path. We ended up going around, but were still able to see the elephant about 200 yards away. We also passed by some warthogs before making it to the entrance of the park. Once we got there, we found out that it costs $30US to get into the park, so we decided to save it for a later day. We were both pretty exhausted from traveling, so we had an early dinner at the hotel, where we saw some tribal dancing and music. Overall, the hotel was very nice and beautiful, but very, very old. We felt like we had stepped back in time during our stay. The hotel has housed many notable people, including Hillary Clinton during Bill’s presidency. The son of the Libyan president was also staying there while we were there. Village Tour, Helicopter Ride, and Elephant-back Safari Monday turned out to be one of the most memorable days that we have ever had. We were picked up at 8:00am for a tour of a traditional African village. We were greeted and shown around by the head of the household, Mpisi. He was a very interesting man and we talked about their households, communal living, religion, medicine, and development in the area. He had very interesting opinions on many things, especially about how development   Read More ...

Saturday morning we got up bright and early so that we could make it in time for our boat trip to Robben Island. Robben Island is a small island in Table Bay (the bay that Cape Town sits on), which was originally used as a leper colony. Eventually it was converted into a prison. It is famous for housing Nelson Mandela during the majority of his incarceration, as well as housing Ghandi at one point. We had a tour of the island scheduled, but Saturday turned out to be extremely windy and all tours were cancelled. The weather in Cape Town is very fickle and it is the second windiest city in the world, after San Francisco. After realizing our tour was cancelled, we decided to wander around the V&A Waterfront. A large mall, Victoria’s Wharf, anchors the area and is very similar to American malls. We walked around the mall, had a leisurely lunch and some ice cream, and then headed back to the hotel to relax for a while. We met a South African couple who was staying in the hotel while we were having afternoon tea (read: drinks & cake). They gave us a number of good tips about what to do in Victoria Falls. They also were very familiar with America in general, including our sports teams. They also mentioned that they had three different friends who were now married to American girls. We assume this is primarily due to American girls’ love of accents. We asked the hotel manager for a dinner recommendation, and he made us a reservation at a restaurant called Blonde. It turned out that they were having a promotion where your entire meal, including drinks, was half off. We ended up having a great bottle of wine and a bottle of   Read More ...

Sorry that we’ve missed a few days of blogging. Things got busy, we did some moving around, and internet access has not been quite as easy to come by as it was during our time in Cape Town. We spent Friday on a tour of the peninsula around Cape Town. We started the morning by driving past Camps Bay and heading to Hout Bay where we hopped on a boat that took us to a seal colony. It was a small island just outside of the bay where hundreds of seals congregated. They were a bit smaller than I expected, but it was very cool to see. The scenery around the bay was also incredible — lots of mountains surrounding a small harbour town. After seeing the seals, we got back into the tour bus and headed through the Constantia winelands to the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens. We walked through the gardens, where Pam enjoyed taking pictures of numerous flowers. I think she enjoyed this part a bit more than I did, as I almost forgot about it for this blog post. From there, we continued down the shoreline through a couple of small towns, including Fish Hoek and Simon’s Town. Simon’s Town included a port for the South African Navy. Apparently their navy is relatively small and more akin to the US Coast Guard, mostly focusing on preventing poaching. Our guide told us that a US aircraft carrier (the Roosevelt) came through the area recently. Despite not being one of our larger carriers, it was still too large to come into the port and had to ferry people back and forth. He claimed that it seemed like most of Cape Town took a day off to go see it. While in Simon’s Town, we also went to see a colony   Read More ...

Today we slept in a bit later than yesterday, but got up in time to have another awesome breakfast served by the hotel staff. We’ve been drinking coffee from east Africa, and it is excellent. We then wandered down toward the center of Cape Town. We’ve tried to be careful about where we walk, given SA’s reputation for being slightly dangerous. We have asked numerous locals about safety, and typically they seem to feel that the reputation is a bit overblown, but you can also pick up concerns for safety and theft. All in all, I get the impression that crime is a problem here at times, but not all that much worse/different than a big city in the states. If you stay out of bad areas, use common sense, and try not to be an obvious target, you’ll pretty much be fine. Our first stop today was the Castle of Good Hope. It is a castle that was built by the Dutch in the 17th century, but has changed hands a number of times over the years. It was interesting to see, but was an obvious tourist spot and not my favorite thing so far. After that, we went to Greenmarket Square in down town Cape. Many locals have booths set up where they are selling souveneirs — carvings, masks, dolls, etc. I commented to Pam that many of these types of things look extremely similar to each other and I wondered how many are mass produced. She thought that they may be produced in quantity by different tribes, but I haven’t quite decided what I think. After a quick lunch, we took a cab to the Table Mountain cable car station. We took a cable car ride up to the top of Table Mountain (images). The view from the top was   Read More ...

After the 22 hour journey we made it to Johannesburg, through immigration and via a rented van, to the hotel. Apparently we are in a really nice part of town where a number of the downtown businesses recently moved ( just north of city center). The hotel was fortunately really nice. We then stopped by a local place for Italian..haha Today we got up nice and early for an 8 am guided tour of Soweto, a Johannesburg township. The townships were where black south africans were forced to live during the apartheid years. It is still an entirely black African neighborhood but it is so sprawling it feels like a whole different town / world on it’s own . We learned about the significance of Soweto at the Hector Pietersen museum. Apparently, the students of the area started a peaceful march against apartheid laws that required schools to teach in the ruling/colonizing party’s language. Police proceeded to gas and shoot a number of the students. Over the course of the fallout the police apparently shot any student aged child they saw in the streets (even 6 year olds). The whole thing was the beginning of resistance marches all across the country. I’m sure some of this is coming out a bit incorrectly but overall we couldn’t believe that we didn’t know more about the entire road to the end of apartheid. Apparently it still wasn’t being taught in history classes while we were in school. Anyways we did see the Johannesburg world cup stadium on our way to Soweto as well as Mandela’s current home in joburg and old home in Soweto. We also saw the current home of Desmond tutu, another nobel peace prize winner. The street where Tutu’s and Mandela’s homes were located in Soweto is the only   Read More ...