South African impressions

• It seems that everyone (by that I mean white people) in South Africa has shocking skin - that is my shorthand test so far to see if people are locals. Combined with the incredible number of goatees and the epidemic of mullets. All appear to confirm my worst suspicions about these strange bunch of people.

• My first little reminder of being back in the Third World - I go to the terminus to catch a city bus and after waiting half an hour without seeing one bus I ask someone sitting on the bench next to me whether there are any buses. He explains that the drivers are on strike and that if you are lucky one or two buses a day come past. Initially I thought, just my luck, the one day I want to catch a bus the drivers are on strike. Later I found out that the strike had been going two months, after the city sold the bus routes to a private company without the drivers. The drivers went on strike, burnt a few buses, and now neither the city or the buyer runs a bus service. Of course there is an alternative, they are called meat lockers, white vans and minivans, run by private operators, stripped of their original seating to fit 20 people in a Tarago sized van !
• Durban conjures up pictures of a decaying, perhaps even post apocalyptic Gold Coast. There is a narrow strip of high rise apartments along the shore, on the edge of a sweeping bay, flanked on one side by a huge port and three sugar towers standing to attention, and a series of points stretching out to as far as the eye can see on the other. The rest of the city slowly climbs away from the beach, via a few love hotels - pay by the hour - through a section of Japanese imported car yards, through down town to the railway tracks
  
• However everywhere there is the air of decay, paint peeling off buildings, plenty of windows that have broken and not been replaced, boarded up buildings - sometimes with rubble strewn at their feet as they begin to show the effects of no maintenance, rubbish lying about in the streets in large piles, that general thick layer of black, greasy dirt that covers cities so quickly, people sleeping in the streets, and semi-permanent camps at the end of dead-end streets or on median strips - with little fires burning as kids and drunks mingle in the piles of rubbish sorting through what has been discarded by others. I can't help imagine what it must have been like back in the day - a kind of glittering seaside city for the folks from Joburg to come down and visit for the weekend - I guess this is what the South Africans who reminisce about the good old days mean. Things definitely look as they are going to get worse before they get better.
  

• I moved out of Durban to a seaside suburb, perched precariously on a steep sand duned hill, looking as though with a good rain the houses will slide in to the sea. (Strangely it reminds me of those 70's brick veneer Australian coastal towns, built before people recognised that perhaps the suburban home wasn't the most appropriate design for a coastal dwelling)  The suburb is predominantly - no, that word doesn't capture it - almost exclusively (that's better, implied exclusion) white. In fact the only black people I see are in the back of utes and trucks driven around by fat white men, delivering them to various building sites, and the odd gardener here and there. Whilst official separation may have ended a while back, there is still a de facto separation - the town centre is pretty much straight black as to the market area, the shops are owned by whites or Indians, only black people travel on the meat locker buses or even on the intercity buses, white people all have cars. The beach suburbs (and the water) and white only, except on Sundays when blacks come down to the beach for a swim. There is also a latent tension in the air, whites look skittish and don't really look anyone in the eye - afraid of those uppity blacks who are now allowed to look you in the eye and are capable of who knows what, blacks look afraid - every time I was walking along a footpath in the suburb and a black person was coming the other way they would stop, step off the footpath and wait for me. And everyone bemoans the crime and the general insecurity. Yet despite all this negativity people are incredibly friendly, lots of people went out of their way to help me out - giving directions, helping me on to a bus, indicating the best place to eat, even shouting me a few beers at the internet cafe so they could talk about Australia. And whilst I was only there for less than two weeks I didn't see any crime or really feel that unsafe. So who knows what it all means !!!