Testing my bloggability...

beaches as big as rugby fields...

slaapstad's good and evil

I'm filled with snot. Again. What is it about this town? I think every disease infested snot inducing bug gets dragged through Cape Town. Something to do with ocean currents and the lack of ozone....

I've just spent two weeks risking life an limb with malaria and yellow fever and god knows what else and not a scratch. Home for two days and I'm leaking on my mouse pad and sneezing traffic. Fuck. Sorry mom. But its an expresive release of some sort.

On the better side dinner partied it up last night on an 8th floor penthouse a work colleague put to good use to say farewell to another work mate. Poor bastard's heading back to the states for 5 years of med school in his bid to save the world. All these Amercans come to save us. Quite encouraging actually.

I also recommitted myself to reducing the boep. Good news is from my place I can get to a beuatiful mountain path and now its actually still light past three in the afternoon so I can hit it after work. Bad news is its three k's straight freaken up to get onto the path and then the path itself is another 3 k's up. Damn. I must look like I'm running through treacle, though coming down I get to stretch my legs and look a little more athletic in case anyone is actually paying attention to my panting ass...

Bizarely I also tore past a 'bergie making a fire on Tuesday eve and stopped for a chat. Guess where he's from? Tanzania. No kidding. Back to work then.

Bullets from East Africa

Good blogging likes bullets, like good bad news african news stories....here are my Tanzanian Top Ten in no particular order of time or importance:

1. Diving off the pier at high tide with local kids in Stone Town.
2. Getting stung to pieces by jellies while playing 'chicken' with more local kids too far out to sea.
3. Sunset ferry crossing in Dar with 25 cars, 300 people, 14 chickens and 5 life jackets.
4. Oceans of Baobabs.
5. Poms living 'in village'. Now that's a gap year.
6. Ugali (pap), Safi (lekker), Mambo (howzit), poa (sharp), asante (thank you).
7. Zanzibari locals excited to meet a South African filled with stories of their eviction from the 'Europe of Africa'. One guy told me proudly of his happy days in ‘Woodstocki’ and ‘Hullbra’
8. Robert and Sam, my Dar peers and proud as hell of their city and people
9. White beaches broader than rugby pitches
10. And this quote from an ancient Swahili inscription of a drum reserved for leaders as an insignia of power:

"Your action is a reflection of your leadership. So call all the people together, including those who behave differently, for the wise gathers all and satisfies them"

A whole other mountain....

Hasty Tasty. Its a little Indian style fastfood place much like the roti shops in the Oriental Plaza in Joburg except this ones tucked under a coke sign at the edge of a strip of concrete shops along the main road in Iringa, Tanzania. The town's bizzare straddling an impressive mountain range bang in the middle of Tanzania. Founded by German missionaries 100 years ago its a cool mountain top town with great personality.

Tonight sitting in Hasty Tasty we were joined by a texan missionary family that's lived in Tanzania for ten years...across from us, and the place only had four tables, sat a german missionary family, 3 white blonde little girls and their folks...been here for 17 years....I've never met a misionary before today.

The road up to Iringa snakes through some of the most beautiful little valleys I've seen before. Strips of it felt just like the lowveld and so felt like home, others where oceans of Boababs. It felt like a world inverted, like being underground and if you flipped the world over the trees stood tall as red woods. I've also never seen bush as 'alive' as those boababs, each its own shape. 'Like odd interpretive dancers', said the american I'm working with.

The road also ran through a nature reserve, got hooted at by trucks while we tried to see an elephant cow and her calf on the road side. Wonderful. Wonderful. And great people doing great things. 'Safi'...'Lekker'....

the space between...

The space between the tower and the mountain...between this post and the last one...its also the title of Dave Matthews song. Of course it is.

Haven't written since the attacks because as it spread to Cape Town I got a little twisted by it, it made my stuff too melodramatic. It sucked.

But I'm back! First up was the getting down. The drive is testimony to South African ingenuity because it is a planet on it’s on this own this place. I’ve not been here long but I’ll tell you that much. The N1 South to Cape Town may just as well be a highway to the moon. Stuff NASA, it SAMRA that impresses me. Heaven alone knows how they got the highway in here, or the voortrekkers got those ossewaens out.

It cost me about 2k to switch universes. That’s 3 tanks of petrol, 1 Nando’s pita, 1 wimpy burger (at 2am), and 17 packets of enerjellies. I LOVE enerjellies. I was meant to sleep in Kimberly but I couldn’t even find the big hole let alone a decent place to sleep so I kept driving.

I slept trucker style under the dark, star pierced karoo sky for two hours instead of forking out for a farm bed and tiger oats…sorry mom.

The beauty of that decision was a badly creaked neck, a spectacular sunrise in the hex river valley and a traffic jam at ratanga junction at 8 in the morning.

I drove into town, smelling bad and looking worse, found my new housemate who I’d first found on the internet, picked up my keys and arrived home. “Hello Cape Town” I said from my new little deck with a harbour view one way and a mountain view the other.

I’ve been out on that deck a few times since. Gotten very wet all but once, and in summer I’m putting in a monster plastic pool and getting wet properly. Yay! Joburg’s still home but so far CT will do pig, it’ll do. More to come. (I'll spare you the gory details of three hours of RSG in the northern cape...except to say that Radio Plays rock, and they reminded me of my ouma.)

Storms under the tower: Your Gold or your Blood

We're always under storm clouds in this city of gold, sometimes thunderous and beautiful and often murderous and frightful. I was given some advice to write shorter blogs more often and this was meant to be it. An angry outburst with a weak punch landing here like thunder shakes my flat windows but changes little.

I'm sick to my stomach, and angry. A cheap easy emotion. Mobs of people swept across streets and terrified, and hurt and murdered this weekend. Angry mobs. Some in the name of national 'rights' and others through pure criminal hate. I watched about six people die in slow motion last night in 'Mr Brooks', a serial killer flick. I flinched and felt ill with each death and the pleasure the murderers took. Sick. This morning I walked past newspaper vendors and tried desperately not to see the front page image of a man on his knees, burnt alive, still alive, being extinguished by a policeman. Sick.

They say we are almost all capable of it, of cruelty and murder. The right moment in blind anger, more scarily only three days of the right environment and even in cool calculated ways we could kill. Or standby and let someone kill. According to the US psychology professor that charged the US Army with complicity in the cases against soldiers that tortured Iraqi prisoners, less than 10% of us would stand up to it, would behave the way we like to believe.

So where's that environment coming from? We are all complicit, our world is skewed to create it. Of 18 million children in SA 11 million live in homes that earn less then 2500 rand a month. Stephen Pinker, another psychologist, shows that levels of violence in a society are more strongly linked to levels of inequality than to levels of poverty. Our happiness is linked to what we believe we should have, not what we do have. Those mobs killing foreigners are angry, those criminals killing old woman in their houses are angry. They believe that they do not have because the foreigners do, because the old lady did and they hate enough to kill. There are millions living in a world of nothing with a permanent window to a world of plenty and few doors to get there.

What we saw this weekend, and the murders we see every weekend, make me angry, and sick. But not blind. We, South Africa, the world, are building these environments. I cannot forgive those that murder, it is still a choice, but we must all find a way to stop creating breeding grounds for them, and for the mobs. I can't forgive us either. It is hard, we are all angry. We must work to fix it...or it will murder us too.

vertigo, chip rolls, ghosts and colour

Once my dirty shell toes are in the Cape we'll get to that contrast of cities that fuels this blog but for now we're setting tone, taping out the door frames and cutting in...building context. We'll get stuck in with the roller brush soon enough. Bear with me.

Johannesburg is a ghost and rock all at once. Or rather a specter and a highveld koppie. The one is real and solid. It just is, it glistens under rains, warms up in the sun, erodes and grows. Its just a place. The other is the fear of a place. The connotations. A certain ring in your ear and tweaking of your perception. This photo shows that beautifully. They say ghosts show up on film sometimes and you can see them here. Solid buildings and fluid vehicle lights. Nothing to fear, but an ominous feeling for some, an 'other worldliness' for others.

It's taken by Huw Mcdonald, a joburg photographer that knows a fair bit of both the city's rocks and ghosts. And its taken facing West along Market Street from the 50th floor of the Carlton Center, a 70's monolith in downtown Johannesburg. I went up there again today to show friends, an ozzie and a capie/namibian, both living in London. The Johannesburg in their heads and the one they walked through and looked over today are two very different places. I suppose that's true for any place but it seems so much more so here.

The mining and banking strip down Main street's like a baby Wall street. It's about 10 blocks long and three blocks wide. All water features, security guards and sidewalk cafes. People from Standard, FNB, Zurich, Anglo, Billiton, government and a hundred other companies big and small. You bump through crowds of suits with take away coffee in one hand and a cell phone in the other. If you don't believe me you have some ghosts to excise. Come down and see. "Man, this is a choice city", commented the capie. Up on Carlton later, reeling a little from vertigo and the lurching express lift, he was commenting on the colour of it all. He put it so simply and beautifully, I wish I could capture it here. He has that thick and interesting accent of a South African in London. Heavy with its Afrikaans roots but full of the questioning inflection of antipodean friends and words from London's own international lexicon. He stared out at the city in wonder, a good two feet from the thick glass and the 150m drop to the streets. In his head he had pictured it bleak and colourless. But in reality it was all bright colour. Perhaps, he wondered, it was the walk in the streets that had given context.

If you haven't been up the Carlton you really should go. It is a little adventure. From the heaving insides of the mall you wedge along escalators and look down on shoppers and lunch eaters and CD browsers. I remember walking around Sandton City as a kid, passages crammed like London subways. It still feels like that in the Carlton. And from the triple volume bowl of people the masses veer right to more lunch spots and deposit you at a quiet little glass booth. R 7.50 per ticket and you get to push the call button yourself. Standing at the door 50 floors of air swirls around before the door opens for you. The lift is pretty inside, face lifted, with only one button that lights up. 50.

And it is a childish rush to watch the red number click quickly up from 0 and feel the lift sway a little and accelerate. And stop. Getting out the lift is quite normal, it could be the 20th floor, or the second. But swing left and the light and view rush along the corridor from the floor to ceiling glass windows 15 meters away. That same view from Huw's picture but rushing at you, pushed along by clear blue sky squeezing up against the tower, and then that lovely feeling of vertigo as you walk across the polished floor to the glass and peer back along Main. Its cool as hell, you really should go.

My friend drove into town a little nervously and waited for me at the corner of Mclaren and Fox so I could jump in and show her cheap parking. In the two minutes she'd been double parked a metro cop had already blipped her and we edged through the traffic to the open lots where safe parking is cheap. Next to the Mag court there's a square of dirt attached to a motor mechanic's, a grumpy man called Luis. Parking is seven bucks in the sun but its safe. My friends shed valuables and stashed handbags in the boot and we began the 10 block walk to Carlton. The idea was to grab a cheap lunch and a few minutes on the viewing deck.

Between Anglo American's marble walls and prancing statues the renovated Main Street Mall and outdoor mining museum begins and runs the 10 blocks to Ghandi Square. We walked along it and then detoured a few blocks down Simmons to Al Baraqa. The best, and biggest chip rolls, bunnies and toasteds in the city. You have to sidle up the to line at the counter and your cash buys you a little paper number and gentle shove back onto the street where you wait for your bundle of wax paper and ton of slap chips. Freaken great!

We took those greasy packets all the way across Ghandi square, under the nose of young lawyer Ghandi's statue, between the hundreds of roaring double decker buses that snake out from there and into the consumer chaos of the Carlton Mall.

Its like a cable car to a concrete idol rather than a rock one. But the views still tug at me. A view on a world full of promise and working things. I know our land is creaking. From that mountain to this tower it is tripping up and struggling and we feel and see every vaulter. But standing on the top of Carlton, with a little of God's perspective, you can see so much work manifest. Clean streets, running buses, hundreds of working traffic lights, metro cops on honest patrol, offices 100% let and chock full with good people working.

It's an eye opening little walk across Ghandi and up the Carlton and I will think of it often on Loop and Long and the other Market....

Another World under Another Tower

An odd benefit of displacing yourself is you get to look at the world through last views and last eyes. Johannesburg's thick with her own contradictions so even in my love affair with this city I can never be self righteous about her goodness. Jozi's accused of many hideous things and goodness is seldom in the adjectives. Any finger I point at the Mother City on this blog's going to be a truth somewhere in Joburg too.

Here I'm pointing a finger to something sweet under the towers and trusting to taste it too under the shadows of that mountain.

Launching himself into the thin Highveld air in the pic is an Austrian gentlemen becoming the first to BASE the Brixton tower. Good for him. The reason his bright yellow, Red Bull sponsored ass, is on this blog is because its the only interesting picture of Brixton Google could trawl up for me. The reason Brixton's on the agenda is because it is a partly gentrifying, partly rotting little neighbourhood on a hill I drive past often, but know embarrassingly little about. Its one of those places the Beeld highlights occasionally because its poor are sometimes white, a kind of township in town. And the picture is worth a blog because I always wonder about adventure tours that visit townships between the airport and the boutique hotels. Seems something of an extreme variety happens in Joburg too, rich thrill seekers launching off tall things in poor neighbourhoods.

I've also always liked driving through Brixton because it has a street life, kids in parks and people on stoeps. Clearly my bourgeois, Levi branded ass is not so different from ze euro spewing tourists. Yesterday saw me idle nervously down Katjiepiering road in Brixton looking for a friend's new little creative venture.

I felt like a tourist in my own home town, 5 minutes drive from the center of my universe and I was in a place I knew NOTHING about.

Katjiepiering dead ends into a newly built palacade fence and the dark little street was littered only lightly with both rubbish and people. At the bottom a handful of cars cluttered the front of an oddly cheerful house in a starkly cheerless place. A big CD tree split the old pavement. 12 foot of tree had been braved by some adventurous soul and sprinkled with hundreds of glittering CD's. The wall was decorated too with new paint and bits of pretty collaged tile; and four or five people huddled around a big fire on garden chairs.

The house itself had had its old side pulled open and a genuinely inviting little dance floor, patio and chill room held a few more people. Drinks came in the form of tequila, orange juice and curry powder, and food as R 10 soup. This is starting to sound like a venue revue but only because I'm trying to explain how really cool it was. Forgive me Leoni.

Music then came as Brazilian folk and Mozi reggae, which I knew about as little of musically as what I understood of the Portuguese.

This post is like a flag against the slipping I talked about in my first post. A place I found on a rotting, or not, hill that's turning or trying to turn. Around the fire some bright eyed guys tried to teach me venda, made an effort to connect. On the street people peered in looking for and finding something better then the shebeen they expected. And a Mozi guitarist who's playing 88 this week found an appreciative little audience.

Now to find a similar tail in Cape Town and we will have our first flag there too.

From the Tower to the Mountain

I love the way cities have personalities. They have an air about their buildings and spaces that have quirks like families have history, and people have spots...sure Johannesburg feels sometimes like LA minus the sea, and Cape Town looks like San Francisco with a flat mountain, but that's like saying my tonsil of a mate Ray looks something like Josh Hartnett...it doesn't really say anything.

This blog's to log a kind of reverse great trek and all the topics, thoughts and debates that have already spun from it. This first entry is only a place holder to sort out layout but what will come are records of conversations and extensions of thoughts and experiences. I have lived in Joburg for most of my working life and in June I'm taking a new job in Cape Town. Where the idea for the blog started was an irreverent facebook status update I posted last week, "James is walking the tight rope from the tower to the mountain". I wrote it because it sounded good, but it's echoed in my head all weekend.

My flat in Johannesburg faces north from the 3rd floor of a solid and in some ways still grand old complex on the edge of Hillbrow. One of my favourite views in the world is from the spongy water sealed roof after sunset when the Hillbrow Tower lights up behind me and the sirens ring up from the canyons of the apartments blocks sprawling around. I love Johannesburg and all its burnt through edginess and strangely warm people, and I feel a real skepticism for the mountain the colonizers claimed and their clicky descendants in her shadows.

I want to write about so many things that hang from that tight rope. About why I LOVE this city, about how South Africans are all on the edge of something great or something frightening and how I feel somehow Cape Town's slipping blindly while Joburg's trying to build something new. I want to write about how my excitement for supporting the Stormers at Newlands was squashed by a bitter article berating people for supporting the Hurricanes. I want to write about why Joburgers are so genuinely friendly, about why my Canadian friend in Cape Town thinks white Capetonians aren't so much free spirited liberals as blinkered sun chasers, or why she's wrong. I want to write about the perceptions of the cape flats and the realities of the townships...I want to write about leaving a girl behind, and about diving in kelp forests...I want to write about the things no one says in the David Bullard debate and the new wave of Swart Gevaar sweeping SA...

I'm walking a tight rope from the Tower to the Mountain and I think you all will have a lot to say. I'm looking forward to it....