Ele-pants

I'm back from a rather exhausting weekend in (technically) the Eastern Cape, the part of South Africa by the Indian Ocean. Besides the "boys are gross" observation (I've had enough of smelly feet and farting to last me a lifetime) which was basically inevitable given that I was traveling with three guys, there was a lot of rather nice scenery to see. The Eastern Cape is so much more lush than the Western Cape; it actually rains there, apparently, so there's rolling green hills and it's gorgeous. A couple random facts I learned while traveling the 700 km or so:

1) The police are corrupt. I knew this anyway, but apparently they sell dagga (weed). And they can be bribed, etc. etc. Also, since they have cameras at certain points along the highway, police cars aren't parked around corners waiting to bust you for speeding, like in the U.S. No, they send you a note in the mail, provided they actually get around to it. (I have limited faith in the police bureaucracy here.) The more I hear about the South African police force, the more I tend to agree with Larry the Texan: "It's a free-for-all: everyone just does what they want, man. This is South Africa!" It's kind of sad but at the same time a little amazing. Apparently even telling the policemen you were driving drunk isn't enough to guarantee you a ticket/jail time; instead, they supposedly laugh and shake their heads in an "aw shucks; kids these days" sort of way before wishing you a good night and parting ways.

2) Fraternities in Germany are pretty much the same as fraternities in the U.S. They tend to also get drunk and do stupid things together. Steffen, the German guy who came along with us, spoke fondly of his drunken nights "acting like assholes" and smoking 50 cigarettes with his fraternity brothers.

3) South Africa is really, really big. Africa sort of comes to a point in South Africa, and it looks small in relation to the rest of the continent on a map, but it's enormous. I realized that to get to Durban, for example, it'd be at least 25-ish straight hours of driving. (I know most people tend to consult maps beforehand, but they sort of intimidate me so I usually ignore them.)

And as far as our destination, I wasn't quite sure where we were supposed to go when I agreed to accompany Larry and Steven, but it sounded better than the alternative: staying in Stellenbosch, perhaps dragging myself to the grocery store to buy yet more strawberries, and failing to finish my reading for English. Still, we ended up going to Knysna (pronounced nyz-nuh), a town known for its beaches, timber and forbidden caves. I'm going to be honest here, because clearly that's what blogs are all about: I didn't visit any forbidden caves. Just to clear up any confusion.

Knysna is cute -- the townships, as the Lonely Planet guide informed me, use the town's lumber for construction and are unique -- but kind of a ghost town. At night, its one bar is all but deserted; I didn't get a chance to see its one club, but I'd expect about the same thing. We didn't pass anyone walking to and from dinner, and it was a little eerie. Correction: Larry went looking for what he thought was a crocodile, which actually turned out to be a man snoring under a bridge. Still, we found an adorable hostel that, due to Knysna's apparent lack of tourists, we all fit rather comfortably into: the four of us took the large front bedroom that could have held seven people. We didn't have to share the room with others the whole time, a fact I totally could have enjoyed if Steffen didn't snore so loudly in his sleep.

Sleep or no, Saturday was busy. With Larry's improving stick-shift driving, we went to View Point, a part of the bay with rocky cliffs (no, I didn't decide to jump) that seemed at low tide: some fish on a taller cliff looked a little dead because their little pool had run out of water. Luckily for me, an extremely amateur photographer, the scenery was so gorgeous I couldn't screw up the picture even if I tried.

Then it was off to our number one destination, the Knysna elephant farm. It was probably the most touristy thing we did all day, the really overly touristy stuff that's so manufactured and staged it's almost disgusting (DVDs of the experience, complete with techno background music), but there were elephants so I was in. While I was paying for my ticket (R140; ~$14 for elephant petting? Oh yes), the lady behind the counter informed me for a mere R25 I could get a bucket of food for the elephants. Like the true American consumer I am, I said "I'll take it" and found myself holding several carrots, bunches of grapes, lettuce and pumpkin chunks. Granted, it wasn't that much food, but I thought it might do some damage (appetite-wise) to the pachydermed individuals out there. Nope.

This is why elephants have it so well: in the wild, they eat 18 hours each day (the zoologists assured us that, in this reservation, they kept the eating down to a mere 12 hours). 18 hours?! The rest of the time, they're sleeping. Two of my favorite activities, and they've got humans waiting on them, hand and foot. While we stood there trying to feed carrots and other random veggies to the elephants, the zoologists were delivering several kilos of tree branches to the elephants. Yeah, apparently our snacks were nothing to these guys, since they eat 250 kg of food each day. The baby elephant quickly tired of me putting food on my palm and reaching for it with his trunk and instead grabbed my bucket and tried to eat the rest of the food (the pumpkin proved too big for him, though). Adorable. And then, after the elephants realized the silly humans had run out of bucket food, they stomped off to a corner of land and tore up the branches. So apparently elephants eat trees -- the picture of me and Mr. Elephant is a bit underwhelming, I think, because he's got a tree branch all over his face. They are also a little intimidating, though no one got trampled to death during our tour; but it occurred to me they were slightly bigger than I was, even after eating a chicken & mushroom pie, food baby and all. Their plot of land was bereft of trees, which makes sense because they seemed to be chomping those things up. I really wish I could eat trees, too.

Speaking of trees, we had hoped to go to the Big Foot Forest in Knysna's national park (we later discovered it was actually called the Big Tree Forest, though that didn't really help us), but for some reason it was "closed." I was a little disappointed -- how often do you see 700-year-old trees? -- but a little less so when I found that their most popular attraction was a suspension bridge. Just like in the movies where the super-fit, attractive hero is running from imminent death and the bridge breaks in the middle over a 100-meter drop to the center of the earth and, after a few minutes of sweat-inducing suspense, makes it to safety. I thought I might have to face my demons (I'm really scared of heights) and rough it when the bridge broke, and the "enter at your own risk" signs weren't too helpful. Nor was the "bridge history" sign, with its brief timeline of the 30-year-old bridge. The fact that it had been rebuilt and "repaired" in 2007 didn't inspire too much confidence, but I figured it might offer some good photo opportunities. After all, having good photos is a little more important than one's mortality, I think. The view was breathtaking, of course.

And then on to the most beautiful beach I've ever seen in my life, in Noetzie, a little ways past a township outside of Knysna. So many rocky cliffs that lead down to the water, and it was completely deserted. It looked like paradise. There were quite a few nice houses in the hills, taunting us for being (relatively) impoverished students. Again, the scene was a little ruined by Steffen's fascination with dropping trou -- let's say I've seen a little more of him than I'd have liked to, but at least he's comfortable with his body? I warned him it was illegal to be nude in a public beach in SA (it is) but he didn't seem too concerned. Considering the police vigilance here, I can't say I blame him.

We'd stopped over in Mosselbaai (Mussel Bay) before Knysna on day one and took a wrong turn somewhere, ending up in a township instead. Our 2009 VW (which, by the way, was a model type from the 1980s, though the car was brand new) attracted stares from the all-black residents of the town. Yeah. It's completely awkward to get stared at for being white. Even in middle school in Fort Worth, where I was a minority among the mainly-Hispanic population, the shouts of "hey, white girl" still implied some sort of familiarity with white people. In that township, it's completely uncomfortable because you can feel the stares for being different but also because you know you don't belong there. On the other end of things, those houses on the beach scream opulence; also, we passed so many BMWs and Mercedes on the highway (all driven by white people). There are these two completely different worlds, living literally minutes from each other, and it's kind of disturbing.