In case he is reading this, we want to assure Judson that we miss him.
Travel to exotic places inevitably involves days that are pretty-much just travel. Today is one of those. We set out from ATL(where I’m writing this), flew from there to Newark and then from Newark to Capetown. Total flight time is about 17 1/2 hours. At least we’re traveling business class. Maxi insists on that . He’s just not a coach kinda’ guy. If you add time for to and from airport, and waiting for planes, you’re talking about over 30 hours. Mainly, the plan is to make it over, check in, have dinner and collapse. More than that is showing off.
Not all trips to Africa from Chicago start in Atlanta, but ours will, because we’ll be picking up Max, our almost-12 year old grandson there (and visiting with Max’s family for a couple days) before going out to hunt lions.
As a very seasoned traveler, you’d think that preparing to leave would be duck soup for me. It’s been rather anxiety-provoking, though. There’s a sense that this is likely the last big adventure trip for Carol and me, we’ve been planning it for more than a year and we want to make sure that it’s perfect for Max. Though I’d never admit this, we’re not getting any younger and things that once seemed like no-brainers to us are now brainers. Or challenges.
And then there was the pre-trip surprise. Last weekend I was feeling–how should I put this–crappy. Tired, achy, sore throat, coughing. So, yes, crappy sums it up pretty well. On Monday (8 days before we were scheduled to leave for ATL), Carol suggested I take a Covid test. I did. And, yes, I was positive. This threw things up into the air, I took various over the counter meds, slept a lot and did what I’m really good at doing–nothing.
This trip is for Max and, even if I needed to drop out, Carol would take him. We began to explore alternatives, plane switches, Wendy taking my place. All of those presented complications and not insignificant expense. While I took great comfort in the fact that Max would have his experience, I was sad at the thought of not being able to see his reactions and delight firsthand in what he would encounter in what Carol and I hope and expect will be a life-changing trip for him.
The (very) good news is that my condition improved and by Thursday it looked very likely that I’d be able to go, too. And I’m posting this as we get ready to board our plane to ATL.
This is something of a test post. For those of you who have followed for many years, you may notice that the blog is now being hosted by an organization called “Follow It”. I have no idea why we needed to switch to that, but we did and my blog-guru, Glenn Crocker set it all up for us. If you have problems getting this, blame Glenn. But I think it works.
So, next post will likely be from, or enroute to, Africa.
Here’s Max this winter in Tucson, already towering over his grandmother. You’ll be seeing a lot more of Max.
When we arrived in Cape Town, we were ushered through the various steps expeditiously by people our travel agent had arranged for. The ATMs would not accept our credit cards so we are stuck with dollars rather than Randy’s for our two days here. We emerge from the airport to cold, rainy weather and our driver, Martha, takes us to the More Quarters, about half hour away.
We have a small apartment, which is fine. We are tired and order small dishes sent to our room. Then we crash. Arise at 6:30 for a good breakfast at the hotel.
We are met by our guide, Josh, at 9:00 a.m. and set off on our Cape Peninsula Quirky Tour! Accompanying Josh was another guide, Lee, who had worked many years as a safari guide, including at Singhita, where Carol and I had stayed in 2003
The tour began with a drive along the coast towards Simon’s Town, where we go in search of a colony of rogue penguins. The thriving penguin colonies on the outskirts of Simon’s Town draw visitors from all around, to this part of the Peninsula. We do it a bit differently and leave the main breeding areas beneath the busy walkways to look for the hidden colonies in lesser-known coves loved by the locals.
Afterwards, Josh tells us more about the rich history surrounding Simon’s Town, provides some insights into this historical harbor town. We stop by the ocean to watch surfers catch waves and compete
Then we’re off to the Cape of Good Hope, and into the Cape Point Nature Reserve. The reserve is filled with adventure, wildlife and captivating historical stories around the Cape of Storms with shipwrecks and legends enchanting this renowned area where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet.
We start our journey along one of the lesser traveled roads to search for the Cape Five – ostrich, baboons, bontebok, tortoises and mountain zebra – while enjoying the beautiful views and Cape Fauna Floral. We found many baboons, some ostriches and eland antelopes.
Leaving the reserve, we stop in Scarborough for an excellent lunch with Josh and Lee at a local restaurant,The Whole Earth.
Not having had enough adventure, we wind down the day with an exhilarating drive back to Cape Town. We follow the tar around the shoulder of Chapman’s Peak which rises above on one side, and plunges way down to the rocky shores far below. Chapman’s Peak Drive links the village of Hout Bay to Noordhoek, around 114 bends which is quite possibly one of the most beautiful 5.5 miles one can ever experience. We were supposed to do this by motorcycle and sidecar, but rain did not permit that. Still the views and crashing waves below made for a wonderful drive.
Tonight we have dinner with the amazing Albie Sachs. Africa has many wonders, one of which, Victoria Falls, we I’ll see later. But I’ll take Albie Sachs over any of those other wonders. We first met Albie and Vanessa in 2003, on a trip to South Africa with two couples who are close friends of ours. Here is a photo taken at dinner back in 2003.
Maxi is our second grandchild to meet Albie and his architect/wife Vanessa September. Zoe, Carol and I had dinner with them in Cape Town on May 13; 2016. Albie is now 89, but remains incredibly vital and productive.
Here, briefly is some autobiographical information about Albie. He was born in Johannesburg in 1935. His father, Emil Solomon (Solly) Sachs, had arrived in South Africa from Lithuania at the age of six, on the eve of the First World War, and his mother, Ray, had arrived as an infant. Both of his parents were involved in the Communist Party and trade unionism.
His career in human rights activism started in 1952 , when as a 17 year old second year law student at the University of Cape Town, he took part in the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign. Three years later, he attended the Congress of the People at Kliptown where the Freedom Charter was adopted. He began his practice as an advocate at the Cape Bar when he was 21, and most of his work involved defending people charged under apartheid’s racist statutes and repressive security laws. Many of the people he defended were facing the death sentence. As a result of his work, he was raided by the security police, subjected to banning orders restricting his movement and was placed in solitary confinement for 168 days without trial. He eventually went into exile in 1966.
He spent eleven years studying and teaching law in England, and a further eleven years in Mozambique working as a law professor and legal researcher. On 7 April 1988, a bomb that was placed in his car in Maputo (Mozambique) by South African security agents, blew up. He lost an arm and the sight of one eye.
In exile during the 1980’s, Sachs worked closely with Oliver Tambo, the leader of the African National Congress (ANC), and helped draft the organization’s Code of Conduct and statutes. After recovering from the effects of the bomb blast, he devoted himself full-time to preparations for a new democratic Constitution for South Africa. Finally, in 1990, he returned home. As a member of the Constitutional Committee and the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the ANC, he played an active role in the negotiations which led to South Africa becoming a constitutional democracy. After the first democratic election in 1994, he was appointed by then President Nelson Mandela to serve on the newly established Constitutional Court.
As a constitutional court judge, Justice Sachs was the chief architect of the post-apartheid constitution of 1996. As one of 11 green-robed judges, he participated in landmark rulings. These rulings included declaring capital punishment a violation of the right to life, to making it unconstitutional to prevent gay and lesbian people from marrying. The court also backed Aids campaigners in 2002, by insisting that the government had a duty to provide HIV-positive pregnant women with drugs to reduce the risk of transmission to their newborn babies.
In addition to his legal work, he has travelled to many countries sharing his experiences, in order to help heal divided societies. He has also been engaged in the sphere of art and architecture, and was involved with the development of the Constitutional Court building and its art collection (located on the site of the Old Fort Prison in Johannesburg). Sachs has also authored several books, including The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs (1966), which was published in Britain when he was a banned writer in South Africa. This book was later adapted by David Edgar as an RSC play in 1979, which is now a classic of prison memoirs. Stephanie on Trial followed his second detention, and The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter (1990) traced his triumphant convalescence after the bombing. He also wrote a book with Indres Naidoo, entitled Island in Chains. In 1991 he received the Alan Paton Award for Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter.
Albie holds 14 honorary degrees across four continents In 2009 he received the Reconciliation Award as well as the Academy of Achievement Golden Plate Award. On 21 June 2014 he was awarded Taiwan’s inaugural Tang Prize in the Rule of Law for his contributions to human rights and justice globally In 2015 Albie was named a Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow. He had helped select the art collection at Constitution Hill, the seat of the Constitutional Court. Not exactly your ordinary tourist day in South Africa.
For his ninetieth birthday, Albie is planning a trip to the US, where Carol and I hope to catch up with him and Vanessa in Chicago.
Last post told you that this one would likely be from Africa, or en route. I lied.
I’m still in Atlanta, warming up for the trip, visiting with family, waiting. From time to time in my blogs, I reflect on the experience of travel or on something else that’s on my mind. If you’re not interested in those things, fine, just skim or skip those posts.
For me, photography has always been an important part of travel. I like it. It’s fun. It’s a way to make a record of the trip and to share it with others. You, for instance.
While I’ve taken a few pretty good photos among the 30,000-plus I’ve taken, I’ve never regarded myself as, or aspired to become, a professional. In fact, I’ve been quite amazed at the photos one can get from the newer iphone models and was contemplating taking only my iphone for this trip. Below are a few I took recently with my iPhone at a concert.
A week or two ago, though, I decided, what the hell, I’ll take my Sony 6300. Through the generosity of FreshLens, one of the organizations that Carol and I support through Innovation 80 (if you don’t know Innovation 80, here’s a link to our website, www.innovation80.org), I was able to borrow the same camera and lens I own for Max to use on this trip. I intend to limit the number of shots I take to a relatively small number of what I hope will be somewhat unusual photos. I’ll encourage Max, though, as a first timer to shoot whatever and however much his heart desires. I’m hoping that photographing together will add to our bonding experience.
And I think exploring together through photography is an entirely appropriate venture for a trip to Africa. David DuChemin, a very fine photographer, but perhaps an even finer philosopher of photography contemplates the similarities between making art and exploring,“Art-making is also a posture of the human spirit towards the unknown. It’s a willingness to inquire of life. To ask what we find beautiful, certainly, but it’s more than that.
“It is a kind of exploration that asks important questions about what is important to us and what we’re willing to risk for it. It’s a challenging of our concepts of what we can and can’t do—a confrontation of our fears and our perceived limits. It’s the willingness to look at the maps we’ve drawn of our own lives and hearts and minds, the ones that have “Here be dragons!” written in the empty spaces, yet unexplored, and to go see what’s there all the same, either despite the dragons or because of them.”
I love David’s regular exhortations to take a risk, to do what speaks to you, the public be damned. His approach to photography is an antidote to what Susan Sontag lamented as, “the aesthetic consumerism of vacation photography.”
Anais Ninn, the wonderful French-Cuban writer, said, “The white man has invented glasses which make objects too near or too far, cameras, telescopes, spy glasses, objects which put glass between living and vision. It is the image he seeks to possess, not the texture, the living warmth, the human closeness.”
Interestingly, to me, she focuses on Acapulco as “the detoxicating cure for all the evils of the city: ambition, vanity, quest for success in money, the continuous contagious presence of power-driven, obsessed individuals who want to become known, to be in the limelight, noticed, as if life among millions gave you a desperate illness, a need of rising above the crowd, being noticed, existing individually, singled out from a mass of ants and sheep… Here, all this is nonsense. You exist by your smile and your presence. You exist for your joys and your relaxations. You exist in nature. You are part of the glittering sea, and part of the luscious, well-nourished plants, you are wedded to the sun, you are immersed in timelessness, only the present counts, and from the present you extract all the essences which can nourish the senses.” Ninn’s trip was in 1947. I wonder whether she would still find that kind of magic in Acapulco today, or whether she’d think of Sontag’s aesthetic consumerism.
By the way, please don’t think that I know the work of Ninn or Sontag myself. Most of the esoteric references I am able to make are because of Maria Popova’s fabulous weekly writings in The Marginalian. If you don’t know it, do yourself a favor and look, https://www.themarginalian.org/ Subscribing is free. I should also invite you to do the same thing to get to know David DuChemin’s work, www.craftand vision.com.
Well, you didn’t subscribe to this blog to add to your reading list. Consider that a bonus. And, yes, I really am going to Africa. A bit of patience, please.
It’s been more than thee years since I’ve done a blog post. I’m doing so now because in mid-August Carol and I will be taking our grandson, Max to Africa, so I wanted to test whether I could still blog.
Can I?
Do you want to come along with us on our trip?
(I’ve added this recent image just to try that feature.)
