Herzlich Willkommen

Herzlich Willkommen, ich freue mich sehr Dich auf meinem Blog begrüßen zu dürfen! Hier erfährst du alles über mich und meinen Freiwilligendienst in Südafrika. Ich schreibe immer wieder neue Berichte hier hinein und natürlich gibt es auch ganz viele Bilder. Viel Spaß beim durchstöbern und falls du Fragen haben solltest stehe ich immer gerne zur Verfügung!
Barbara

Montag, 11. August 2014

The Wildcoast – Another kind of life


Now it’s winter in South Africa, everywhere around Pretoria it is cold, during the night it can even be around 0° C, that’s far too cold for me so I decided to take 2 weeks of a break, we had three weeks of school holidays anyways. So I went to Durban and to the Wildcoast (Province Eastern Cape), those places have no real winter, there it is always around 20°C.
I started my trip together with some friends, we hired a car and drove to the coast. We went to Port Shepstone, here they grow a lot of sugarcane, and I always saw people walking around eating sticks. :D.Later I figured out, those sticks are sugarcane, so they really taste like sugar and if there  are so many plantations of this stuff are around why should you not eat it. Or better chew it until it doesn’t have any taste, a little bit like bubblegum. We also saw some banana plantations, really cool, my first time seeing banana trees! And I saw my first Wale, or at least something in the water maybe 100 meters away from the coast that is supposed to be a whale. Later on I saw them a little bit closer, but still from far far away, I guess for a closer look you have to go on a boat. But it is even impressing from far away to imagine how big such a whale is, so that you can still see it.
Our second destination was Port St. John and I fall in love with this place, so I just decided to stay here alone while the rest of my group was going further to East London. But the people in the backpacker where I stayed where really amazing and I went hiking and horse riding  along the beach. You couldn’t really swim at the beach cause a lot of people got killed by sharks there, but that didn’t really matter cause it was really beautiful there.  At my last day at this place I even helped painting an orphanage (Weisenhaus)  so I got to know a lot of really nice people.
Then I took a shuttle, what means driving  about six hours for just 60 kays cause you have to use gravel roads and taking a taxi, what means on your way you will always collect some people, it’S like an hop on hop off system. Surprised that I’m talking about gravel roads? Yes I decided to turn away from civilization and go to see some lonely placec and “rural areas”. What am I talking about when I say rural areas? About a place where I have been there exist statistics that say it’s a rural area cause 83% (of the population of that area) get there water from rivers, streams and rain, half of the population uses wood for cooking and heating ; 46% have no toilet at all and89% have no rubbish collection(means they just burn everything themselves).Educational only 10% have a metric certificate and around 6% got any higher education. But I don’t want to say that life in those areas would be bad, its just a little bit different to what I am used to, so I just tried to get an impression of how you deal with this kind of life . By the way I don’t want anyone to think people in a rural area  don’t know about a different life, they wear the same clothing then me, go shopping in the supermarket, and they also watched the worldcup on a big screen, so they even have public viewing, just that not everyone has a TV on its own.
But let me just go back to my own journey.. first I went to a backpacker at Coffee Bay, here there was still a lot going on, the backpacker was one of the busiest I have ever been too, just because it’s a famous place for travelers for surfing and the amazing nature around. So I went hiking with a group of people mixed up from every country, Australia, Austria, Usa, Switzerland, Germany, a very colourful group I can say. I also saw the final of the worldcup at this place and had an amazin morning with an amazing sunrise for which I got up at 5 o’clock in the morning just to realize that the sun rises at 7, yeah funny story but I had someone nice to talk to so it was definitely worth it.
Then I found a nice girl from the Usa and we both wanted to go away from such a busy place so we hiked to bulungula, a two days hike with a stop in between at a small village called Lubanzi. Those were the most loneliest places and most amazing places I’ve ever been to. You can walk at the beach for hours and hours and will maybe meet some cows and goats, if you’re lucky there is even a donkey standing at the beach but that’s it!  Now and then you see those little huts and you know there is a village, but actually you can’t really see where  the one village ands and where the next one starts cause they are spread all over the landscape and still there is a lot of space and this gives this place called “Transkei” a special feeling that I can’t imagine having at any other place.
Such a lot of air around you, just listening to the sound of the ocean..awesome! And during the night, I never saw the star sky so clear like here! Beautiful, just beauty on it’s own.
Okay so much about the landscape, now lets talk about the culture here. The original people from the Transkei are the koi koi, actually the Transkei was independent from South Africa till 1994.. this means no vortrekker who came to industrialise the country and bring new technology so that’s why the place still has this freedom. That s what the Guy (Silas) who guided us on our hike told us. And the people want to keep their freedom and peace, they know how rare places like this are on our busy world.
The people in the Eastern Cape are from the Xhosa Tribe. So I wanted to get to know their culture a little bit and how they handle stuff even without electricity and water and all those things. And I saw life is possible and not bad even without all this comfort stuff, but kind of complicated sometime s and everything takes a lot of time.
So me and Taylor (the girl from the USA) participated at a womans power day. One Girl (23 years) took us to her home in  the village and showed us her life.
Maybe I should mention that the backpacker in the village Bulungula is run by the community so everything is organized from the people of the village and nothing feels like just made up for tourists, they show you how there life goes by taking you with them.
Taylor and me learned how difficult it is to carry a bucket full of water on your head, i guess with those big buckets my neck would break so we just used empty yoghurt buckets =). Then we had to go, collect the wood in the forest to make fire, cook pap and some spinach. The vegetables are all grown in their own garden something that is becoming very rare in my German society I would say.  
It’s all manageable just that it takes you about three hours to cook, so yeah it’s not just switching in the stove putting your pan on it. Same with going to school, the girl told me that the school is to far and on those gravel roads taxis take a lot of time, so traveling goes slow..like I said everything  is just a little bit more complicated.
By the way communication wise mostly the people that work in  the backpacker picked up a lot of English, but if you want to go to the village you should  maybe practice your Xhosa.
Spending my time at the Wildcoast was the best decision I could do, I enjoyed and learned a lot. So this is another side of South Africa, something totally different like my experiences from Pretoria or Atteridgeville. This country on its own has a lot of faces so you can’t really talk about South Africa as one now just imagine you talk about ”AFRIKA” saying it  would be like this or like that. People easily do that without thinking about how many countries there are in Africa and you can’t just put them in one pot. So let’s just learn that we have to differentiate and take care what we are talking about.
The only thing I would say is definitely true about South Africa is that it is some kind of Rainbow nation and it definitely has a lot of colors in any kind of way.

on the way to Port Shepstone




Port Shepstone

our backpacker in Port Shepstone

some banana trees on the way


Port St. Johns


beautiful view on some hiking trip





a place called the blowhole, water is blown up in the air cause of the shape of the stones






me on a  lovely horse riding trip



hike to the "hole in the wall" near by Coffee Bay

first we thought this would be the hole in the wall

Coffee Bay sunrise


getting up at 5  for this, awesome!


my backpacker in Coffee Bay

some awesome people i got a little bit lost with on a hike..but it was really fun

I was lucky meeting this girl, hiking together, we had a nice time

on the way to Bulungula and Lubanzi,some small small villages at the wildcoast


the real "hole in the wall"

happy happy happy



Lubanzi backpacker

our awesome guide, spent to days with him walking along this coast learning a lot about his culture

i found a turtle in the ocean











Bulungula !

me trying the Xhosa culture

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