Red Wine Express

We just left Abidjan in the Ivory Coast and one thing has become clear. After Angola, Ghana and Ivory Coast I can say with absolute certainty that there are no buses with operating PA systems in Sub-Saharan Africa. More on this later but while on the subject of truisms, I had previously mentioned that cruisers can surround and decimate a buffet as quickly as Sitting Bull took out Custer’s 7^th Cavalry at the Battle of Little Bighorn. Similarly experienced cruisers always get the best seats on buses as the child bride and I can attest. Their positioning in the cabaret lounge where we get our riding instructions prior to disembarking for our shore excursions is strategic and cunning. And even though the herd moves at the pace of the slowest member (which in this situation matches the hour hand on your watch), the passageway to the gangway is only one American wide. So the ever respectful and courteous (“after-you”) CB and I always get the very back seat on the bus.

In theory we’ve had three to-and-from bus rides, one each in Angola, Ghana and Ivory Coast respectively. I say in theory because yesterday our full-size tourist bus in Ghana broke down. An hour later after waiting on the side of a completely non-descript road, replacement mini-buses arrived to complete the journey to the Cape Coast slave fort – an extremely interesting place with thousands of tragic stories. The CB and I found ourselves in one mini-bus with half of our previous bus-mates. The air conditioning didn’t work so for the return journey to the ship, the CB and I (well, me actually) decided to switch to the other bus. It was then that I realized all or our fellow passengers are aspergers. We occupied seats previously occupied by others. The people around us reacted like our cats do when we rearrange the furniture – the minutest of changes will just not do. Notice how on a bus trip everyone returns to the same seat after getting on and off. Not me. The CB whispered that maybe we should switch back to the other bus because we were being looked at like we had the plague. I, being a bit pissed off by this stage said “fuck em”.

Back to the PA systems. Tour guides by definition, should guide the tour with interesting and stimulating information, especially when on a history-based tour, as we tend to go for. In Angola we couldn’t work out much of what the young lady guide was saying so when we stopped at the military museum after passing the 18 rock (one for each province) monument built by the Cubans, I asked her about Cuban involvement in the civil war. She assured me that Angola had been absolutely at peace since independence in 1975. I guess she forgot about the civil war which continued until 2002. It was a very confusing situation but I think the communist backed coalition won so maybe that’s why they don’t mention the war. No one re-writes history like the communists.

Yesterday the dodgy PA’s were replaced by shouting guides in the much smaller buses after our unfortunate bus-mishap. Our aforementioned switch to an air conditioned bus (which was too cold according to one of us – sigh) meant we were also exposed to a one hour harangue from our guide who shouted a parenting-101 sermon. Who isn’t riveted by a discussion on what to do when young girls reach puberty when you’re on a historical tour taking in the slave trade in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. The only riveting was to our seats as there was no escape. Oh for a bigger bus and a dodgy PA.

It’s very easy to be indolent in the extreme on these cruises especially when you’ve paid for all the booze you can absorb. On previous cruises we’ve rarely taken in the cabarets, either by not being there or, in my case, falling asleep during them no matter how loud the noise the performers have been making. This time we are not only pacing ourselves (three cabarets so far) due to the length of this cruise (3 weeks) but we are – gasp – exercising.

There’s a walking track around the opening over the pool deck so you can walk around and observe the pool inactivities below although to be fair, there’s more to look at in the open sea which is what a couple of the security guards were doing the other day. They were taking particular interest through the binoculars in a vessel which to the naked eye was a blob on the horizon. We hadn’t seen security on our previous walks and as we were off the coast of Angola, another African country with a small population of mega-rich and a huge population eking out a day-to-day existence. Could it be that some of them had taken to pirating? Hopefully, we’ll never know.

It’s a long way to come to see the Southern Cross but we hadn’t seen it for a while thanks to city lights – once in the last 6 years when we spent a couple of nights in Stanthorpe. But there it was pointing at the back of the boat. That’s the only time I’ve been on a boat and known we were heading in the right direction. My navigation skills would have seen my ship dropping off the edge of the world back in the 15^th century although luminaries like Columbus went looking for India and found the Caribbean so I’m in good company.

We crossed another country off our list yesterday with a trip round Luanda in Angola. And that trip was about the closest I’ll ever get to feeling like the President of the United States although if I’m a demented 80-year-old in later life I’ll closely resemble the current one.

No, cogniscence impairment aside, our presidential treatment was a police motorcycle leading our three bus convoy and an ambulance bringing up the rear. Ours was the first cruise ship in Luanda this year so the locals were going to make bloody sure there were no slip-ups. Maybe that’s why the pirates kept their distance.

They took our money in the markets instead when we were subjected to the inevitable bout of economic tourism. That’s okay though as we don’t mind paying the locals a bit over the odds for riotously colourful shirts and dresses depicting elephants and African dancing girls and other culturally appropriated images. It was a bit concerning however when, after buying a dress for what we thought was a reasonable price, the market ladies began whooping and dancing as we walked away. At that stage we weren’t sure what the exchange rate was between the kwanza and the US dollar. If its 500 kwanza to the dollar, we paid $10. If it was 50, as our tour guide indicated, we paid $100. Fortunately for us it’s 500 so Little D’s cute pink dress isn’t the Angolan version of a Versace, at least price-wise.

We’re now on our way to Ghana and have the next three days at sea. This’ll be the longest period I’ve spent away from land since 1963 and with the water being thousands of metres deep, it’s the longest I’ve spent above land putting a couple of 17 hour flights from London to Darwin and Dubai to Rio de Janeiro respectively, in the shade.

Some years ago, after many years living on acreage, the child bride and I decided to move into more manageable accommodation. She wanted to move into an apartment but I, despite my love-hate relationship with grass after spending years sitting on a ride-on mower, wanted a townhouse. I wanted to come down slowly from my grass addiction. The irony is that I eventually killed all of our townhouse grass when trying to kill the nut-grass in it. So, one re-landscaped garden later, we don’t have any now. Notwithstanding, I could not live in Walvis Bay in Namibia unless I could build my house on the rugby field which appears to be the only greenery here. The rest of the place seems to have been built on the beach which is at least 50 miles wide.

It’s no wonder there is a paucity of grass in this place. Our tour guide advised us they get on average half an inch of rain a year and a little while ago they had a 13 year drought. Now, I don’t know about you but to me, those seem like one and the same. Where we lived in New Guinea, we would get about 10 feet of rain every year so what’s half an inch between friends. But if half an inch is all you get and getting it is the difference between pleasure and pain, how do you feel if it doesn’t come? We need to get this discussion back onto the straight and narrow again, I feel.

Pretty much everything in Liverpool has a Beatles connection. Similarly this place’s claim to fame is huge piles of sand so the word “dune” is ubiquitous when it comes to streets, shopping centres, hotels etc. But as you go east and further into the desert (or up the beach), sand gives way to rocks. And they are folded and faulted and twisted and thrust hither and yon; a structural geologist’s paradise. A spectacular and spectacularly ugly Mad Max landscape where incidentally, the last Mad Max movie was made. The geology is metamorphic. The topography is Mordormorphic.

I’m a very ex-geologist but this sort of topography still makes what hair is left on the back of my neck, stand up. I am reminded of the relative timelessness of the geological process – we’re talking potentially hundreds of millions of years to produce the petrological mayhem here which puts the climate catastrophists’ end-of-world timetable countdown into the blink category. Are we down to 7 years now? I’ll need to call Al or Greta or AOC (no, not the Australian Olympic Committee, although these days their answer would probably be the same) or some other world famous climatologist.

We’re talking different things here but catastrophic change doesn’t happen overnight in nature other than very locally. None of us will live to see significant permanent change in any shape or form and you can take that to the bank. Allowing grifters, carpetbaggers and ideologues to tell you they can change nature overnight (and believing them) will result in them taking you to the cleaners vis-à-vis your bank account. If you don’t realise this is happening now, you’re not paying enough attention.

That’s Walvis Bay and Namibia done and dusted. Various orifices have been unclogged of sand and we are heading north again. Despite the fact we are in the tropics it is still somewhat chilly. Our Namibian tour guide said there was no way he would swim or surf in the Atlantic Ocean as the water is freezing which I guess explains the less than tropical breeze. Angola beckons.

This is our fourth Azamara cruise and I think I’ve finally worked out why the crew : clientele ratio is so high. Not many of the people on these cruises would be capable of climbing into a lifeboat (or out of a bath) unassisted if the Poseidon Adventure shit hits the tidal wave fan, so the more help the better. It is what it is. What can I say. Anyway, this ship won’t stray far from the coast although most of it would be rather inhospitable coast and I’m almost certain wading onto a remote beach isn’t one of the planned shore excursions.

Parodying our cruise-mates would be too easy and too cruel and the CB and I actually fall into a number of the categories I could highlight although I still reckon we are in the youngest 20 or so on the boat, not counting the staff. We’re not quite the Walking Dead but sailing on Saggy Elbows Cruises is definitely us. Paul Keating used to say don’t get between a premier and a bucket of money. He could have said don’t get between a pensioner and a free buffet with equal alacrity. When that great American stand-up Bill Burr said the best way to conserve the earth’s resources and reduce the planet’s population was to systematically take out cruise ships, I think I know which ones he was talking about.

We’re 40 or so miles from shore so it’s 360 degrees of horizon at present as we sail up the South African (or Namibian) coast. It’s also our first ocean cruise for a while so the wobbly boots are well and truly on and we find ourselves walking like shopping trolleys – facing the direction you want to go but veering off at a 30 degree angle. Better off sitting down and letting perfectly balanced waiters bring liquid refreshments at regular intervals.

It’s now day 3 and we are approaching Walvis Bay in Namibia. We have seen more dolphins in the last half hour than we ever saw at Seaworld and you don’t have to pay to see them  leap (is that what dolphins do?) out of the water apart from the cost of the cruise and airfares – cheap at twice the price.

The immigration people are getting on board right now and everyone who wants to get off (the boat) has to have a face-to-face meeting with an immigration officer. Very officious and official. Must be the German in them although at the end of the day it’s about dollars. I have never, apart from here, had to write on an immigration form how much money I expect to spend while I’m in their country. If you say none, does your visa application get rejected? I guess so. Not sure where we’ll spend it however because from here, where the Azamara Journey is tied up, it looks like Gilligan’s Island with a container terminal.

Two full days doesn’t do Cape Town and surrounds justice. But we gave it a go. The first day was mostly about geography. That got the walking and climbing out of the way as well as the almost vertical cable car trip up Table Mountain. The view from the bottom of the cable car was sensational and it just got better as we went up. Walking and climbing dispensed with, day two was all about wine. But first, a digression followed by day 1.

The first time we got in a lift in our hotel the power was cut. Their wind-mill must have stopped turning. The lift stopped abruptly and the lights went off. 20 or so seconds later the lights came on and we proceeded to our floor. It’s a bit of a shock but nothing like the shock of travelling up a mine shift at 30 mph. When the power cuts out here, momentum keeps the lift going up until gravity wins and it drops until the tension in the cables catapults the lift back up and so on, up and down in ever decreasing iterations until physics wins and you eventually stop. Unclenching then proceeds. When this happens, don’t be in the lower level of a two level lift with 90 people above you. Who says it doesn’t shower underground?

Back to geography. The Cape of Good Hope (nee Cape of Storms) is the point everyone knows about, well anyone who can read and occasionally exercises that skill. It’s the most south-west point on the African continent and there’s a sign to prove it. In other words it’s not the furthest south and it’s not the furthest west which doesn’t seem like anything to be particularly proud of. And Cape Point, a few kilometres from the Cape of Good Hope is not the place where the Atlantic Ocean officially meets the Indian Ocean. That’s a hundred or so kilometres away. But it is the place where the Atlantic Ocean current meets the Indian Ocean current. I know, I was confused too. But I was able to exhibit my encyclopaedic knowledge of primary school social studies when the guide quizzed us. Bartholomew Diaz, Vasco da Gama (explorer and bastard extrordinairre) and Emmanual the 1st anyone? And that last one isn’t the first movie in a soft porn series. Actually, maybe it is.

The wine areas are spectacular, even through the bottom of a glass and after four wineries, the eyes were getting somewhat glassy, like peeholes in the snow as my Mum used to say. But only if you swallow rather than spit. Unfortunately only one made port and it was the first so at the end we only had one bottle for balcony night-caps. The booze is free on these boats so no real damage.

We only had a handful of tour companions both days. In the short time we’re BFF’s only to never see each other again, some put themselves forward as worth writing about. Two American gay guys, one a genetics academic, the other a human rights lawyer with the ACLU were an interesting pair. I could have got into so much trouble just by asking a few questions so confined myself to asking the genetics guy how he reconciled X and Y chromosomes with numerous genders. He politely said it was a problem.

It’s been hard to reconcile the murder capital of Africa reputation Cape Town apparently has with what we saw and did. I guess we stuck to the well-worn tourist trails and CapeTown is a tourist magnet. To be sure we got off to a molestation-free start I booked a car from the airport to our hotel with an outfit that operates in many international airports. The driver warned us about checking child-locks in Ubers. That settled that. No Ubers.

We’re now underway on the cruise and what’s the first thing I read when we got to our “state room” (Azamara doesn’t have “cabins”)? Visa’s will be arranged at every stop provided you don’t have yellow fever and can prove it. FFS! After all of the aggravation I went through trying to do the right thing, the lazy pricks who did nothing expecting it would be done for them, were right. I better not give out this web address to any of our fellow cruisers while on board. We wouldn’t want them to think I’m putting them in that category. And I’ll be politely enquiring of Azamara why they ignored my two emails on the subject.

Most people who’ve flown with Singapore Airlines would agree it’s one of the better airlines if not the best. Their people know the difference between offering a service and being a servant (take note various western airlines, too many to mention), their planes are comfortable and clean, although like all airlines, if you travel up the back it helps if you’ve spent time as a battery hen. And the experience is only as good as the people around you. On the leg from Singapore to Cape Town the CB and I were in premium economy so there’s a bit more space and a bit more attention. But can someone tell me why, in the middle of the night, half way across the Indian Ocean, when half the people in our small three row cabin are trying to sleep (me included) and the other half are binge watching White Lotus (minus the naughty bits), the crew hands out bags of potato chips. It would have been quieter if they’d put bubble-wrap carpet down in the aisles.

It was a late start out of Singers because of the weather. I’m good with that. I’ve flown through typhoons and cyclones (same thing, just depends which part of the world you’re in) so if the captain thinks it’s worse than that, delay away.

Speaking of typhoons, it was grand final day in 1993 and I was on my way to Hong Kong. I got upgraded to first class so the trip was off to a flyer in more ways than one. I asked the cabin boss to ask the captain to keep us updated on the score which he duly did and the Broncos won, of course. I was sitting next to a St George supporter and by the time we got to Honkers I must have had two bottles of champagne in the bag so when we had to land (after a few attempts) in a typhoon, I was feeling no pain. Flying through, then over a cyclone in India between Vishakhapatnam and Madras in a rickety old Indian Airlines plane was an entirely different experience however.

Safety is also a rather significant item in the holiday’s strategic plan if travelling to South Africa. Our son helpfully advised us not to get car-jacked and our daughter also read about the country’s imminent collapse into chaos. I was somewhat heartened when waiting for our bags in the baggage hall. There were the usual lost luggage counters and foreign exchange rip-off booths. But there was also a booth I had never seen before, anywhere in an airport. It was simply called “Fire Arms”. I should have asked if they were checking those being brought in like Wyatt Earp did in Dodge City, or giving them back to the good burghers of SA who had inadvertently left them in their carry-on bags or selling them to nervous first-visitors.

I was reminded of the the airport’s Fire Arms shop or whatever it was, when driving round the more salubrious parts of town. Security signs are on private houses everywhere with some provided by professional security firms and others home-made but all are dazzlingly clear. Of all of the words written on these signs, as a would be miscreant you only needed to be cogniscent of two words which are ubiquitous vis-a-vis the signs and these are ” Armed Response”. Every other word is superfluous.

It’s now three days into the trip and we’ve been rather busy so the next entry will cover what we’ve been up to in fantastic (there’s a clue) Cape Town

I can’t remember where I heard this. Just a bit of trivia I hoovered up under society’s sofa I guess but it seems the pineapple we have on one of our suitcases has rather a salacious significance when used in a certain way. Apparently a pineapple shape outside your door means there’s shenanigans of a swinger variety occurring on the other side of said door. Our pineapple is so we can identify our bag on a carousel loaded with similar bags. Remind me not to leave this bag outside our door on the cruise because cruises are supposedly rampant with this behaviour. Who knew? It’s rather perplexing when I think the CB and I have been amongst the youngest passengers on our cruises. Most of our cruise-mates have struggled to stay upright let alone impress a stranger with their horizontal tango expertise.

This could  be the least of our problems however. I just read a news article that suggests South Africa is about to become a failed state. Not a good state of affairs if you’re landing there tomorrow, as we are. Now before we get too excited about this it has to be said I read this on news.com.au which is where Rupert sends his work experience kids to pretend they are journalists. It’s hard to take their dross with anything more than a grain of salt when usually 6 of the first 8 articles are about The Block or Married at First Sight. These worldly hard-bitten cynical journos think Josh giving Bree a good sorting-out when we were all hoping against hope that he’d play hide the sausage with Summer, is breaking news to them.

I’ve been a South Africa watcher for decades. They are a major producer, exporter and consumer of coal which is my thing (let the debate or abuse begin). Their state-owned power producer Eskom is about to precipitate a collapse of the electricity grid causing even more mayhem than usual. Fortunately I’ve also been watching The Last of Us so know how to survive in a dystopian shit-storm and as previously mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I can run faster than the CB if the shit-storm shit hits the fan (just joking, yuk yuk). It’s not unexpected though. Mandela stepping onto the mainland in 1990 was the high point and it’s been more or less downhill ever since. As long as we get up Table Mountain on Thursday without a power-cut stranding us half-way and get to sample what I am reliably informed are excellent wines on Friday, all will be well. We escape on Saturday.

When I worked full-time for a living and spent a large proportion of that time on the road (or in the air to be more accurate) we used to say that the countries you least wanted to go to were the ones that made it hardest for you to get there. For me that was Iran, Pakistan and at least the first few times, India. The child bride and I are about to embark on a cruise up the West African coast from Cape Town to Lisbon and obtaining visas for the various stops is proving somewhat problematic. But first let me recount a story in a similar vein.

Back in the day I spent an awful lot of time in India. It wasn’t always awful, in fact it rarely was except when a severe bout of the inevitable descended. Descended right through me in fact. But that’s a different and not really worth revisiting, story. So on this particular trip I was looking forward to coming home in a day or so when I got a call from my boss. I know he’s going to read this so I’ll keep the abuse to a minimum. If you are a regular reader of this blog you will have read the story about when he asked me, on a Sunday night, to go to India on Monday during the 1989 pilot’s strike and I didn’t have a visa. This was a bit different – he wanted me to go to Pakistan.

Not such a big deal you would think because it’s next door. It is though, when your passport’s almost full. Going back a step, I was pretty pally with the Austrade Senior Trade Commissioner who worked out of the Australian High Commission which is next door to the Pakistan High Commission as luck would have it. He gave me the name of the Pakistani senior visa guy so I walked next door, told the security guys who I needed to see and one of them escorted me to his office. That’s when I was told I needed a full blank page in my passport (which I didn’t have) for the visa stamp (no sharing it seemed) and the inside back cover, the bit stuck to the cardboard, wasn’t good enough.

Back to the Aus High Commission I went and an hour later after rushing off to find somewhere that did passport photos I had a brand new passport in my hot little hand. It was hot because the passport has hot – straight off the presses. So back next door I went.

On arriving back at the Pakistan HC it seemed all of the security guys had gone to lunch and not only had they left the gate unlocked, it was wide open. In India! So I walked in completely unmolested. I knew where the visa guy’s office was so I walked across the courtyard and into the building like the invisible man and knocked on the visa guy’s door. He didn’t seem too perturbed to see me and proceeded to get my visa stamped. Somewhat bemused I was thinking to myself that a James Bond gig would be pretty easy if all you had to do to break into a foreign embassy was wait until lunch-time. This was some time ago and there has been a bit of ugliness between the two countries since then so I am sure they have beefed up security by introducing staggered meal times.

That was that although as an epilogue to the process, when my Pakistan Airlines flight took off it felt like we had been fired out of an almost vertical cannon. I have only experienced similar prolonged steepness, like sitting in the space shuttle, when flying over the Andes from Santiago in Chile where the ground seems to be only a few hundred feet below you for about half an hour. The relationship being what it is between India and Pakistan I guess they wanted to get out of missile range as quickly as possible.

I can’t remember whether all of that aggravation was worth it. I never managed to sell a tonne of coal into Pakistan (with that company – I did later with another) so I guess ultimately, it wasn’t.

Back to our trip. We are visiting South Africa, Namibia, Angola, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Gambia, the Canary Islands, Madeira and Portugal. As with most e-applications these days you are presented with drop down menus and limited choices. Interestingly most of these guys are not with the multiple gender program yet because you only get two choices in their genetically based application process. Not even three let alone the 74 listed on most university application forms! Guess they’ve got more pressing issues. The menu for port of entry for one country provided for three land based and two airports. Problem. Problem has not gone away and their embassy with responsibility for Australia which is not in Australia is, like Joe Biden, not taking questions. And I was getting as much sense out of one of the others as journalists get from Joe Biden’s press secretary (but she is the first black, immigrant, lesbian press secretary, so it’s alright). I actually completed this application before an administrator asked for our flight itinerary. After explaining three times that we would arrive by boat so we didn’t have flight itineraries, they eventually explained they only issued visas for entry by air. Now I’m politely explaining to them why they need to reimburse the visa fees I paid to complete the process (or so I thought). I could be the victim of a very elaborate scam here.

Anyway, we’ll see what happens. We spent three days in Russia off a cruise a while back and it was the only place in Europe that wanted us to buy (the operative word) a visa. We got off and on the boat numerous times without an immigration officer in sight. Maybe this trip will be the same. Stay posted to find out.