Durban, South Africa
The biggest deep water seaport in South Africa was teaming with every kind of ship and heavy equipment, but the skyline of Durban looks like any modern city. Toyota and GM have huge factories here, and the downtown was huge. This could be anywhere in the industrialized world as we sailed in the day before yesterday morning for an all day visit. We took our breakfast on the veranda, exercising our butler's telephone/paging protocol (apparently to the breaking point, but that's another story for later). We decided not to book a tour--one can do only so many "panoramic city tours" or visits to tribal sites (this one in an old movie set) and even to game parks--so we decided to take the ship's shuttle bus into town. We walked a few miles along the quite beautiful urban beachfront promenade which was reminiscent of Rio's, no fooling! We saw pre-school kids, surfers, and lots of locals and tourists riding bikes. We found an Internet cafe and spend 5 rand (55 cents US) for an hour of pretty fast connection time. A nice day and a long walk.
Yesterday's half day call to East London, at the SE corner of Africa, was made even shorter by the ship running slower to minimize the pitching in the transocean swells. We arrived into South Africa's only river mouth port (the guidebook said) an hour and a half late at 1:30 pm, and we sailed out again at 6 pm. Not moving was nice, very nice. More on that, too, later.
For a brief exploration of East London, we took the ship's shuttle through town to a huge shopping mall that, 1) looked like a huge shopping mall anywhere in the world, and 2) had a store, called "Game", which as far as I could tell was a clone of Best Buy. I bought a couple of 2500 mAh rechargeable batteries. Now that's exotic. The standard size in the US is 2450. Wow. Now I know I'm far away from home. I guess there were other indications as well that we were in Africa--such as a curious music video on the TV in the shuttle bus--but I want to report again that in all our stops the people were well dressed, busy, friendly and apparently well educated and knowledgeable. Only the handful of Afrikaners we interacted with appeared to not have much of these attributes.
East London, a 120 year old--that is to say modern--small city had Utah like very wide streets, a spectacular town hall, and a clean look in its Mediterranean climate compared to the very busy hot and humid Durban on the Indian Ocean.
We watched the sail out from the estuary as the waves crashed along the sea wall. The swell was huge, and I spent the evening immobile due to the lactose-free Walgreen motion pill, the third I've felt necessary in over two years at sea. Note the trough in the swell in the photo I took from our 6 Deck veranda, 60 feet or so up. Fortunately, we are exactly midships. The folks in the expensive real suites on Deck 8 are way at the front of the ship and are having an E-ticket rides, well those of them who aren't standing near our cabin looking jealous.
We arrive Cape Town tomorrow morning at 7 am. The ship will sail on its next segment at 6pm with almost 100 fewer guests, and most of them will be long time repeaters. Lots of old friends will be on board, and the crowd will be, uh, quite different. 18 days later we will arrive in Las Palmas, Canary Islands and start on the last segment of the cruise to Barcelona. So, only 30 days to go....
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