South Africa

We like the South Africans! The locals are very helpful and friendly, just enough to not get annoying. You can have good conversations with them, they are very honest and open and want to talk about everything, but we’ve noticed in some provinces especially in the centre of South Africa, somewhere in the conversation you’ll end up talking about apartheid. Racism is an important subject of discussion here, obviously. Certainly ‘the white people’ do not want to be seen as “that racist”,  apartheid is over! This same white South African will remind us that they have lived here for generations and that the farms and estates were honestly bought by the white people centuries ago.

In our opinion racism is not really alive anymore, but class discrimination ís. People with money look down at the ones who have nothing. And because most people with money are white you can easily mistake it with color discrimination.

It’s a vicious circle, white people have money, always have had. They get education and therefore better jobs. Black people have had no money or family capital for a long time, there was no or little education available so jobs such as servant, cleaner or garbage-man was their future. The government wants to make education in South Africa free so that it will be available to everyone. This will mean a major turnaround for the black population, which covers about 70% of all residents.

The population is predominantly Catholic and very much into the Lord. Jesus is everywhere and one is very sensitive to a “god bless you” here and there.

If you want to ask someone a simple question you’ll be forced to ask how they are first. Hi how are you, I’m fine how are you? Thén you can ask your question. This gets tiring after a while especially when you notice it’s just a formality and they really don’t listen to your answer. Some even say ‘I’m fine’ before you’ve even asked…

But there are a lot of people who can really appreciate you asking, especially because you’re a foreigner.

So, our conclusion: we love the South African people, and given our color blindness, we are smiling at everybody and we get a twice as big a smile back.

We visited South Africa from 1 to 25 April, this is the South African autumn and certainly not a high season. The weather was good but varied in each part of this big country. There were days of 10 degrees (Celsius) and a lot of wind and heavy rainfall. The next day could be 30 degrees, (very) sunny and no wind at all.

We did our hikes on the cloudy days, but the way the day starts says nothing about how it ends. Four seasons in a day is nothing new in South Africa.

It was quite cold and we had a lot of rain in the province Vrystaat and the area of Drakensberg, especially the mountains can provide a positive or negative effect on clouds. Everything is green and the showers and toilets run like a waterfall.

On the coast it was much warmer, but also dryer.

West-Kaap and Kwazulu Natal suffer from extreme draught. It hasn’t rained for a long time and the rivers are dry. Sometimes you can’t even flush a toilet.

In short, unpredictable!

We booked a rental car well in advance at Avis 360 for 19 days. This is a rental with full ensurance and 0 own risk. We paid around € 20.00 a day including the one way fee for a totally new Ford Fiesta.

In South Africa 95% of all cars are white. They’ll give you different reasons why this is, because of the dust, the visibility or that it’s cooler in the heat. Actually the white cars are the cheapest, any colour will add to the price. And: ‘we like white cars’. So… that mystery’s solved.

Most of the locals drive a bakkie, a pickup truck. We drove a normal car, but at some points we wished for it to turn into a big wheeled bakkie…

The main roads are well maintained and driving is quite relaxing most of the time. Though there are also a lot of bad roads, especially the smaller roads on the map are usually dirt or gravel or have enormous potholes every 20 cm. They take you about three times as long, so calculate that into your plan.

In these 19 days we’ve driven 3900 kilometres which took us about 64 hours.

We’ve found driving in this country very safe, although it does take some time getting used to the ways of passing a vehicle. Just drive on the emergency lane to let someone pass, everybody does this, it is totally normal. So even on a single lane road with a overtaking prohibition you’ll never get stuck behind a big truck.

South Africa has many minivans that take you from A to B. But also bigger transport busses are available like BazBus, Greyhound and InterCape, these are companies that are quite good. The cost of these busses are not necessarily lower than renting a car and it also gives you some limitations. When traveling alone, take a bus. But with two or more, rent a car!

We prebooked the InterCape bus from Malelane to Maputo, Mozambique because at the Amsterdam airport we needed a ‘return ticket’. A bus ticket was enough so we did. We paid € 15.- per person for this trip which is very expensive as it is only 80 kilometres or so. Waiting at a petrolstation in Malelane took forever but finally 2.5 hours late the bus showed up.

The train in Cape Town is good and very cheap. We paid a return ticket from Cape Town to Simons Town € 2.30 per person, which took us an hour one way.

Trains anywhere else in the country are okay, but slow and unpredictable. On the other hand they are cheap if you have the time. An example: Johannesburg to Port Elizabeth takes you about 28 hours but costs about € 6.-

Currency: 10 South African Rand = € 0.73

In total we’ve spend:

• Transportation and gasoline: € 634.10
• Accommodations: € 993.53
• Eating and drinking: € 531.15
• Entrance fee: € 311.00

Other: € 45.50

That brings us to a daily budget of: € 104.80 for two persons including everything except international flights.

In these three and a half weeks we’ve done everything we wanted. We have visited three Game Reserves a few other parks and did one guided safari daytour. We’ve eaten very good meals and drank a lot of wine and beers with that 😉

We have stayed in hostels, homestays, B&B’s and more, everywhere we’ve always slept private rooms with private or shared facilities. We’ve also had an apartment or cottage a few times where we had more bedrooms and facilities than we needed.

The food in South Africa is quite cheap, especially meat! But because of the low wages the food in restaurants is not that much more expensive than home cooking. This counts for alcohol as well. We drank fantastic wines, sometimes only € 2.50 a bottle! We varied between the both, depending on our accommodation. 

Some examples of products and prices in euro:

• Whole bread in supermarket: € 1.00
• Sandwich in lunchroom: € 3.00
• Coffee in lunchroom: € 1.50
• Bottle of wine in a restaurant: € 10.00
• Bottle (superdelicious) supermarket wine: € 2.50 – 7.00
• Beer in a cafe: € 1.65
• Can of beer (500 ml) in the supermarket (cooling): € 0.75
• Meat in supermarket (500 gr steak): € 3.50
• Dinner in restaurant: € 6.00 – € 10.00
• Liter gasoline: € 0.90
• Simcard with 1 Gb data: € 10.00