9 December 2008
They’ve been aboard a giant mining ship off the Cape west coast, down the world’s deepest mine, and into the Magaliesberg mountains in North West province with a programme that rescues troubled youngsters.
They’ve learnt about efforts to restore the lost languages of the San, they’ve visited the Cape Town-based company whose electric car made its debut at the 2008 Paris Motor Show, they’ve toured the country’s first commercial wind farm.
And everywhere they’ve gone, their laptops and cameras have gone with them.
From 30 November through 8 December, a group of top American bloggers – accompanied by a few local bloggers – toured South Africa, recording their impressions of the country and, with the help of wireless G3 modems supplied by Vodacom, distributing these impressions via the ganglia of the internet.
Organised by the International Marketing Council of SA, the Brand South Africa Bloggers Tour 2008 included some big hitters in the blogosphere, including Mona Gable (The Huffington Post), Zadi Diaz (ZadiDiaz.com), David Sasaki (Global Voices Online), and Eliane Fioret, whose ubergizmo reviews gadgets in six languages and has an enormous following, ranking 22nd among 93-million blogs by Nielsen’s Blogpulse.
Here are some of their impressions.
Bloggers Mine Gold in South Africa
So I’m crawling on my hands and knees through a space about the size of a sewer drain. It’s about 105 degrees and hot as Hades and so dark I think I might pass out from fright. But passing out right now would be a very bad thing to do. Because apparently there’s a young man to my right laying explosives. Must hurry.
I’m literally at the bottom of the earth in Tau Tona, the deepest gold mine in the world … I’m not sure how many feet down we are, but Ray Lewis, one of my fellow bloggers on the tour, says it’s akin to nine Empire State buildings stacked end to end. Pretty darn deep, in other words …
… After our day at the mine we drove to the Magaliesburg, an area that is home to some of the oldest human fossils, and checked into a private game reserve called the Plumari Game Lodge. The back porch of my thatched chalet looked out over a field of wildflowers and grasses and a pond. I was just about to take a nap when I glanced outside and saw an elephant. He was pulling leaves off a tree with his trunk and a man in an orange baseball cap was riding him. At first I thought I must be delirious with fatigue. But then I saw, about 30 yards from them, another man atop another elephant. Then I went inside and took a hot bath in a claw foot tub with a view of the wide sky.
Following South Africa’s Path
If you are looking for a guide to how humanity should move forward to a sustainable future, there’s no better place to visit than where we all started.
Our whirlwind bloggers’ tour of South Africa included a dizzying 22 stops during the first five days. We’ve seen so much – including the rich and diverse cultures of the native peoples, the technology that seeks to build a greener future, the urban centers, and the lush landscape – that it is easy to miss the forest for all these lovely trees.
Why – other than making for great travel entertainment – does South Africa matter so much to the world today and to our collective future?
Diamond Mining Ship aka Peace in Africa
On Wednesday, we flew to this amazing diamond mining ship 10 miles off the Northern Cape coast of South Africa. Elizly Steyn, the metallurgist, one of the 3 women on board, gave us a tour of this huge “gadget” that costed 1.1 billion rands ($110 million) to De Beers.
A Call From the Distant Past
Sometimes when I go to the ocean and stand at the edge of the water for awhile I can fell the pull of time. The feeling at the ocean is a reminder that we came from there. Some serial entrepreneur fish decided one millennium to expand his target market by crawling onshore and here we are …
Wake up 30 minutes before first light and wait for sunrise in a South African field and it’s the same. There is something about the air, the light and the stillness that is different from, say, the Rocky Mountains or Death Valley …
Africa joining the electric car craze
The entire world hopes to start driving electric cars soon, and Africa, despite its reputation for poor economies, is no exception. Luckily, a South African company called Optimal Energy is working to release a vehicle in 2010.
This afternoon we dined at Moyo’s, a cheery outdoor buffet in Rosebank, Johannesburg. I ate springbok stew while a quartet of musicians sang the Click Song (“We have lost our queen!” exclaimed one white South African, in a moment of delayed mourning for the late Miriam Makeba). I even submitted to having my face painted, or rather stippled in the zygomaticosphenoid region with a black-and-white feathery design. Within minutes, I absentmindedly smudged the artwork. For the rest of the afternoon I looked less like a Xhosa warrior than like a half-hearted Gene Simmons impersonator. Or like a man with a Siamese fighting fish preparing to attack his eyeball. I leave you that image, as an appetizer for posts to come.
!Khwa ttu: Sustainable Cultural Preservation
The surprise highlight of this trip for me so far hasn’t been a helicopter flight, luxury resort, or journey down three and half kilometers to the world’s deepest mine. No, what has impressed me the most was a lunch-time visit to !Khwa ttu, a culture and education center for the San people of Southern Africa that sustains its operations through a tourism lodge and restaurant …
What has me excited about the project is that it is able to preserve dying cultures and languages, generate jobs, teach new skills, and educate others all while staying sustainable from its tourism revenue.
The pictures tell the story … see:
Soweto: Hector Pieterson, Holiday Inn, Nambisa and Kliptown
Over the past ten days I cannot express to you effectively the magnitude of incredible things that I have done. But the trend that I seem to have been following on my excursions is to be dumbstruck and in awe of the smaller things, the details that make me African and not the grand gestures and excursions.
One such moving and riveting experience was a trip to Soweto.
High on SA
… At !Kwa Thu I met a San bushman, who despite the fact that there are only four people left in the world today that can still speak his language chooses to speak Afrikaans because it is the language his mother taught him.
In Alexander Bay I met a man and his wife who gave up the rat race and returned home to travel 400 kms per day in the arid dessert to promote the rock paintings and nomadic lifestyle of the bushman in an attempt to give back and preserve the Koi and San communities.
In Stellenbosch and in the Magaliesberg I met coloured people who wear their French and Dutch colonial heritage with pride …
The bloggers’ South Africa posts appear individually on their own blogs and collectively on We Blog The World. To see their pics, visit Flickr: The We Blog the World South Africa Pool.
Simon Barber, US country manager for the IMC and the main mover behind the bloggers’ tour, followed the action closely on the Brand South Africa Blog.
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