It’s funny how we can find ways to compare just about any new place we visit to other places we’ve been in our lives. No matter how distant or different the location, there always seems to be something familiar to which we can liken the landscape, the atmosphere, or the smaller aspects of the places we’ve encountered since we’ve been in South Africa. After two months of internships, classes, and activist projects, we ventured east this week on our mid-semester excursion to KwaZulu Natal (KZN), and we’ve had the chance to see a part of South Africa that is geographically (and culturally) quite different than the Western Cape. The Drakensberg Mountains – where we will be spending the last three days of the trip – have proven to be the most striking topography of the excursion, and even after hours of driving through the mountains on Wednesday, we still walk out of our chalets at Monte-Aux-Sources Resort to gaze in awe upon the grand panorama.For every mental picture I capture, I long to be able to describe it in terms that those I know back home can understand, and so I find myself likening almost everything I see to something I’ve known (or heard about) while back in the United States. I may not be well travelled internationally, but I’ve been lucky enough to have seen a large portion of the continental US, so from my summer travels around the country, I piece together a South African landscape through comparison…
Coast Highway
In the sleepy, sun-drenched town of Plettenberg Bay, I see Santa Barbara, CA.
In the middle-of-nowhere road side rest stops along the N2, I see the rest stops of the American Midwest, right down to the Shania Twain soundtrack and fast food.
In the traditional huts and villages scattered across the vast and rolling landscape near Hluhluwe, I see the Native American reservations of the South West.
In the cattle milling in clusters across the middle of the rural farm road, I see the herds of sheep that blocked the roads in my mother’s pictures of Ireland.
In the pink and green neon glow of hotels and casinos on the Durban beachfront, I see the bright lights of the Las Vegas strip.
In the endless sky and long, winding roads across KZN’s vacant, green fields, I see the Oklahoma prairie, and in the hazy blue-green mountains that encompass those fields I see the oversized landscape of Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
In the green and brown stratified peaks of the jutting Drakensberg Mountains, I see the Sierra Nevadas and the southern Rocky Mountains.
And in the waterfalls, pools, and sculpted rocky ridges that surrounded us during our hike through the Drakensbergs, I saw the mountainous landscape of Hawaii. (This likeness is perhaps supported best by my inadvertent repetition of the phrase “Wow, this feels like Lost,” as we hiked through the mountains.)(
The continent of Africa has been so exoticized by the Western world – through the media, even through the education system – that I was prepared to find myself in some wholly alien environment once we stepped outside of urban Cape Town on this excursion to the wild reaches of KZN. A part of me expected jungles, rutted dirt roads, and lions on the prowl. And admittedly, I expected sand dunes, regardless of the fact that we’re no where near the Sahara I was picturing. But in the beautifully dramatic landscapes we’ve seen during the last five days on the excursion, I have found a peaceful familiarity in a continent thousands of miles across the Atlantic from home.
Having been in South Africa over two months, I’d thought I’d surpassed the point of formulating any histrionic assumptions about a “stereotypical” Africa. I have, after all, developed a very grounded and realistic portrait of this country over the last two months as we’ve experienced and learned about issues like racial and political tension, while visiting the many landmark sites on the Western Cape. But it is clear that the romanticized visions of Africa still linger in all of us, from time to time. It’s been said that this is a country of many contrasts and much diversity; the landscapes, the culture, the development, the politics. Sometimes it just takes a trip like this to remind us that there is still so much of South Africa we do not yet know, still so much we have yet to discover.
