Season's Greetings

And a very merry Yuletide to you all - as well as my wishes for a peaceful, prosperous and thoughtful 2012. We're back from a holiday in Port Alfred where the lovely beaches were uncrowded and the kids got to set up their own ecosystems in tidal pools (of course these were gone the next day to the bafflement of Lily and the relief of the dozens of captured hermit crabs and starfish).  Henry was more concerned with running into the waves than any eco-research; with the water being fairly rough and given his brick-like swimming abilities, I was kept on the hop. All in all though it was a fabulous time.

One of the excursions we made was a little North of Port Alfred, to the Fish River lighthouse. Chivvied on by a very strong and chilly wind we took some quick pictures of this imposing Victorian edifice and the completely deserted beaches nearby and then fled back to our cottage to apply an insulating layer of KFC grease to our innards.

Another excursion was to the Big Pineapple at Bathurst – a hilariously kitsch structure once again subject to some gale force winds (as you can see I was clinging onto the kids at the top, 17 metres above the concrete).

 Ice creams all round (or, in Harry’s case, all over) and then off to Grahamstown to marvel at the Victorian architecture I recalled vaguely, details having been blurred by alcohol when I was at Rhodes in the Eighties and the decades since then. The Cathedral of St. Michael and St. George was well worth a visit although Henry Alexander decided the acoustics were perfect for a clog dance cum ballet routine and needed to be chased down to ground behind the baptismal font and silenced.

We ended off with a night on a farm near Addo Elephant Park, and then the next day drove through the park on our way to PE Airport - seeing, strangely enough, quite a few elephant :) they survive surprisingly well on the low thorny scrub that grows near the coast there.

All in all a great and long overdue return to my old haunts in the Eastern Cape..

Davey's on the Road Again ....

A track from Manfred Mann's Earth Band, an old favourite and very appropriate right now. I'm moving on from my current consulting role with SAP to take up a corporate OD and change role with one of the major mining houses here in Joahnnesburg. It's been an interesting 2-odd years back in South Africa with much travel (mostly to Nigeria); many conferences, lots of new friends and of course the growth and development of my beautiful children. It's hard to capture such eventful times in a few photos but here we go ....

Autumn in Africa

It's been a while since I posted anything, I see. A very busy few months which have seen us moving into a newly purchased house, and sending Lily off to the vastly overpriced pre-school on our estate. She is now 4 going on 28 and developing a nice line in looks to keep her old Dad in his place ...

The new house is a lot larger than our Berkshire home, and the renovators we hired kept asking us if our furniture was still coming from the UK. We blushingly admitted that what they saw was the sum total of what we own, less some antiques we stored, and we're still working on how to fill an extra 200 sq. metres of space we never had before.

We took the kids to a fantastic zoo around 90km north of Pretoria - called Mystic Monkeys it is the first one I've seen with decent sized cages for the simian cousins. Lily and Henry found the apes very amusing, but were far more impressed with the tiger and white lion cubs they encountered.

Otherwise all well - we're adjusting to our second year back in Africa. Hellish expensive now, Johannesburg, but we are keeping our heads just enough above water to allow the occasional smile.

The glamorous side of international management consulting

I thought I’d write a brief account of my week in Nigeria just to give some kind of indication what it is like to travel there on business. Not my first trip there of course, just the most recent. And not the worst either – this one was about average. I’ve done about a dozen such trips in the last year or so, all economy class because even though the total journey time can stretch to 14 hours or more, no one leg is 8 hours long so we don’t qualify for business class travel.....


To start off with, my Nigerian multiple entry visa expired on 11th May, which meant I was taking a risk with the hostile immigration officials in Lagos, by trying to gain entry for a week starting on 8th May. I thought I’d chance it and so booked the trip, even though they’re a bit touchy right now after the elections.

My shuttle driver got lost on the estate I live in, because their system has two addresses for me and he chose the old wrong one. That meant he eventually arrived about half an hour late for my pickup, which in itself was already arranged for a bit too close to the check-in time. After I growled at him for being late he got nervous and drove fast and erratically until I told him I’d rather be late than dead, whereafter he slowed down a bit.

Check-in for the SAA flight in Johannesburg was OK, although a sudden gate change at the last minute meant hundreds of people galloping a few hundred metres to the new gate. Once boarded, I realised with sinking heart it was the oldest plane in SAA’s aging fleet of Airbus 340-200s, which meant no individual movie screens but rather a rattling drop-down central monitor every 15 rows or so, with flickering pictures of Eddie Murphy in shades of purple and green. The plane was 99% full but mercifully the only empty seat was the one next to me so I managed some fitful dozing across the partially raised armrest. The food was the usual dire 1970’s SAA rubbish, with a salad composed entirely of large rough cut pieces of wilted green pepper, a main course of oily lamb stew over sloppy mashed potatoes and a pudding straight out of my boarding school decades ago. The Nigerian lady over the aisle from me kept trying to put her headphone lead across into the arm of my chair (hers wasn’t working) but was eventually repelled by my hostile glares. It was a single socket system so my double-socket noise cancelling headset didn’t work.

We landed an hour after the scheduled time with no explanation from the pilot, who just baldly informed us we were late. Frankly I was glad to just get there even if a bit slower than usual. The standard mad dash for the aircraft exit took place, with the cognoscenti shoving all and sundry out of their way in the rush to be first in the very very long immigration queue. If one is late in that race, one ends up being part of the “escalator follies” where the relentlessly-running steps deposit a stream of non-Nigerian passport holders into a small, finite space – providing much amusement to all as people crash into the end of the queue, drop briefcases or vault madly over the edge of the escalator to avoid the impact. The Nigerian immigration staff are usually somewhere between abrupt and openly hostile, and best not provoked.

I guess I was about 40th in the queue, which gave me enough time to read and internalise the cover story sent via text message to me by my driver waiting outside. When the immigration screening officer asked me what I was doing in Nigeria I said boldly “I have a meeting at the Presidency and I’d like to leave the country on 11th May” which was at least 50% true. I got a 2-week entry visa and scampered madly off to the baggage carousel, where I waited an hour for my luggage to arrive.

Once out into the hot steamy late evening in Lagos, I was glad to see my driver who shepherded me out into the dark and mosquito-riddled car park to find the car. On the way there I spotted a Nigerian policeman with the ubiquitous Kalashnikov on a sling - he must have been bored because as I passed him he body-checked me quite hard with his shoulder and then lifted the rifle and said “Do you like this?” “Yes” I replied “It’s an AKMS, folding butt parachute model, 7.62 intermediate,. Not bad even at 600 rounds a minute!” and walked away. Unusual behaviour even in Nigeria, but still it was even more proof that I can get into trouble anywhere without even trying... my driver was aghast at this unprovoked bit of bullying but I was in a eerie state of calm (or early dehydration) and forgot about it almost immediately. Not the first time I have been thumped by someone with an AK, anyway.

A long drive all the way into Ikoyi to my hotel, because the hotels close to the airport are too expensive for our project. Too late for dinner and, as usual, leaving for the next airport too early for breakfast although I did manage to steal some sausages from the buffet as they were laying it out. Driver slapping at mosquitoes in the car all the way while I frantically slathered myself with Tabard repellent, there are only so many trips you can safely take antimalarials and this wasn’t chosen to be one of them.

Monday morning and early to the MM2 domestic terminal, and luckily I am well briefed in what happens if you have booked a seat on Air Nigeria from South Africa and then you change your flight also from South Africa. You are depicted as a “no show” in the systems in Lagos and need to queue to have your ticket revalidated before queuing somewhere else to pay the “date change” fees and then queuing somewhere else again to check in. I eventually completed this process as they were closing the checkin and scuttled upstairs to board the flight.

The trip to Abuja was uneventful , although the 35-odd km from airport to hotel took over an hour thanks to some very bad traffic. They’ve been working on the road there for years now, with no real sign of getting close to completion. We eventually arrived at the Hawthorn suites, where we are compelled to stay while in Abuja, and I was given a room which was pretty standard, although only half the light bulbs were working. A quick freshen-up and then off to the client.

Dinner was room service (it’s too dangerous to wander round outside at night and the hotel is in the middle of nowhere anyway) and I ordered a steak which was a silly error. The rare grilled steak I was promised turned out to be an extremely tough and vastly overcooked piece of leather, served with an enormous mound of plain white rice (no gravy) and some stir fried cabbage. Should have gone with the local dishes, although I wanted at least one night’s sleep before smiting my colon with loads of chilli and meat.

Breakfast was the usual oily mix of strange foodstuffs, all liberally soused with chilli pepper. I chose some crumbly local bread to support the Nigerian scrambled eggs, chilli beef sausages and chilli chicken stew, then headed to the office.

The aircons were working this time, thank God, and the day was pleasant enough inside, although 36 degrees outside. I had lunch with the OCM team in the “Mama Cass” canteen, and attracted some strange looks for humming “California Dreaming” and then giggling helplessly. Lunch was, as ever, jolloff rice and chilli chicken, with some sauce from the chilli beef stew to moisten the rice. I could feel my tummy whimpering...

... and remembered my wife telling me last year just go to “Pret a Manger” to pick up something rather than eat all the spicy food ha ha. Nigeria is not like that. Anyway, time for some ghastly instant coffee with powdered milk (there’s no fresh milk in the whole country for some weird reason, and almost nobody drinks coffee either).


It’s now 12h00 on Friday and I will try and find another bottle of water somewhere to keep hydrated, it will be a very long and hot afternoon leaving here for the airport at 13h30, arriving in Lagos around 17h00 and taking off for SA at around 23h00 to arrive in Johannesburg at around 05h15 local time without having slept on the flight as usual. Then time to try and cheer my family up after they lost me halfway through Sunday and I arrive back grumpy and tired on a Saturday. And not tell them I am probably going to need to do this all over again soon, as we get closer to go-live.

Roll on Christmas



Henry



It's 1 December in sunny Gauteng (actually cool and overcast today) and I am in sole charge of our Harry who turned 2 last week. Lily is in pre-school and Marcela has gone shopping with my Australian cousin Misty, who is visiting us this week. Work emails are coming through slowly, although there is still not the end of year lassitude I'd been bargaining on. One good thing is that it looks like I am done travelling for the year - apart, of course, from our Christmas sojourn to Maritzburg when we will join the Great Annual Gauteng Lemming stampede to the seaside. Still, work looms in Dubai, Istanbul, Abuja, Lagos and Addis early in the New Year and I am also looking at an internal project which will have time in Germany and the USA.. 

Lily checking if this was a real spider!

Our last trip to PMB was pretty good - Kim and I got to spend time together and the kids got to play with various of their cousins. Just up the road from where we were staying is Cordwalles School - which has a decent play area for kiddies although some of the decorations verge on the macabre, as can be seen..

We had a great and relaxing time and look forward to visiting our Natal relatives again soon. It's good to be there and no great challenge to put our watches back 20 years for the time difference :)

Otherwise we're all setting in pretty well. It has already been six months since I collected the family in Istanbul and brought them to our rented townhouse in Midrand. Lily and Henry are doing well, thriving on being able to play outdoors pretty much every day and I must say it's good to see them doing so. They get on well as siblings - although Lily tends to boss her little brother a bit there's very little fighting and he even sat still for her art class.. 





Before official cleanup



After cleanup for family photos

Voortrekkers en nuwelinge

Last weekend after staggering back from my regular trip to Abuja via Lagos I thought I'd take the family to see the Voortrekker Monument (also known as the Pop-up Toaster) which is around ten miles north of us here.

Dad doing local culture immersion training with Lily and Henry

A surprisingly large block of granite, on the top of a hill and surrounded by gardens, the Monument was built way back in the Thirties to celebrate the Great Trek of Dutch folk a century before. The "Trekkers" left the Cape Colony to avoid British domination, and headed North. Some, including ancestors of ours, kept on heading north at the slightest hint of domination, interference or even the odd dirty look - an irascibility and antisocialness that had them settling remote and uninhabited parts of Rhodesia. Some of these proto-Hodgsons apparently pre-dated the explorations of Selous and Livingstone - the discovery of Victoria Falls by the latter was quite some years after one of the Swart or Erasmus family arrived there in transit.

Henry and I found a seat next to some garlic plants and relaxed in the winter sunshine. A little way down the hill the sound of The Last Post wafted into the air - the annual South African Defence Force remembrance day service was taking place at the Wall of Remembrance which, like the US one in Washington, lists the names of the fallen. My war dead are mostly in Rhodesia I guess, and anyway I hate memorial services and funerals so we stayed up the hill, avoided all the old folk wearing black blazers and medals and contented ourselves with watching the parade of bearded Afrikaners, camera-toting tourists and the odd local low-budget families like ourselves who couldn't find anything else kid-friendly to do on a Sunday in Gauteng.

Lily inside the 64-wagon laager

Mindful of the fact that I was heading for Istanbul on Tuesday, I resolved to make the most of our Sunday outing and allowed my pale European kids to get more sun than they were accustomed to in Newbury. Lily explored the flower gardens inside the ring of concrete ox-wagon bas-reliefs symbolic of the laager that defended the Volk from Zulu attacks at Blood River and Marcela ascended to the parapets, no doubt thinking how her ancestors would have found such a structure useful in repelling the marauding Turks that threatened Bessarabia regularly.

Antipodean autumn and Eastern Delights

Getting chilly in the evenings, Johannesburg is. One of the biggest adjustments for Northern Hemisphere folk coming to South Africa must be the plummeting night-time temperatures in the middle months of the year. Houses are, by and large, not insulated well, never double-glazed and seldom heated to any meaningful degree so if it's minus 3 outside the chances are it's pretty cool inside.

Our new home has underfloor heating in most rooms, designed to take the edge off the bone chilling shock one gets when stepping out of bed onto a ceramic tiled floor. This is great in theory, although the miserly trip switch on our distribution board means running more than three of these at one time is not possible. Also in the master bedroom some of the heating panels don't work, making the morning dash to the loo a kind of Russian roulette across a chessboard of alternately warm and freezing tiles.

The family is adjusting OK after a pretty grim flight here from the near East last week. Overall it was a fairly new Airbus, reasonable seat pitch and a good line in food and little giveaways. Typical of a new and aspiring operation I guess, they have concentrated on being very friendly and smiling a lot while bombarding the customers with toiletries, food and drink. I'd personally rather that they had looked at the overall customer experience from booking to disembarking, and re-engineered that so we were not left crammed into a fetid waiting room without airconditioning or announcements over the causes of our delay; boarded eventually using the "stampede" method which meant that those carrying babies (like us) were too slow to be among the first hundred to so passengers on the plane; sat on the plane for three quarters of an hour watching an exceedingly strange selection of humanity stroll up and down the aisles chatting merrily (no explanation for the delay again, nor for the fact that this airline seems to use neither competence nor pulchritude as criteria in its stewardess selection); then an eventual very long taxi, punctuated by random hard braking and equally random loud, profound groaning noises from the undercarriage and thank Allah finally a takeoff at 01h00 instead of 23h00 - and a leisurely meal service with all main cabin lights on until 04h00.

My increasingly acerbic comments to the stewardesses about the light were met with complete incomprehension. We had two sporadically hysterical, vomiting or hopelessly sobbing infants trying to sleep under a tent fashioned of airline blankets wedged between the seat backs of the enormous Afrikaans couple in front of us (dislodged regularly by their bibulous and elephantine romancing, which looked like colliding icebergs) and the seat fronts of the happy Brazilian soccer fans behind us who sang gently and greeted Harry every time he popped his tear stained pink face up for a look. A helluva way to spend nine hours - and I was so glad to be in good old Oliver Tambo Airport I nearly danced - well, if my legs had not been sciatically numbed from sitting on the arm rest of the airplane seat for hours as the only way to let both kids lie down simultaneously I might have indulged in a happy waddle.

Now to settle in to our new life and hope I am not transferred again inside of the next year. My poor wife is exhausted to the point of death with having lived in 6 different places since January 2006 and that, coupled with my very high Life Insurance cover in this job means telling her we are moving to Jeddah or Walldorf may be the last thing I ever do.

Back in the Motherland

Unusually enough for a many-generation African, this is the first blog I am actually writing and publishing from the Dark Continent. It’s March 2010, late summer in Johannesburg and still quite sultry on occasion (as indeed I myself am, in a dim light..). I’m in a pretty decent office park in the Northern suburbs – a place called Woodmead – and luckily enough given the ferociously congested traffic on the motorways, live in an adjacent community so my daily commute is around 15 minutes. When the family arrives I’ll add quite a bit onto the commute but gain the safety of living in a secure estate in Midrand.

It is indeed strange and yet familiar to be back in Mother Africa after an absence of almost ten years. Some of my ancestors first got here in the early 1700’s although their sun-resistant Afrikaans genes have been diluted by later infusions of Celtic and Saxon blood, giving me my delicate pink complexion, suspiciously ginger beard and lack of tolerance for the sharp ultraviolet here. Perceptibly sharper than in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia I can tell you, although not reaching the levels of lethality of Brisbane where “burn time” is around a dozen minutes.

So what’s changed since my last major visit in 2006? Bearing in mind I was a little distracted back then, introducing my new fiancée to my family without, or so I thought anyway, revealing the true reason for her strange attacks of morning nausea and habit of wearing very large shawls and wraps about her upper body. As it transpired, pretty much all of them knew we had a baby on the way but thought it funny to say nothing.

Anyway back then I think there was far more pessimism in the country than there is now, and of course the Joburg airport was a complete nightmare back then. We were decanted onto the tarmac at around 06h00 of a Highveld winter’s morning and then left standing without a shuttle bus for about 20 minutes, during which time Marcela went an interesting shade of blue and I finally realized (much too late, as usual) that she was wearing a little summer dress for her first trip to Africa.. she never expected it to be close to freezing and with a stiff wind blowing..

This time the airport is much better, if still a bit shy on travelators, bookshops and so on. The scenery is still verdant and lush, although when my poor wife arrives we will be in winter again and back to brown and dusty and dry. Every single major road is stitched with roadworks, cones, piles of earth, haphazardly parked heavy equipment and, at the intersections, hilariously un-synchronised traffic co-ordinators from some private organization I suspect. Internet speeds are better, although the country is still well before the tipping point where sufficient connectivity forces a boom in e-commerce and, hopefully, an improvement in website design (most of the commercial sites are truly dire examples of “brochureware” with very limited search and online purchasing technologies, I have already been guilty of firing off irascible emails to estate agents and second hand car sales sites that look like they were designed by primary school kids).

Politics is still, along with crime, probably the dominant source of local news although I hope the World Cup will temporarily alleviate that. I’d love to be able to get politicians doing stuff to improve service delivery instead of grandstanding, scoring cheap points off each other and generally enriching themselves. That of course applies to everywhere I’ve lived, Zimbabwe, the UK, South Africa, Kuwait and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – absolute power corrupts absolutely. I reckon politicians should get a low base salary during their term in office, and at the end their constituents should vote for their bonus and severance payment based on actual work done not rhetoric.

Mild headache, I must remember to drink a lot more water than in the UK. Could also be a result of the six inoculations yesterday as preparation for next week’s trip to Abuja and Lagos. The cheerful little SRN, unbowed by either her forty years experience or by the sight of me with my shirt off and no sports bra, used 4 needles in total and was emphatic that she’d like to have given me more immunizations but accepted that I was settling for the bare minimum. Of course I have to take antimalarials too, the new ones which cost almost a UK fiver a tablet.
It’s good to be back. Strange, scary, very different to the last decade or so – but still good.