‘Hell,’ said Jean-Paul Sartre, the famous French philosophe – who, it’s less well known, opened the bowling for Middlesex in the 1920s at a brisk fast-medium, also contributing useful runs in the late middle order – ‘is other people.’ Well, he actually said ‘L’enfers, c’est les autres,’ which I often paraphrase in family friendly areas to ‘L’enfers, c’est les enfants de les autres,’ (1) but that’s another story.

Regular readers of this blog will know that we’re fans of independent travel, often, but not exclusively so, in Spain. Not that we’re alone in that, of course. We’re all our own travel agent these days, aren’t we, just in the same way that we organise our own insurance and banking and restaurant reservations. Our lives are measured out in comparison websites, as TS Eliot nearly said.

However, for our first bucket list trip, South Africa, we did an old-fashioned thing and went to an actual high street (well, shopping mall) travel agent and booked an organised tour with Newmarket Holidays (if you’re looking for a detailed review of Newmarket, here isn’t the place, but they were pretty good).

Which takes us back to Jean-Paul and Hell being other people (2) (best bowling, incidentally, 7-37 on a helpful track at Trent Bridge in June 1929 … ok, I’ll stop now(3)). How would we cope with being cooped up with a busful of strangers for 10 days?

Here’s the thing. I like to think I can talk to anyone, regardless of race, creed, colour, class, political affiliation or taste in music. There is usually something to relate to in most other people.

But. We’re independent kind of folks. The herding instinct is not strong in us. We like to do

our Own Thing, whatever that might be in given circs. We don’t like being told what to do, although I’m guessing that’s not so uncommon.

In that context, we’ve never really fancied a cruise or an organised tour, and being stuck in a group of people in close proximity, however acogedor they might be.

Reader, we had a blast. Briefly, the tour consisted of:

Whale watching, which exceeded all expectations – the huge Southern Rights were right up alongside, and even on occasion under, the boat on a beautiful, clear morning in the bay where they came to calve;

Game Drives: two nights in  a luxurious lodge, and two days of being driven all over the countryside by a Clyde-built ranger whose opening gambit was that she didn’t like people. She was, however, very good at finding cheetah (fresh from a kill) lions (very sleepy) a couple of combative buffalo (with each other, fortunately) a grumpy male rhino (Mrs Rhino was having none of anything) and

elephants having a good laugh in a bath;

Ostrich farm: not my favourite stop, but they tasted not bad with a glass of pinotage;

Caves like you’ve never seen – or heard – before;

Lunch at the side of a beautiful lagoon;

Two days of wine tasting, and a one night stay in Stellenbosch;

Penguins at Boulder Beach;

Three nights in Cape Town, including Table Mountain, Botanic Gardens, and more (see below).

It’s exhausting just listing it – we packed a whole lot in, and it’s a mark of how great it was that pretty much everywhere we went we wished we were staying longer.

On the last full day in Cape Town, we took the ferry out to Robben Island, where the authorities held Nelson Mandela for most of his 27 years in prison as a political prisoner. Our guide for the prison itself was an ex-political prisoner himself, one of the last wave of them sent to the Island in the mid 80s. He was probably about the same age as me, but while I’d been living it up as a law student, he had been doing hard time in one of the worst places on Earth to be if you were a black political activist.

He was at pains to point out that, by the time he arrived, things had improved a bit, to the extent they weren’t sleeping on a cobbled floor with only a thin rush mat and a single blanket, with no glass in the windows, as Mandela and his comrades had done. They had the relative comfort of two showers a week, bunk beds and two changes of clothes.

It was still a brutal existence. Although some of the prison guards were kind, and actually risked their jobs by doing things for the prisoners they weren’t meant to, others were vicious racist thugs. And irrespective of the individual guards, the institutional racism was deeply ingrained: some so-called scientists had decided that native African prisoners needed less food than the Cape Coloured or Malay inmates: see the weekly diet he’s holding in the picture. Most sinister of all was the ingredient listed for lunch, puzamandla, a Bantu energy drink which, according to some, the authorities used to slip in chemicals to make the African prisoners infertile.

The prisoners refused to be drawn into this divide and conquer move. They shared out the food equally, irrespective of race.

Our guide also said that the improvements in prison conditions only happened because of pressure from outside

organisations, like Amnesty International. It made me even more determined to get involved in their work going forward: Robben Island may be long closed, but similar abuses go on round the world.

It was a sombre, but moving, end to our trip to a country that’s still not without its problems – corruption, unemployment, crime rates – but that, at the same time, is a beautiful place to visit.

And the organised tour, and co-existing with 23 other individuals on a bus for 10 days? After that trip to Robben Island, where 60 souls shared a single cell and two showers, putting up with some of our lot whining about the lack of aircon didn’t seem such a stretch.

Plus South Africa beat England in the semis, so that worked out well.

 

(1) See also, in dog-friendly cafes, ‘L’enfers, c’est les chiens de les autres.’

(2) More of a zinger than some of his others: see, for example, ‘Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.’

(3) This is all nonsense of course. It was Somerset he played for.