The trip of awesomeness part 1: Durban

I have been in hibernation these past few days trying to recover from the nasty shock that is the Real World. What a bleak, harsh place. You spend your holidays sleeping and doing one fun thing after another, so going back to work was like a slap in the face with a frozen tuna.

I am hoping that recounting my adventures will cheer me up with happy memories.

Here is part one of the SA roadtrip 2010 chronicles:

Durban.

- One of the first things I noticed after stepping off the plane is how friendly everyone is. People just randomly chat to you all the time. I was a bit shell shocked at first but got back into the groove pretty quickly.

-At O.R Tambo airport the first thing we saw when we looked out the window was someone reversing along the freeway for quite a way. Then we knew we were home :)

- It was monsoon season in Durban which meant it rained pretty much every day we were there.

-This was torture, because we were champing at the bit to swim in the sea.

- I rediscovered that Durbanites do not like going to the beach.

- We hung out with my aunt, had braais, ate lots of food and bonded well with my aunt's DSTV.

-watched some bizarre Afrikaans movie with two "Bill and Ted" type misfit characters who clearly never left the anal phase.

- The place was crawling with Vaalies (what do you call Vaalies now that they are not Vaalies any more? Gauies?) We were amongst them with our GP numberplate and our general confusion over where we were going.

-They have changed all the road names in the city centre, which leads to much fun. Some of the roads still have the old names with a line through them, some not. Our map book included some of the changes and left some out. Also new roads have been put in which confused the hell out of us. We managed somehow. We did get lost a few times, but Durban is small.

-We went to Moyo, on the one sunny day, and it was very fun being painted and sung to, but I must say sitting so close to the sea and not swimming was killing me.

-On the final full day we had left in Durban we decided that we had to go swimming in the bloody sea. Unfortunately the monsoon was in full swing. This is me going for a balmy stroll along the azure coastline:

I was using the umbrella as a shield.

-While this may be a commonplace scene in the UK, trust me, we were the only people at the beach apart from a few workers and they were looking at us as if we were deranged.

-Needless to say we did not swim that day, but we scooted off the next morning before we left and finally swam in the Indian Ocean. Hooray! Note to self, do not go on holiday to Durban before April.

-We also took the cable car up the funky new Moses Mabhida stadium like real tourists, and it was totally cool to see an aerial view of ole Dirtbin.

IT is good to see that Durbs has finally been deemed worthy of a revamp (read bulldozing every old landmark to the ground), because it was really starting to look a bit sad and crumbly for a while.

view of the Durban Country club, in full colonial splendour.

Durban beachfront being bulldozed.

Final Scorecard for Durban:

Dassie score:

BFG: 0

Po: 0

monkeys seen: a measly one

times we got horribly lost: at least twice

sea swims: 1