Today in Trust member Kate Thompson’s South Africa diary, Kate commences the last week of her visit by tracing all our roots.
Day 26: Sunday, 4 July 2010
There is much less to do now and any trips are down to individuals to arrange. I had another lazy day and spent much of it catching up on Radio 4 programmes and reading the South African version of the Sunday Times. I did get over to the Morningside shopping centre, which was very busy and is obviously where locals go for lunch on a Sunday. I bought a sandwich from the bakery and a map of Johannesburg from the bookshop. I ate in the restaurant again in the evening and shared a table with Chris, because Gail is not at all well. They have had a doctor to see her, who gave her an injection to help her stop coughing and get a decent night’s sleep, and some antibiotics. She must feel miserable; it’s bad enough being ill at home but ten times worse when you are miles away. This must be the shortest entry yet, but then there is nothing to talk about!
Day 27: Monday, 5 July 2010
The start of my last week in South Africa. I had booked to go on the ‘Cradle of Humanity’ tour, which should have cost about £77 with five of us, but because Gail and Chris had to cry off, it cost £93! The majority of this was obviously the cost of getting there because the entry fee was only just over £10. Alan, Richard and I went in a minibus with a driver, who said he was glad to be speaking English again. We had a nice chat and it turned out that he used to work for the Pretoria Archives Department, and was very taken with the fact that our earliest document (in Hertfordshire) predated the earliest in South Africa by about 800 years!…
The Cradle of Humanity is the title given to a large area where fossil remains have been found, including of hominids, which confirms what Darwin and others thought – that Africa is where Homo Sapiens came from, having been descended from various other types of hominid. We visited two sites: the Sterkfontein caves and Maropeng, where there is an interpretive centre. The caves are where the skull of a early ancestor, named ‘Mrs Ples’ by a local paper, was found. They are currently excavating another skeleton, which is 90% done; some South Africans believe that if they had got it all out, the African nations would have done better in the World Cup!
There wasn’t a huge amount to see, apart from various types of rocks, stalactites and stalagmites, etc, although we were shown a fossil. The South Africans are obviously enormously proud of this heritage but I have to say it wasn’t enormously interesting.
We went onto Maropeng where we started off in a small boat which went along a watercourse with various elements, such as the ice age and tectonic plates moving. You needed a lot of imagination and we did wonder what the point of it was! After this there was quite a good interpretive exhibition about the beginning of time, our prehistoric ancestors and finishing up with global warming and other current issues; it was obviously aimed at children, as there were lots of things to play with. There were some original fossils in a small room.
We ate lunch at Maropeng, where I also bought a small guidebook to help me to understand what we’d seen. We all agreed that it was mildly interesting and obviously important, but not really worth the cost. When we got back just after 3.00 I went over to the shopping centre to see if they could offer more reasonable trips to Soweto & Johannesburg and Pretoria.
The latter sounds very interesting and the main government building is yet another designed by Sir Herbert Baker. The lady in the travel agent tried three tour operators but none of them had vacancies, but when I got back to the hotel I discovered that five others were interested in the Soweto & Johannesburg trip, which brings the cost down to a more reasonable £40 or so. I booked for six of us for Friday and there appeared to be no problem fitting us in.
I then did a google search and discovered a firm that would do Pretoria for just over £50, but I really need to find out if they are OK. As I was going out, our driver was still in reception. He was amazed that I had come on my own and impressed that I could talk as knowledgeably about football as the men! I told him I probably know more than some men but that he was not to tell them so! I ate in the hotel again and was pleased to see that Gail appeared for dinner. I managed to finish reading my book about the Victoria Falls and have almost finished the South Africa tourist guide, so I may get onto the two which I haven’t opened yet!
Part sixteen of Kate’s diary will appear tomorrow