Independent America

Wimpy and Corrupt: Shaking the Tree

JOHANNESBURG 9:13 p.m.

The beer is local: Castle Lager.  It'll help take the sting off another brutal day.  That began just past midnight when I was rudely awoken by an earthquake.

Truth be told, I could hardly believe it was an earthquake.  First, there hadn't been one in Mozambique in over a hundred years.  Second, after I woke Heather up to prepare her for desperate flight from our hotel room, there were no aftershocks.  Except for the rumble in my belly from yet another mediocre meal that we were forced to take a few hours earlier at the Hotel Polana (I'm reporting to you from the Hyatt in Johannesburg -- score one point for the corporate chains).  So I decided that I must have been dreaming, and that the earthquake was just a subconscious metaphor for my Delhi Belly.

Until I found out that distant Mozambique was suddenly big international news when I stumbled out of bed this morning.  So I was probably still disoriented when, for the second time since we arrived in the country, I was shaken down by an underpaid, greedy cop who kept an eagle-eye out for our foreign plates as we struggled to find parking in front of the U.S. Embassy in Maputo.  A threat to take me down to the station, not even one attempt to look at my license, and one hundred thousand Metacais later (about $4), I was home free.  Luckily, not as expensive as my other brush with tourism corruption in Wyoming during our IA expedition last year.

Botswana Moonrise

Our first "African Sunset/Moonrise" on the road in Botswana.  It's rainy season here and most nights have been shrouded in heavy clouds.  We're still looking for the Southern Cross.

Hard Road, Easy Road: Atlantic to Indian

On the way in, it had been a hairy drive along the 20 km of muddy roads and deep, sandy tracks. Here in the so-called Kalahari "Desert" of Botswana (it has been recently stripped of this designation by smarter folk because it gets more than 100 mm of rainfall a year), a torrential subequatorial summer has led to washed out streets and flooding.

To keep our Toyota 4x4 straight, I struggled to keep the steering wheel pointed 90 degrees to the left as the sand pushed the wheels the opposite way. We had just driven over 700 km from Walvis Bay, on Namibia's Atlantic Coast, and I was tired. But we had now detoured from our route to find our cattle ranch hosts, Dudley and Denise, deep in "the bush" (20,000 acres of land, and a leopard the previous night on his son's roof).

Our main drag up to now, the Trans Kalahari Highway, is a well-paved narrow two-way highway. It would have been perfectly suited to Independent America's two-lane rule. But to skirt the other one (no chains), would have been a challenge.

The Shell or BP gas stations every four hundred kilometers or so were well equipped with your typical North America chainstore conveniences with the best corporate retail that regional economic superpower, South Africa, has to offer. Forced to choose between the lesser of two evils, a chicken pita from Barcelo's and Nando's – two fast food restaurants that celebrate peppery "peri peri" sauce with their own centuries-old legend – I happily opt for Nando's more refined offerings. Because we have to. Heather prefers Nando's too.

But it's Barcelo's in Kang, the halfway point on the TKH in Botswana.  While munching on my pita, a fellow traveller called out and asked where we were headed. We talked about the weather and the Kalahari.

"I've never seen any lions," the desert native told me. "Except on TV."

On the Road AGAIN

Hello from Pretoria, South Africa.  We're traveling through the nether regions of the African continent over the next 3 weeks.  It's a rough schedule, but we hope to post a few musings from the region on this very blog!  And yes, it's a road trip, from the Atlantic to Indian Oceans (Namibia to Mozambique).  No, it's not a vacation.  We dearly need one though.

Hanson and Heather

Dependent Africa: On the Truck

After a good cross-country ski, my friend Brian and I would head to Starbucks to recuperate and warm up.  It was never my favorite destination, but it was a nice social stop.  Still, once I found out they had their cakes and cookies trucked in from Calgary, seven hours away, I realized I should try and support a local coffee shop that actually had ties to the community.

This evening at some chain restaurant in Gaborone, Botswana, I tried once again to order ravioli.  They didn't have any a few days ago, so I figured they had to make some more.  Not so.  Apparently, it's being shipped by truck from Capetown, South Africa, about 1,100 km away -- along with regular menu items like hamburgers and brownies.  This in a country that is having a hard time diversifying, the proliferation of foreign-owned chains hardly help boost the local economy.  And there's even a surplus of local, hormone-free beef!   At least the rather large cockroach that was crawling around the floor seems to come from these parts (unless of course, it was a stowaway on a previous shipment from South Africa).

Independent Africa: Prayers for Rain

This past North American summer, Heather and I drove 21,000 km across the United States.

Now, in the middle of this sub-equatorial African summer, I'm already up to 3,000 km on this unusual road trip, driving on the wrong side of the highway (just like the British do) and on the other side of the globe. The high-powered, automatic transmission of the Tennessee-manufactured Xterra has been replaced by a stodgy, sluggish, diesel stick shift of an African-made Toyota Condor.

It may be a different continent, and a different story, but sometimes the song remains the same. Here, South Africa is a superpower, with its economic and political tentacles extending far beyond its borders. Corporate chains like Pick N' Pay, the Equatorial Coffee Company, and the Sun Hotel are easy marks even along the nicely-paved secondary highways.

Corporate America has yet to make an obvious appearance, partly because during those endless dark days of apartheid, South Africa was forced to do business with itself when the rest of the world turned its back on the country's racist hierarchy. So the retail chain infrastructure was already nicely established when the leopard changed its spots in 1994.