Adventures in World Cup travel

Please forgive the appalling self-indulgence - this is an article about my South African experience that was written for an in-house newsletter. I got far too carried away and failed miserably to stick to a reasonable word limit, and it will not be included in its full-length form in the newsletter because - the editor-in-chief assures me - it was just TOO DAMN HARD to cut it down whilst still doing it justice. That's what I choose to believe anyway. She also told me the word "gullible" isn't in the dictionary, how strange.

So here it is in all its glory, and obviously this is copyright (c) Ben Gould, 2010 in case anybody was thinking of appropriating it (stop laughing at the back). Some sections may have appeared in similar form in blog entries at the time - deal with it.

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My favourite World Cup-related memory is of a high school food technology lesson back in the summer of 1994, during which the male half of the class was even more boisterous and less interested in the subject than usual. The teacher, fighting a losing battle, attempted to quieten us down. “But Miss!” protested one of the rowdier lads, “It’s the World Cup!” What else needed to be said? For men of all ages, nothing is quite as exciting as this tournament. And England weren’t even in that one.

As some readers may know, I was lucky enough to be in South Africa for the duration of the 2010 edition. Including the final, my friend Dave and I attended a total of nine games and were able to see a large cross-section of this huge country. Without wishing to become the journalistic equivalent of those people who invite the neighbours round for an evening of holiday slides, our first day in Africa deserves a special recap:

• Go to ticket machines in Johannesburg airport to print off our tickets early doors. They are working intermittently, then all go down just as we reach front of queue. Decide to go elsewhere.
• Queue for ages to pick up hire car. Drive to Sandton (opulent Joburg suburb and unofficial WC tourist hub) and queue for 2.5 hours before finally getting tickets.
• Manage to hit a monkey during our drive to Rustenburg. Seriously. Stop to inspect the damage. End up having to drive into the town to obtain a new, dent-free vehicle
• Arrive at the hostel to find it overflowing with drunken England fans due to owners’ rampant profiteering. Our dorm beds, for which we have paid over 30 quid each, are apparently still “under construction”.
• Get park and ride bus to stadium, seems fairly well-organised. England’s stuttering performance and the awful stadium don’t register fully in my extremely frazzled state.
• Go the wrong way on exiting the stadium. When we find it, park and ride pick-up point is like a war zone with zero organisation. Finally pile onto a bus after 90 minutes or so
• Wade through heavy car park traffic and get back to hostel until 2am. Beds are crammed 8 to a room, but we are far too tired to care
• Go to sleep trying not to think about the 900 or so kilometres we have to drive tomorrow

For us, things could only improve after that. But the tournament descended into something of a nightmare for England, and many of the fans who’d paid an awful lot of money to travel halfway across the world were left feeling angry and disappointed. How does one account for such an atrocious campaign? One explanation is that the team contained too many big names who, when the pressure was on, simply couldn’t knuckle down and put their egos aside - contrast this with the young, Ballack-free German team who gelled together so well. A case of too many chiefs, not enough Indians, then. Apparently “chief” is also a playground insult, which makes it even more apt.

Unfortunately, most England fans are ferociously optimistic, even when all evidence points to the contrary. Like a pack of wild dogs, they descend on cities in their thousands, marking their territory in the main square by festooning St George flags over every available surface before proceeding to drink the place dry. They tend to wear their shirts at all times too, especially when visiting popular tourist sites and even when attending games in which England are not even involved. I, on the other hand, didn’t even remember to wear mine for the Algeria game. Perhaps this was why things went wrong. (Incidental fact: before Euro 96, the flag of choice for all England fans was the Union Jack and not that of St George, which makes very little sense.)

England’s elimination acted as a pivotal point in our trip. After watching us get ruthlessly despatched by the Germans (in a hostel bar where the power cut out just as the game started - we’d have been better off with no power to be honest), the trip took a much more sedate pace. The first couple of weeks, though, were somewhat hectic.

After our nightmare first day, we then had a day and a half to make the 1400 kilometre journey down to Cape Town in time for our second live game. I had promised to share some of the driving burden despite being little better than a novice. But the seemingly endless straight roads through the vast Karoo desert proved a useful training ground, and although technically only single-lane, the unofficial custom of pulling onto the hard shoulder to let someone safely overtake was easy to grasp.

Cape Town and the surrounding Western Cape province form by far the most “European” region of South Africa, which extends to the climate too. Therefore, as soon as we approached the city, the heavens duly opened. The prospect of spending five days in a permanent downpour was not a pleasing one, and I was beginning to reconsider the entire trip. However, despite it raining intermittently throughout the day and that evening’s rather dull Paraguay-Italy match (which we still enjoyed due to our proximity to various famous media types), the following days gave us uninterrupted sunshine in which to enjoy the spectacular scenery which Cape Town has to offer.

The city has the unfair advantage of being built within a huge natural amphitheatre, bordered by a combination of Table Bay and a dramatic row of peaks which include the famous - and, I can confirm, bloody steep - Table Mountain. We stayed in Fish Hoek, one of many touristy coastal resorts south of the city, on the opposite side of the Cape Peninsula which culminates at Cape Point, within striking distance of the Cape of Good Hope.

Contrary to popular belief, this is neither the southernmost point of Africa nor where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet. That honour belongs to the Cape Agulhas, our subsequent visit to which confirmed that it will remain comparatively little-known due to its utterly nondescript nature. Although it does have a lighthouse you can climb to the top of. Meanwhile, Cape Point boasts jaw-dropping clifftop views and all the usual tourist accoutrements, but when we made the short walk to the Cape of Good Hope itself there was not a soul there and our only company were a handful of Dassies (small, beaver-like creatures which scientists insist are the closest living relatives of elephants) and a majestic Eland (large antelope) - quite an experience.

Aside from the two matches we saw at the impressive Green Point stadium and a walk around the commercial hub of the V&A Waterfront, we didn’t spend much time in the more urban areas, a pattern that would become familiar over the next week. We moved steadily eastwards around the coast, overnighting either in hostels of varying quality or, excitingly, in National Parks accommodation. Two nights were spent in a hut at the spectacular Storms River Mouth, the sound of crashing waves only a few metres away being a strangely soothing one, and another at Addo Elephant Park.

This is a huge nature reserve containing the so-called Big Five of elephants, rhino, buffalo, lions and leopards. Driving through the thick Addo bush differed somewhat to the trips to the local safari park of my youth. These animals are in their natural habitat, and thus offer no guarantee of being spotted on any given day. In places like this it must be easy to fall into the trap of driving around for hours in the hope of glimpsing, say, a lion (which we failed to see), but considering we encountered a plethora of pachyderms (a couple of them extremely close up) along with zebra, buffalo, ostrich and various deer and antelope, we hardly had cause for complaint.

When not busy safari-ing we did a lot of hiking too. Still, we tried to catch as many matches as possible - the national parks all provided communal big screens, and watching on these alongside other random tourists in such close proximity to nature was pleasingly incongruous.

The best place we stayed was for two nights prior to the Germany disaster, a beachside hostel at Chintsa on the so-called Wild Coast. This stretch of coastline isn’t as desolate as its name suggests, but the villages that pepper the shore can only be accessed by dirt roads, leaving the beaches relatively unspoilt. The hostel itself was “vibey” enough and incredibly friendly without being full of joss stick-toting hippie types. Peaceful, man.

The drive on “D-Day” (elimination day?) was a strange one. We woke up to heavy rain, which when combined with fog does not represent ideal conditions for traversing twisty mountain roads. Further inland, and into KwaZulu-Natal province, we were suddenly confronted with a very different South Africa. Dusty, ramshackle villages teeming with black natives, many of them spilling out onto the roads as they waited for the ubiquitous (and dangerous-looking) minibus taxis which ferried folk from place to place. Many people, presumably unable to afford the taxis, either attempt to hitch or simply walk the roads, and cattle were also a common hazard on the carriageway.

So far nearly all the black faces we’d seen were in the context of white society - shop workers, petrol station attendants and maids, for example. Now our surprise at being this close to a totally different world was palpable. We never did get to explore a proper township - the tour we booked to Soweto inexplicably fell through, and the closest to the “real” Africa we ever got was a day later, on the way to the Royal Natal national park in the foothills of the Drakensberg mountains, which passed through a native village complete with tin-roofed shacks, shebeens, half-finished brickwork house shells and bloody hundreds of cows.

There is an ongoing debate about so-called poverty tourism, which is far too delicate to get into here. What I found amazing was the stark contrast between the richer, mostly white areas around which the SA tourist industry is inevitably based and the harsh realities of life for the vast majority of its inhabitants, tucked away where most tourists won’t see them, except perhaps from the safe confines of a vehicle. For all the progress the country has made since the first free elections of 1994, the drive towards Western-style capitalism has actually widened the gulf between rich and poor. One only has to visit Johannesburg and take a trip to an affluent suburb like Sandton, with its luxury shopping malls and hotels, and huge houses equipped with razor-wire fences and expensive alarm systems as standard, and then drive past a poorer black area like Alexandria just down the road to appreciate this divide.

Naturally, our most awkward White Middle-Class Guilt Episode occurred in Joburg. Stuck in a traffic jam and surrounded by a larger-than-usual mass of hawkers (where they obtained their merchandise - bulk orders on flags and scarves throughout the World Cup - remains a mystery), we were suddenly approached by a guy with cloth and bucket who, before we had time to inform him we had no wish for our windscreen to be cleaned, proceeded to do just that. We gave him a token fee, on the basis that we never asked for his services - coins which he angrily threw back at us, shouting what did we expect him to buy with one measly rand, etc. Ashen-faced, we drew up the windows, not quite understanding what we’d done wrong except be lucky enough to be born with some of the advantages which he’d been denied.

Despite such incidents, the mood of the country during the World Cup felt overwhelmingly positive. Most of the people we met were incredibly welcoming and even those white folk whose sporting interests normally extended no further than rugby (if that) seemed interested in the tournament and keen to show their support for Bafana Bafana (literally “the boys, the boys”), as the national side are known. Plus, waiting staff and shop assistants throughout the country were sporting the distinctive yellow jerseys as uniforms for the duration.

Sadly, such enthusiasm was not always backed up by the quality of the football on offer. Here are the results of the nine matches we saw in person:

1-1, 1-1, 0-0, 1-0, 0-0 (penalties), 1-1 (more pens), 1-0, 1-0, 1-0.

Although we were somewhat unlucky with the matches we picked, these do reflect a trend towards a more defensive style of international football. The last three victories belong to Spain, proving that for all their pretty, tippy-tappy football, it was their sturdy defence and ability to do just enough to scrape through each match that enabled them to claim the trophy.

The most contentious issue of the tournament was that of the vuvuzelas. Seeing as I was over there for the whole month, I managed to convince myself that their incessant droning was a unique and integral part of the experience, and by the end I was actually finding the cacophony quite pleasant in a Stockholm syndrome kind of way. It still goes without saying that they should never, EVER be allowed into any British ground, of course.

Anyway, the second half of our trip was far more relaxed. Nearly all of the tickets we now had were for matches in Joburg and nearby Pretoria, and through Dave’s connections we were able to stay in a nice suburban house in Melville for 10 nights or so. Joburg is a curious city. We spent no time at all in the city centre, which is still regarded as somewhat unsafe despite attempts at rejuvenation. For rich folk and tourists, everything is centred around the northern suburbs which are structured like many American cities in that the social scene is centred around huge, interchangable malls, with people driving everywhere due to the lack of public transport.

I never really felt unsafe, possibly due to extra security measures in place for the World Cup. Still, it seemed a shame that, even in an area like Melville, we were advised not to walk the short distance to its recognisable UK-style “high street” of cafes and bars after dark. Yes, the statistics prove that there is a real element of danger in Joburg. But the fears of the rich, mostly white, community breed paranoia, which in turn breeds resentment amongst the mostly black have-nots, leaving the city firmly divided along class and racial lines - a fractured, frustrating place.

Of the few tourist attractions around those parts, the best by far was the Apartheid Museum - which, particularly the Nelson Mandela exhibit we saw, was a truly humbling experience. We’d done Robben Island in Cape Town, and both places are a fitting memorial to a not-so-distant bygone era. In what is probably not intended to be a revealing comment on the development of the country, the same company own the neighbouring tacky theme park called Gold Reef City, complete with garish casino. As these things go, this wasn’t great, and the “mine tour” (Joburg is a city literally built on gold mining) featured the Worst Tour Guide Ever - out of the ones that turned up, at any rate.

We also visited Durban for the Spain-Germany semi-final, stopping over in the Drakensberg along the way so that we could do a mountain tour and therefore say we’d been to Lesotho. Bouncing around in a Land Rover up and down the vertiginous Sani Pass and gasping for breath at high altitude while struggling to ascend a relatively small peak may not sound like fun, but the views alone were more than worth it.

Durban itself is a city of contrasts. Strolling through the crowded city centre and around the Victoria Market, we only saw a handful of other white faces. Hawkers and street traders vie for business with the modern superstores whose pavements they share. Head down to the beachfront, though, and you could be in any European coastal resort, albeit one where the winters are very warm. A welcome change from Joburg, where the temperature can drop like a stone come nightfall.

We visited a water park-cum-aquarium place and a huge casino complex too, figuring we’d earned the right to indulge ourselves a little and reacquaint ourselves with what in our addled heads were our high-rolling London lifestyles. Oh yes, and the semi-final was entertaining enough, mostly because the Germans got beaten and the Moses Mabhida stadium was rather impressive. Although whether you’d call the design an homage to the new Wembley or a blatant ripoff thereof depends entirely on your mood.

And so, we drove back to Joburg for the big one - the World Cup final itself. We were seated right behind one of the goals, a position which proved to be not quite as ideal as imagined thanks to the pitchside cameramen blocking our view. And the game was an appallingly cynical one. And I didn’t get to see Shakira properly. And yet, I can now say I was at a World Cup final, and that feels good.

In fact, I’m fully aware of how lucky I am to have had this opportunity, and I can’t seriously complain about the trip in any shape or form. It was, as the locals themselves would say, pretty lekker. If it’s any consolation though, I’ll be the one stuck in the office on Christmas Eve because all my holiday has been used up. Looking forward to it already.