11 Things I Wish I Could Get in South Africa

Because I'm incredibly lazy, I'm happy to accept suggestions for my blog. My friend Erin wants to know what we miss from back home. So here you go:

1) Graham Crackers

Destiny's child was two random ladies that history has forgotten and Beyonce. You know who nobody has ever heard about? The Two Musketeers. The Good and the Bad wouldn't exist without the Ugly. Nobody ever leaves the house feeling complete without first checking their pockets for the holy trinity: wallet, phone, keys. My point here is that everything great in the world has three parts.

I rest my case. (source)

And nothing in the world is better at reminding you that you deserve to die fat and alone while simultaneously making you not care because you DESERVE to experience heaven in your mouth than a delicious, gooey s'more. Whoever decided that simply roasting a marshmallow wasn't enough, that chocolate needed a companion, and that Graham Crackers weren't desserty enough, was a) probably American, and b) a genius. However, South Africa doesn't take kindly to genius, so they've banished every great idea to ever grace the planet. OK, that's probably not true. But they don't have Graham Crackers here, so they deserve to get made fun of. Just not to their faces. Cause everybody here has guns.

I'm not the only one feeling the pain.

2) Normal Freaking Tortilla Chips

Remember when you had a perfect life? You had a loving partner, a ton of friends, and a career that fulfilled you? Then one day you decided to smoke the pot. A slick looking dude rolled up to your office on his Razor scooter, pulled a marijuana out of his backpack, and said he'd share it with you. After inhaling the seductive smoke straight from the pit of Hades, it was a short trip to downtown smack town, and after the 5th time your wife found you passed out on the bathroom floor with a needle in your arm surrounded by My Little Ponies, she kicked you out, and because you were homeless, you lost your job, and now you're living in a cardboard box selling your body for bags of chips, and not even good chips. Off brand chips. Sound familiar? Didn't know what you had until it was gone, did you? Same thing happened to me. Except I didn't deserve any of it. And instead of my family, house, and job being ripped away from me, it was nachos. Pretty much the same thing.

I mean, they have nachos here. You can order them at any restaurant. They just happen to taste like despair mixed with skunk colon. Here's the thing- they use flavoured tortilla chips for nachos here. There's an ungodly powder on them, and then they stack the usual toppings on, resulting in a terrible pile of darkness and misery. The guy who first said "you don't know what you've got until it's gone" was definitely talking about nachos.

Pictured: an actual plate of South African Nachos

The good news is I met some new friends because of the dismal state of nachos here. Still relatively new, I was naively asking at a restaurant if they made their nachos with plain tortilla chips or the flavoured ones. I was assured they were plain, so I excitedly ordered them. Of course they weren't plain. But the waiter knew I WANTED plain chips, so he very helpfully lied to me in order to make me happy, Which is a common thing here. But anyway, an American woman at a nearby table overheard my desperate plea for regular nachos and came over to tell me to just let the dream die. And since then we've become friends with her and her family, so there's that.

Since then, I HAVE found bags of unflavoured tortilla chips at Woolworths, which is awesome. But they're about $678 for a tiny little bag, so I'm going to indulge only on special occasions. Like when I'm hungry and want nachos.

3) Pepsi

Yes, I know pop is bad for me (or cool drinks, as they refer to pop here, which makes no sense, because most of the other liquids they drink are also cool, but South Africans seem to make confusing the rest of the world their sole purpose). Don't judge. And I'm more of a Pepsi than a Coke guy. I know, I know. I make terrible life choices. I had two kids. You don't need to remind me.

The thing is, though, that South African's don't really like Pepsi. At any given gas station, you'll see an entire cooler filled with Coke. Just Coke. Not even other kinds of pop made by the Coca-Cola company. All Coke. And if you're lucky, you MAY find one row of Pepsi. But never Diet Pepsi, which I like.

There's a simple reason for this. During apartheid, a bunch of global companies pulled out of South Africa to show their distaste for you know, the whole "not treating people like actual people" thing. Pepsi was one of them. Coca-Cola had a meeting and decided, "you know what, it's not THAT bad" and kept on selling Coke, which gave them a stranglehold on the market. Pepsi came back once apartheid ended, but it's been difficult to catch up ever since. Coca-Cola still dominates the soft drink landscape by a long shot. As it turns out, having questionable ethics is a sure way to succeed.

Just ask this guy. (source)

4) Arby's

I like Arby's. Whatever. Don't get all judgy. Statistically speaking, there's a 356% chance you picked your nose today. With your finger. You're gross too.

5) Affordable Toys and Books

OK, so I've got two young kids. I even sometimes like them. And I don't want them to grow up to be idiots, so I like to buy books for them. The Potato particularly likes the How To Train Your Dragon series. However, each paperback book is about $30 CDN, which is, if you haven't already guessed, absolutely batnuts crazy. Getting anything shipped here from North America is prohibitively expensive, so there's not a lot of options. I expected to get robbed at ATMs and gas stations in South Africa, not at bookstores.

Enter Book Depository. Although they are based out of the UK, they offer free shipping worldwide. It's more expensive than buying books back home, but much more affordable than buying them here in South Africa. So I've kinda got the book thing sorted out.

Toys are another thing. They are generally 2-3 times more expensive than buying them in North America. And forget about buying branded items (Disney, Transformers, etc). Worse, they don't even throw in a free tube of lube with every purchase, which is much needed after paying their exorbitant prices for toys. For now, I've spray painted a large ball of barbed wire for the kids to play with and called it Black Beauty. The nice thing about young kids is they're stupid and will believe anything you tell them.

6) A Working Postal Service

Remember when I said you could just order books online from the UK and it was way cheaper than buying them here? You should because it was like, literally 2 paragraphs ago. Anyway, about that...

I ordered the full set of How To Train Your Dragon books for the Potato because that's my way of making up for being an overall terrible parent and human being. It was supposed to take 10-14 working days to arrive. I thought that was pretty good. That was also when I was still fresh off the plane and thought anything worked as expected here. The books were shipped right away, and then after waiting the 10-14 days, then another month, I contact Book Depository and mentioned something may have gone awry. They seemed entirely unsurprised and re-sent the books, telling me that if the first set arrived, to please let them know.

In about 3 weeks, my second set of books showed up. Awesome. At least it worked this time. I've got to hand it to the customer service team at Book Depository- they were awesome and efficient. Then, about another month later, the books arrived again. It turns out what I thought was the second set was actually the FIRST set, and it had just taken over 2 months to get to me. Because that's entirely normal here, which I found out when I started receiving Christmas cards from friends and family back in Canada in late February.

To be honest though, I'm just surprised both sets showed up at all. It's a pretty well-known fact that the postal workers here do their Christmas shopping at work. And by that I mean they simply take likely looking packages home. It's totally a thing here, and everybody just seems to accept it. But even when packages DO make it through, the postal service is hilariously inefficient. It makes me feel bad for criticising Canada Post when they go on strike every other month.

7) Common Sense When it Come to Packaging

You know how you open up a package of food, then take what you want, then re-seal the bag, thus locking in the delicious freshness? Yes? South Africans don't. Ok, I guess some food is packaged normally, but try buying hot dog buns here. Or hot cross buns. Any kind of bun, really. Be prepared to eat them all in one sitting.

Like a lot of things here, everything looks normal at first glance.

The horror!

Look, South Africa. I KNOW you've heard of bread bag clips (unbelievably, I had to Google search "what's the name of those things that hold bread bags closed"). I've seen them on your bags of bread. Could you MAYBE just port that technology over to your buns? And use normal bags. The ones you currently use rip wide open when you glance at them wrong, causing the whole world to go prematurely stale. There's no way to close these things at all. Plastic wrap just glides across its smooth, shiny surface, then clumps together in an environmentally unfriendly wad several feet away from the food it's supposed to be protecting.

You know what's worse than crappy packaging on food though? No packaging on your bread-type items. Spar, I'm looking at you. There will be loads of delicious bread- cheese bread, savoury bread, buns, etc- sitting in piles on a table in the store. People walk up to the table, touch every single loaf in sight, smell it, cough on it, put it back, and choose another one they haven't coughed on (though 57 other people probably already have). Then you put it in the bag yourself, which is sitting right there next to all the bread. But the bread isn't in it. Cause hygiene is vastly over-rated.

8) The Absence of Huge, Disgusting Bugs

Know what I miss? Walking into any given room in my house and not fighting down the urge to bolt, screaming like a little girl, out of the room, using my children as shields against the crawling nightmares that Africa has spawned and unleashed into the universe.

While I'm getting used to fighting through swarms of ants to reach the bedroom and battling bat-sized moths, the one bug I really can't abide is the mole cricket. These things look a little bit like regular crickets if they bred with the lovechild of a demonic hot dog and that creepy girl from the movie The Ring.

These are in my back yard all the time. So annoying. (source)

I'm not even going to post a picture of them because I don't want to give you nightmares. If you really want, you can Google them. These end up everywhere. And they burrow into your lawn so you can't find them. They also make a sound like regular crickets, but much louder. I'm not even exaggerating when I say it hurts your ears when you get too close. Their call can be heard up to 600 metres away, which attracts countless other mole crickets and thoughts of clubbing yourself to death with an overpriced Elsa doll just to embrace the sweet, sweet silence of death. And no matter how many times you set your house and yard on fire and start a new life in another South African city, they come back.

This is literally the least frightening bug they have in South Africa

I miss the days when the biggest pest I had to endure was Justin Trudeau.

9) Public WiFi

Have you ever been out and remember a savage meme that you want to send to your friend? You send it, right? Because in Canada, it's normal to have access to WiFi wherever you are. And if you don't have WiFi, cell data is still relatively cheap, and it's totally worth using it to slay your friends with a sick burn. In South Africa, not so much. SOME restaurants offer free WiFi if you're eating there. A whopping 50 mb of it. Which is enough to check your e-mail. Then you're cut off. And cell data is ridiculously expensive here, so you have to think long and hard about whether or not you want to use your phone when you're not home. In fact, if you're dying right in front of me, I'd have to consider you a very close friend before I'd use my mobile data to look up emergency numbers to help you (here's another fun thing about South Africa: there's no 911. There are a bunch of different emergency numbers, and each one is roughly 43 digits long. There's no way I'll ever remember them). And even if you're my close friend, I'd have to decide if I want to use my precious data to save your life or send you one last fire meme. (Spoiler alert- you're probably going to die laughing).

10) Working Traffic Lights

In Canada, we kind of take for granted that things, you know, WORK. You plug something in, it works. You use an ATM, it works. You look at me at my job...ok, bad example. South Africa is fun because you're never bored. You can never get into a routine because sometimes the power will randomly go out. Sometimes it's the water. Sometimes roads are blocked off because of massive protests where people burn tires and everything else in the immediate surrounding area. And you will ALWAYS find traffic lights- or robots as they call them here- that don't work. Not all of them. But always a couple, no matter where you go. It has to be much more complicated than it looks to make these work. Or maybe people just don't give a crap. But I can tell you that when the drivers here are already insane (I talked about it a little bit in this post), the lack of functioning traffic lights becomes even more of a problem. It's not like anybody really pays attention when they do work though- red lights seem more like loose suggestions than hard and fast rules, especially when it come to the taxi drivers. But that's another story. At the risk of sounding lame and boring, I miss order and rules.

11) Sriracha Sauce

They don't have it here. I'm super bummed about it.

*Edit- thanks to a couple of readers, I've found Sriracha Sauce at Woolworth's. But it's not THE Sriracha sauce- it tastes a little off. However, it'll do for now!

I could go on and on. The staggering lack of efficiency, the roads, the absence of customer service, and a thousand other things. That being said, the good here FAR outweighs the bad, and I'll be sure to make a post that outlines the things I'll miss when I leave South Africa. That post will be much longer than this one, I assure you. I do love it here, and I'm slowly learning to deal with the things that once drove me bananas. I do still miss chocolate chip cookies though- South Africans can't do those worth crap. Get it together, guys.

The Best Moment of My Life

I always thought the best moment of my life would go something like this: 1) I see something awesome, like a massive shark or snake or bear or better yet, a bearsnark. 2) I pass my beer to someone 3) I make the awesome thing even awesomer, probably by riding it or something cool like that. 4) I get remembered as a legend.

None of that happened. Yet. But I did see some dogs, and THAT was the coolest moment of my life. Like, I mean, I got married and had kids and stuff, but ANYBODY can do that. And to be honest, my kids are only 3 and 6 now. It's too early to tell if they're going to turn out OK or not. I'm going to reserve judgement until they're about 30. And these were African wild dogs, which are one of the world's most endangered mammals, so that's something.

My mother in law arrived from Canada on Jan 5 to torment visit us for the next several weeks. To get here from Vancouver is more than 24 hours of straight travelling and a 10-hour time difference, so jet lag is brutal. Because nobody has ever accused me of being a nice guy, we loaded her up early the next morning for a 4 hour drive to Sabi River Sun, where we would be staying for the next week. While the resort itself was beautiful, the main draw for us was its location: it was a 15 minute drive to Kruger National Park, which has been my favourite place on earth since my first visit 10 years ago.

Although there are several places to stay within Kruger, we chose to stay outside the park, for the simple reason that while driving around looking at wildlife for 13 hours each day for a week is awesome, kids are awful and will make you regret having them if they don't get a change in scenery every once in a while. Staying at the resort allowed us to explore other areas around the park, like God's Window and Bourke's Luck Potholes.

I somehow resisted the urge to pee off the bridge. 

Anybody who knows me knows I love animals, so I was looking forward to this trip for several eternities. After settling into our room (actually, it was 2 bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, and a loft for the kids), we decided to watch the hippos wander onto the resort's golf course for their evening feed. Oh ya, I forgot to mention: the resort has freaking hippos and crocodiles in a large pond at the edge of the property, and every night the hippos come out of the water to fill their fat faces. Except not this time. After waiting on a viewing bridge for about 30 minutes with several other families, the security guard finally felt he should mention that because of the recent rains, the river behind the property was full, and the hippos hadn't been coming back to the resort for the past several nights. Why he didn't tell us this earlier, I'll never know, but we DID hear at least one hippo grunting in the bush behind us, which got us excited to see wildlife in Kruger the next morning.

Kruger's gates open at 5:30am (at least in January- they do change slightly depending on the season), and with superhuman effort, we managed to be there by 6:40. The area in which the part is situated has been having a massive drought for at least the last year. And it decided to break literally the day we arrived at the park. It was rainy, cloudy, and miserable: not ideal conditions for taking pictures. However, just minutes after driving into the park, we saw some vehicles stopped on the side of the road. If there's just one vehicle, it could be anything. There's nothing more frustrating than stopping behind a parked car trying to see what they find so interesting, only to find they're somehow captivated by a freaking impala. These things are the McDonald's of the park. They're everywhere and provide a quick, easy lunch for predators, but you get sick of them after about 670 sightings in under an hour.

People who stop for these are the reason Trump won the election.

But if there are more than a couple of cars stopped, you can bet it's a predator of some sort, which was exactly the case here. Right in front of us, a leopard was sitting on the side of the road! This was crazy- many people go to Kruger several times before they spot one of these elusive cats, and here was my mother in law's first time, and she saw one within 5 minutes. After determining that he couldn't get to anybody in the cars, the leopard sauntered away into the bush.

And the rain continued. And continued. We watched the rivers carefully, as they were coming precariously close to the bridges we crossed, but things seemed under control, so we continued on, seeing elephants, a hyena, giraffes, and a billion types of antelope. And then we came across this:

 The water over the bridge is MUCH deeper and moving MUCH faster than the picture shows. We watched for about half an hour to see if someone would risk it, with much the same anticipation one has when watching a trapeze artist: hoping they make it, but also kinda hoping they won't. The ordeal ended in the most boring way possible- nothing happened, and we turned around and left.

Over the next few days, we were fortunate enough to see all the Big Five (leopard, lion, rhino, elephant, and cape buffalo), although never on the same day. Each day we saw four out of the five. I'm not going to give you a play by play of every minute of every day. What I WILL tell you is that we saw lots of these:

This is the exact moment I learned how to drive in reverse super fast

And these:

The scientific name for these is "stabby boulders."

A pile of these:

Apparently these cows are a big deal here.

 And several of these:

OK, so HE puts his kill in a tree above him and everyone thinks it's awesome. I do it and people call the cops. 

I have roughly a boatload more pictures, but you get the idea.

All this stuff was awesome, but early one morning, we couldn't go down the road we wanted to because it was still flooded, so we had to take a different route. And I'm glad we did, because that's where we saw a pack of wild dogs just hanging out on the side of the road! I've been told that people here have gone to the park dozens of times and never seen wild dogs, and they were definitely on the top of my list to see, but I never thought I'd actually run into them. African wild dogs hunt in packs, and are some of the most fearsome, beautiful predators in the world.

Behold, the majesty...

OK, I also got some other pictures too:

You probably recognise her from a bunch of rap videos.

This is nature's way of letting you know an animal is totally OK to pet. 

This one was particularly interested in my bite-sized three-year-old.

If they were in high-school they'd totally steal your lunch money.

We watched the dogs laze around much longer than anybody else in vehicle wanted. Then I remembered we have this really cool book: it has pictures of all kinds of African animals, and when you press a special wand against one of the pictures, it plays the corresponding animal call. And it just happened to have the hunting call of the African wild dog. Never content to let sleeping dogs lay, of course we busted that sucker out. I didn't really know what to expect, but holy guacamole did they ever respond! All at once, the pack jumped up, fully alert, and stared right at us, clearly wanting to eat the crap out of us. So we did it again. This time the pack started running down the road, chasing after-or running away from-the rival pack they heard. I don't think the rest of the people watching had any clue what got the dogs running, but I'll remember that experience for the rest of my life.

Everyone tells me that winter is the best time to go to Kruger because the vegetation isn't as lush and you can see further into the bush. Maybe that's so, but I know we came out of the park with a bucketful of memories, and as a bonus, we saw tons of baby animals as well, so I'm glad we went when we did.

I have no idea how to end this, so here's a pile of pictures to distract you while I disappear in a cloud of smoke:

I've literally dated worse. 

These guys are super handy when you need to open very large bottles of wine.

All I see is bacon in training. 

Waiting For Telkom (AKA, South Africa's National Pastime)

I'll never complain about slow internet again. OK, I probably will, because most of it is horrifically slow here, and you don't know how hard life can be until you've waited a good 5 seconds to load the perfect cat meme to send as a witty response to a friend's text (or SMS as they call them here, because in the spirit of doing ALL things inefficiently in South Africa, they've decided to tack on an extra two syllables. Just because they can).

Anyway, I'd just be happy to have internet at my house. Any internet. I'd gladly pay whatever it takes, or trade one of my children, or watch a room full of elderly Russian men slurp borscht for hours on end at excruciating volumes, if only I could get internet at home.

Here's the deal. While internet is becoming more and more readily available, and while fibre is gradually being rolled out across the country, most people still rely on DSL connections here, which is fine. However, while there are many DATA providers, only one company can provide the line. And that company is government run (read- impossibly inept). Just the mention of Telkom here makes people's nether regions pucker up, but we're at their mercy. The data providers can give us data ONLY through a Telkom line, which means Telkom is responsible to ensure their line actually works.

Almost 2 months ago, we called Telkom and said "We'd like to give you money. And in exchange, can you do the sole thing you exist for, and provide us a line." This shouldn't be too hard, as it's literally the only thing they do. It's not like I called them to ask where the crap I can find regular, non-flavored tortilla chips here so I can make a decent plate of nachos, which I'm desperately craving right now and which seem to be entirely unavailable here. Anyway, they proceeded to give us non-stop entertainment for almost two months (and counting) now.

The first installer came within a week. All good. But then we needed an electrician to install a wire for Telkom. Why we can't get Telkom to do that, I have no idea. So we hired an electrician. Telkom came back and said the electrician didn't do his job right, which, because this is South Africa, of course he didn't. So we called him back. Then waited for Telkom again. Several days later, Telkom assured us the line was installed and working. Great!

Our first order of business was to change our service to Afrihost, because we wanted nothing to do with Telkom after hearing numerous horror stories about their abysmal service. The thing is, though, they still control the line. The data company simply takes over- you pay the data company, and the data company pays Telkom for the line rental. So there's no escaping. And to further de-hance their customer service, Telkom immediately cuts off your line and puts you in a "holding pool" if you want to go through another company. The wait is typically 20 business days, so you're looking at a month with no internet, Because most people don't want to be cut off from Netflix, cat pictures, and eelslap.com for an entire month, they choose simply to stay with Telkom. To make this clear, Telkom has resorted to cutting customers off from the ONLY way they can access the internet if the customers don't want to use Telkom, who is renowned for their "couldn't give a crap" service. We decided to wait them out.

After we got the notification our line had migrated to Afrihost (in a record 27 days!), we were off to the races! And by that I mean we didn't even make it to the racetrack. After several calls to Afrihost, we determined there must be something wrong with the line that Telkom had assured us was working. After another 4 calls to Telkom, they insisted the router we had bought was defective. I told them it wasn't, but they claimed that was the only possible problem. So we packed up the kids, drove 20 minutes to the nearest Telkom store and waited for someone to test the router. Luckily, it was the end of the day, and there was nobody in line. So we only had to wait 25 minutes for one of the 3 employees standing around doing nothing to acknowledge our existence. After a quick test, they confirmed the router was fine. Now the only possible explanation is there's a problem with the Telkom line, which I had been trying to tell them all along!

Meme Crunch

Actual image of me waiting for Telkom

Vicki decided to try her luck now, and she was told that a technician would come the following day. She called in the morning, just to make sure, because by now we had figured out that anything Telkom says has as much value as a Donald Trump fart in California, and was reassured that yes, the technician would come that day. At 4pm, she called AGAIN and was guaranteed someone would come before 6pm. 6pm came and went, and no Telkom. At least we expected it this time. When I called the next morning, the agent told me that while a fault was logged, there was no technician assigned to the account, so there was no way any technician would EVER have been on the way. In other words, the agents twice told Vicki that someone was coming simply so they could get off the phone and not have to do any work. Sounds about right.

At this point, the agent put me through to a manager, who assured me she would escalate the issue and get a technician out as soon as possible. When I asked when that would be, her only reply was "This is a very busy time of year." So now we wait.

While this whole process may seem insane to my friends back home in Canada, we've come to expect this sort of thing. Telkom was voted the best communications company in South Africa by South Africans, who make a national pastime of complaining about Telkom, if that tells you anything. I've gone past the point of being amused. And also past the point of being frustrated. Now I'm back to being amused. You can't hurry South Africa. And to be honest, sometimes it's refreshing to not be able to do anything because your hands are tied by red tape and incompetence. It gives me more time to appreciate the beauty of the country and enjoy the other things (apart from customer service) that South Africa has to offer. But I'll write more about those things in future entries.

As soon as I get internet.