South Africa part 1

General Information 

I was planning to skip this part and leave it up to you wether you like to go and check out the information regarding this land, but I must admit that I hate when other writers do so. 

South Africa's official name is The Republic of South Africa and it is as big as 1.221.037 km2 large country. What does that mean? That is proximately 3 times Germany, or Finland, Germany and Italy all together. Or just about 1/8 out of Brazil  and for 23 times South Africa could fit in Australia.

It has a lots of cost lines; nearly 3.000 km or 1.739 miles. 

Although all that cost line, swimming is not recommended  due to the cold water of Southern Atlantic Ocean, that has the temperature about 12-15°C. 

Only 8% out of the population of 55 million are white, and 80% are black. There are some so to say coloured people and few asian. 

There are 11 official languages in South Africa. In Cape Town and the areas we visited, most people speak afrikaans (old dutch) and english. But the language distribution is a bit different elsewhere; only  13% actually speak afrikaans, and just nearly 10% english. The most spoken language is zulu; nearly 12 million out of 55 million inhabitants speaks it. 

South Africa's flag designed by Frederick Brownell looks like this: next to it the Coat of arms 

  

South Africa has three capitals; Pretoria that is executive, Bloemfontein is judicial and Cape Town legislative. Jacob Zuma is the president of South Africa, while the deputy president is Cyril Ramaphosa. 

The political system has parliament; lower house and upper house (a bit like in UK). 

South Africa become independent from UK in 1910.

The first european to set his feet in South Africa wasn't a dutch guy, but the Portuguese Bartolomeu Diaz in 1487 at Walfisch Bay in the western cost. Dutch and english arrived only 2 centuries later to take it all over from Portuguese.  And just like in those American Western movies, also here white men robbed land from aborigin population. There are to be found in museas testimonies of that battle between zulu and dutch at the Boer camp. 

(Boer family is known by mining diamonds.) 

Not only zulu wanted to get rid of Boer Republic, but also British that in between 1880 and 1902 fought 1st and 2nd Boer War. 

South African currency is rand (ZAR), and the to European South Africa is nearly 35% less expensive to spend holidays, comparing to most EU countries.  

I payed nearly 900€ to my flight ticket, because we bought it just a month before departure, due to the circumstances of other participants. But I noticed that Emirates, KLM and Turkish Airlines offers better deals if booked in advance of 4-6 months. We flew with Turkish Airlines, to fit different countries of departure. I must say that my first experience with TA was more than successful. Flight attendants are extremely kind (but not to be fooled at) and beautiful to watch. 

Food on board was excellent and it was enough. Wine and juices were included also in my short flight from Milan to Istanbul. 

Just a small story about Istanbul Airport: It had been snowing a lot few days before our departure, and I wasn't really sure wether we could make it. Arriving to Istanbul, the whole airport seemed to be in total chaos  But.... Living in Italy I can assure you that Turkish and Italians are quite similar in case of emergency. They totally ignore German style procedure and byrocrcacy. They work hard as mules, and fix everything necessary later. So planes left just about few hours of delay. 

In South Africa I learned that some of the passengers in our flight from Istanbul did not get their luggages on time, but again that wasn't our case. 

(It depends a lot of the airport handling company: in Italy I got a huge transfer tag in my luggage) 

Let's get started with, at MXP airport

We didn't take a car from the airport, because we chilled at Cape Town down town for few days. Later on we took a small car and I'll tell you about later in the part 2. 

Arriving to the Cape Town Airport we took a taxi. As we were 5 and with the driver 6 we expected to get a mini van. Nope. We all got in to a family car for 5 with all the luggages and our journey couldn't get more hilarious start !!!