Category: Africa

Never Again

Gummint, Mocking Furriners, Third World, Travels

It is only when one leaves America does the shattering truth emerge that as much as we hate U.S. bureaucracy and deplore its inefficiency and tortoise-like attitude, just one encounter with the Third World has us weeping with relief when all we have to do, say, is renew a driver’s license down at the local DMV.

So New Wife and I decided to deplete our savings and try to repeat our earlier, abortive attempt to visit her #1 Son and family (grandchildren!!!) in Sydney, Australia.  (The first trip, of course, was nuked by Covid and the OzGov’s pathetic overreaction thereto.  That only cost us $1,500 for NW’s air ticket.)

Of course, even without Covid, Straya throws all sorts of shit at anyone who might want to spend some tourist dollars to visit their poxy country (pop. 25,000) — you have to apply for a visitor’s visa (from a list of about 50 different categories) before you can even get onto an airliner.  Cost of said application:  ~$340 per person.  However, the Dept. of Home Affairs boasts, it only takes as little as 36 hours for it to be approved (except where otherwise indicated by ).  Of course, using Covid as an excuse, the time was not 36 hours, oh no:  New Wife applied in February of this year, and it arrived promptly on May 15;  I applied for mine on April 1, and ATOW it still hadn’t arrived.

So I wasn’t able to get on the plane with her last Friday evening, but I was told that if I changed my flight to Sunday evening, they would help me take care of my little visa problem.

Which is where the (further) problems began.  I wasn’t able to change my flight because Expedia can’t do anything if the departure time is less than 10 hours away (on Friday evening, it was about two hours away by the time I’d got home).  No problem, thinks I, I’ll just go to Qantas’s website and change it there.  Except that Qantas must have used the same guy to build their website as homeaffairs.gov.au — there is no way to “manage” your booking — nowhere to enter your ticket number or reservation number, nada.

Last night I discovered the following:  because I hadn’t been able to change my flight, Qantas was going to take the whole fare and give me a “coupon” for $500 to use for my next flight;  additional expense to fly out on Sunday night: $800.

Even worse was my visa experience.  I could actually get an ETA visa (don’t ask) approved in about 20 minutes, except for a couple of teeny-weeny little problems:  the Qantas mobile app downloaded onto my phone, but couldn’t open;  and the visa application cost was going to be another $340, because this was a new visa application fee, you see, and no they couldn’t (okay wouldn’t) credit me for the failed visa application because they are two different visas.

Oh, and did I mention that the Sunday flight was overbooked anyway?

The hell with that.  I would rather take that $1,100-odd and pay for the grandkids to come and visit me.

Hence the title of this post.  Ain’t gonna happen, never, no way, uh-uh am I going to try to visit Australia ever in the future.  It’s just too much frigging hassle, and expensive, to visit a place that was never high on my Wannagothere List in the first place.

It’s not like I don’t have other options;  here’s one just arrived in my Inbox last night:

Cheap Flights: Dallas to London $566-$589 r/t

Don’t need a visa, either.  Buy a ticket, arrive at the airport, fly eight (not seventeen!) hours, and it’s tea and sausage rolls at Greggs for brekkie the next morning.

Other destinations ditto, with local cuisine variations.

Too bad, for everyone.

I think I’ll go to the range later today and get some AK-47 practice.  That’s one thing I can do that I’d never be able to do Down Under.

ZA Factoids

Africa

ZA, of course, being the international acronym for South Africa.

Cape Town is one of the world’s most beautiful cities:

The people somewhat less so, but that’s true of just about any city.

Durban looks like Miami Lite:

The Drakensberg range is quite spectacular:


They were named thus by Boer settlers who thought the mountains looked like dragons’ teeth.

The Wonderboom (Wonder Tree), a fig tree that is over a million years old:

…which is why you need to prune your fruit trees.  (It’s that thing in the center that looks like a bush.)

South Africa has its own version of the Grand Canyon, called the Blyde River Canyon:

Not as deep, but then again it’s a couple hundred million years younger.

Now for some other size comparisons:

Relative to the U.S. Lower 48:

Relative to Texas:

And here are the Big Five:

Anyway, those were some of the slides I made for New Wife’s “Where I Came From” presentation to the kids at her school.

News Roundup

Bad News, Third World

With commentary so pungent, your nose will burn worse than Madonna’s hoo-hah.


…in case they die before they can be killed?


…and a quick glance at the student orgs involved will tell you all you need to know.


…said snow being the “thing of the past” as prophesied by some asshole or other.


…executive summary being: 
1) keep drinking; 
2) strongly think about vaxxing if you haven’t; 
3) Boris Johnson is a dickhead.


…either somebody is lying, or else just stopped lying.


…so, not a red cent in their red kettles then.  Hope it was worth it.

From the Heart Of Stone Dept.:


…stop that giggling, it’s a tragic — hahahahahahah.


…being Clarkson, his first ad line was rejected:  “If you’re an alcoholic, don’t fight it, feed it”, and was replaced by “It’s really fucking good”


…and good for them, say I.  Not all restaurants need be “family-friendly”, and I wish there were more of them.


…and just like that, the entire career of actor Peter Sellers vanished.

Now, INSIGNIFICA:

 

…and speaking of pointless Brit TV shows, here’s someone from the celebrity dancing thing, the wonderfully-named Nadia Bychkova:

I know:  small boobs, long legs.  She’s a professional dancer, FFS.

Goat Rodeo

Third World, Travels

So the UK-US “border” is finally opened, and the Brit airines (BA and Virgin) want to make a big deal out of it, so with typical Brit ceremony they schedule dozens of airliners to take off simultaneously from parallel runways, to land at NYFC’s JFK airport, likewise simultaneously.

More than 10,000 passengers flew from London to New York City yesterday on the day the US border was open to international travelers since the coronavirus crisis. British Airways took 8,600 travelers on 26 aircraft while Virgin Atlantic ferried a further 4,500 customers on ten shuttles into JFK as figures soared back to pre-pandemic levels.

And then complain when this occurs:

Hundreds of passengers were left waiting for hours at JFK airport yesterday when three planes reportedly arrived at once on the day the US border reopened.  Furious travelers blasted officials for the ‘disgraceful’ planning as the aircraft landed from Manchester and weary customers flooded into customs.  One flyer posted footage of the chaos on social media as masked people queued in sprawling lines as they waited to be let into the country for the first time in 600 days.

Here’s the kicker:

It is not clear if airports brought in more staff for the big reopening, but it comes amid warnings they were not ready for the huge influx of tourists.

LOL it’s New York fuckin’ City, already crushed by mandatory facemasks, mandatory lockdowns and mandatory vaccine-related staff shortages:  what did you think was going to happen?

I’ve previously stated that JFK is really a Third-World-standard airport — and by that I don’t mean Singapore / Bangkok-type Third World, but the Bangalore / Nairobi kind.  So to expect anything other than chaos on a normal day, let alone this one, was simply stupid.

And, of course, everyone needs a kick in the nads for this fiasco:  the airlines, for making a grand gesture to overload the airports, the airports for not planning for the influx, and lest we forget, the idiots who just couldn’t wait to get here and had to be on those first flights.

Simple Solution

Good Stuff, Immigration, Marxists, Third World

From this Niall Ferguson article via Insty (thankee, squire) comes a gem:

Last week, the Rhodium Group’s Logan Wright estimated that there was enough empty property in China to house more than 90 million people.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?  Housing for 90 million dispossessed and poverty-stricken Afghans, Haitians, Venezuelans, Mexicans, Africans and Palestinians?

Could the answer be that simple?  Let’s hear the response from the ChiComs…

[exit, cackling like a maniac]

Breaking The Law

Africa, Hunting, The Gun Thing

Question from Reader JockC, via email:

“Did you own any other rifles back in South Africa, or was the Israeli Mauser the only one?”

Getting one gun in those days was relatively easy.  As I recall, the license application for the Llama pistol took about a month to be granted, and the Mauser only a matter of weeks.  “Self-protection” for the handgun required a background check, but “hunting” and a bolt-action rifle was hardly even scrutinized, as far as I can tell.

Getting your second gun always took longer, as the “Why do you need another gun?” had to be justified, and “Because” wasn’t acceptable.  Once again, the hunting thing was much easier, especially if one was applying for a larger- or smaller-caliber chambering.  A second handgun, unless for a specific sporting purpose, like a target pistol?  Oy.  It could take as long as a year for the license to be granted.  So I only ever owned one handgun at a time, as did many of us.

Officially, that is.

The only other centerfire rifle I owned back in the old Racist Republic was an Oviedo Spanish Mauser in 7x57mm, similar to the one below except that I had the bolt altered so I could use a scope with the thing.

I have spoken many times before of my affection for the old, gently-recoiling cartridge, seen here alongside the other popular ones in use at the time:

The long bullet of the 7×57 allowed for astounding penetration, which often made a “quartering” shot as deadly as a side-on shot.

The Orviedo Mauser was the Model 1893 (similar to the “Boer” Mauser of later fame), and many was the approving nod I got from Oom (uncle) Sarel and his farmer friends whenever I uncased it.

This was the gun I used for almost all my hunting (a.k.a. poaching), and it was never registered to me under S.A. law because reasons.  (I did occasionally use borrowed rifles, but the Spanish Mauser was the main one.) I got it from the estate of an acquaintance who’d been killed in a car accident, and whose father just wanted to get rid of it.

Using the unregistered gun instead of the Izzy (which was registered to me), I had no compunction about tossing it into a ditch should the game rangers ever appear… but fortunately that never happened.  Just before I emigrated, I gave it to the farmer on whose farm I did all my hunting out in the Northern Cape.

As to the area where we hunted:  yikes.  I have no pictures of where I hunted, nor any trophy pictures, because under the conditions I hunted, those could be called “evidence” and used against me.  But I found some pictures of the terrain up in the northern Cape Province (as it was back then), and they should give you a glimpse of conditions along the fringes of the Kalahari Desert:

       

Dry as hell, hot as hell, no place for White men (as the saying goes) and only mad dogs and Englishmen etc. etc.

Despite the harsh conditions, game was relatively plentiful, although we usually only hunted for culling purposes — such as when a springbok herd started grazing on pastures meant for sheep or cattle, and had to be made to fear the area.  I myself grazed on springbok biltong for about six months after that occasion.  Then there were the lions, who just followed the game onto the farm, and had to be dealt with, in the words of the farmer, “so they don’t develop a taste for beef, sheep and humans.”

I would get an evening call from Oom Sarel the farmer:  “Neef (nephew) Kim, do you feel like a bit of shooting this weekend?” and if I was free, I’d load up the car and set off before midnight Friday for the six-hour drive out to Kuruman, the nearest town.

I enjoyed it immensely, as much as for the companionship of those weekend hunts as for the actual hunting.  What I learned from those outings was that I wasn’t as good a shot as the farmers — hell, the neighbor’s 17-year-old was death on wheels, and when he shot, he worked his rifle’s bolt so fast it sounded more like semi-auto fire.  (It was a Sauer .270 Win, I think, but I do remember that his one-shot kill ratio was well over 75%.  Astounding.)

Anyway, that’s the story of my hunting days.  There were a couple others, in different areas, but those weren’t as illicit, nor as enjoyable, as the ones out on Oom Sarel’s farm.

Side note:  In South Africa, younger people address their elders as “oom” (uncle) or “tannie” (auntie) out of respect, even when not related.  In return, the older folks will call the younger ones “neef” (nephew), “seun” (son) or “dogter” (daughter) and “niggie” (niece).  It is a very affectionate and respectful custom, and I have to admit that I miss it.

The Afrikaans “g” is pronounced the same as the Scottish “ch” as in “loch”.