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This post is about one man: Nelson Mandela. It is by no means intended to be a biography or really all that detailed whatsoever. We'll see how short I can make this. Apologies in advance if it's not as short as you want. It's not going to be short.

Some of the places we visit have horrible histories. Wars. Colonization. Repression. Racism. Torture. Revolution. Censorship. Violence. Rampant abuse of power. Corruption. Graft. Disease. Exploitation. Denial of basic human rights. The list could go on and on and on and it does with words far worse than I've written here. South Africa is right up there with the best (or worst, I guess in this case) of those places. I guess at one time or another and for extended periods of time, South Africa could embrace all those terrible words and phrases at the beginning of this paragraph.

I know I've only written one real paragraph so far but lest you think the country of my birth (the United Kingdom) and my adopted home country that I love so much and in so many ways (the United States) are immune from that litany of bad things in paragraph number one, think again. You can put all of those words against both nations at one time or another and they would fit perfectly (and maybe even some today). What else you got? France? Hah! Germany? Please! Spain? Nope, nope, nope! Pick pretty much any nation on Earth and you'll find what I wrote to start this post. It might have been a long, long time ago. But it's there.

But this post isn't about any of those nations. It's about South Africa. And South Africa is different. Not because it's worse than any other country on Earth, but because of how justice was finally meted out. Do you know how the revolution finally happened in South Africa? It was by vote. It was peaceful. Think the United States and Western Europe are superior to the rest of the world? How many nations out there ultimately achieved complete regime change without bloodshed? 

How did that all happen? I have just two words for you: Nelson Mandela. 

All those countries that we have visited that I referenced earlier? On some level, they all have national heroes. I don't think I've ever been anywhere that far and away had a singular guiding force in the true establishment of their nation like South Africa does with Nelson Mandela. 

We had to spend some time in South Africa tracking down Mandela's legacy.

Nelson Mandela Statue. Cape Town.

I knew something was up with Nelson Mandela and South Africa way, way before we set foot in South Africa late last year. I grew up in the 1980s. I turned 12 in the first year of that decade and attended high school and my first university entirely within the '80s. When I was in high school I knew that South Africa was under all sorts of pressure to abolish Apartheid, their segregated societal system that preserved power with the white minority over the black majority. I knew (or at least I thought I knew) that there was some dude named Nelson Mandela imprisoned for his beliefs who advocated violent overthrow of the government. And I knew that Steven Van Zandt wasn't going to play Sun City. And I'm not trying to be funny with that last one.

But I didn't really know what Sun City was. Or who Nelson Mandela was. Or really anything about South Africa really. Time to fix at least some of that.

Nelson Mandela Square, Johannesburg.

Maybe a very quick history of South Africa is in order. Quick being the operative word. I'm skipping a lot here. This post is trying to be about Mandela, not the history of South Africa.

Colonization of what is now South Africa began by the Dutch in 1652. They weren't the first ones to explore the area (the Portuguese were) but they were the first to settle and start pushing the native peoples, the Khoikhoi and San, into less desirable areas of the continent so they could take the harbor of what is now Cape Town for a resupply station for ships making the passage to Asia.

The Dutch held South Africa (it was not the size it is today) until the early 1800s when it was ceded to Britain as a prize in the Napoleonic Wars. The British outlawed the Dutch language, which alienated the European descendants (the Boers) already living there who moved inland away from Cape Town to escape the British. Over the next century (approximately), the British gained full control of South Africa with maybe a war or two in there involving most notably the former Dutch settlers and the Zulu. Oh...and the discovery of both gold and diamonds as abundant natural resources.

In 1910, the British consolidated the former Boer colonies into a single South African Union which was self-governing but also still under the control of the British Crown. South Africans fought on the side of Great Britain in both World Wars and the country was eventually granted independence from colonial control in 1961. By that time, the white minority was fully in control of the country with no desire to give it up. 

There wasn't always Apartheid (which literally means "apartness") in South Africa. That happened in 1948. But there was plenty of institutionalized racism happening in South Africa a long, long time ago. 

Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg. 

By the time Nelson Mandela was born in 1918, the government operating under the South African Union had already passed the 1913 Land Act, which segregated land ownership within the country, allocating about 7% of the total land area for black people. It also prohibited the selling or leasing of any land designated for whites to black people. 

Before Mandela's tenth birthday, the government had proceeded with additional laws like the Urban Areas Act, which segregated living areas for black people outside (rather than within) the cities they worked in, and the Color Bar Act, which prohibited black people from holding skilled tradesmen positions.

Then came the National Party and Apartheid. With the National Party, there was no more pretense about sneaky laws designed to make non-whites feel inferior. It was all just out in the open. Their slogan was "Die wit man moet alkyd baas wees" which means "the white man must always remain boss". They even manufactured some support from God when the Dutch Reform Church asserted that the Afrikaners were God's chosen people and black people were a subservient species. 

More rules followed. 

The below is not a comprehensive list. 

It's just to set the tone here.

1949: The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act. That one is kind of self-explanatory.

1950: The Population Registration Act, which labeled all South Africans by race, and the Group Areas Act, which created separate residential and business areas for each race.

1951: The Separate Representation of Voters Act, which robbed non-African, non-whites of their representation in parliament. This act spread explicit and official race-based discrimination from just black people to all non-white people.

1957: The Immorality Act, which prohibited sexual relations between whites and non-whites.

Getting the picture yet? 

Laws alone don't tell the story. We needed to dig deeper.

Community tributes to Mandela outside one of his houses (the third, if I'm remembering right).

We spent time last October and November in both Johannesburg and Cape Town exploring the history of colonialism and repression in South Africa and tracking down sites relevant to the life of Nelson Mandela. In Joburg, we spent a full day visiting what was probably far too many sites (including at least three former Mandela homes) along with a quick stop at the Apartheid Museum. In Cape Town, our Mandela-quest was informed by a half day trip to Robben Island along with a colonialism-themed food tour around the streets and alleys of Cape Town.

And I'm only sort of complaining about our day trip in Johannesburg but I do feel we could have spent more than the 45 minutes or so we were allotted at the Apartheid Museum. We basically speed-walked through that thing.

Some stuff stuck with me. It usually does with tours like this. We actually learned a ton and a lot of it could be stitched together I am sure to create a window of a portrait of what life might have been like for a non-white in South Africa before the end of Apartheid. But for the purposes of this post, I'm going to focus on three sites.

Mandela House, Soweto

The house in the picture above is located on Vilakazi Street in the township of Soweto outside of Johannesburg. It was built in 1945 along with innumerable residences exactly like it on lots that were similarly sized and pretty much the minimum size that a house like this could be placed upon. The one above is different than the others only in the respect that it was purchased by Nelson Mandela and in 1946, he moved into the house along with his first wife Evelyn and their first child. It was the first house he would own; he would hang on to it until 1997. One wife later (Winnie) as it turned out.

Mandela was not born anywhere close to Johannesburg. He started out life in the Eastern Cape Province. But he moved / ran-away-from-home to Joburg with his older cousin to (1) escape an arranged marriage; (2) finish his education and establish his law practice; and (3) ultimately embark on his life's work which was freeing the country of his birth from codified, institutional racism. His first home around Johannesburg was in the Alexandra township; when it came time for him to buy his own property, he moved in to the place on Vilakazi Street. The house is preserved as a museum today.

From a Mandela history standpoint, the house for me didn't shed a ton of light onto the life of the man. Yes, the house is small. Yes, there was no indoor plumbing. Yes, he lived here at the start of his monumental adult life. But other than that and absent the whole South Africa racism thing (we'll get there...), it's a starter house for a young couple in the 1940s. My mother grew up in that same decade in a house with an outhouse and a non-plumbed bathtub. Nothing surprising there.

Inside the (first) Mandela House today; Nelson's favorite chair.

But there are scars of pre- and post-Apartheid South Africa all around and over the house. First, while this seems like a pretty good 1940s starter home, this was likely the best choice from an extremely limited portfolio of properties available to the Mandelas. 1946 was well after the Land Act and the Urban Areas Act were in effect but before the introduction of Apartheid. Want to buy a house as a black man in 1946? Choose whatever you want and which you can afford from the 7% of the land allotted to the more than 80% black population. This circumstance isn't physically manifested in the house, but a house of this size at that time likely represented somewhere in the upper half of the maximum possibility property ownership for someone with Mandela's skin color.

The other scars on the house are more real. Scorched brick from fire hurled at the house. Bullet holes alongside stories of Winnie and the kids having to shelter in the interior of the house to avoid gunfire. A trash can lid used as a shield to protect from bullets with evidence of just how non-effective such a shield could be in in the house. And that fire and gunfire. All from government forces. No gang warfare here. Just the government of South Africa waging war on its own un-represented population.

A trip to the Mandela House involves parking the car and walking through the circus of street hawkers and Soweto citizens packed close to what is now a top tourist attraction looking for opportunities to assist with anything. Getting there involved driving through Soweto, from its fenced, well-maintained single-family homes in ordered neighborhoods to dirt-floored, corrugated metal shacks and shanties with electricity self-rigged from power poles and portable toilets like we might find on construction sites in the United States as the only place to pee and poop. The level of poverty in Soweto is striking for someone (me) who has never really been anywhere so densely populated with such unnecessarily basic shelter. I know there are places in this world that have it way worse and I'm not just being a white American expressing outrage at a level of poverty that I just don't see regularly but from my perspective, the governments of this world have the power to fix this stuff. It doesn't need to exist. Over simplifying, I know. Call me an idealist.

No pics of the shanties. I'm not taking and posting photographs of other people's poverty handed down by their own government.

Is a trash can lid an effective shield against bullets? Not really, no.

Robben Island, Cape Town

Nelson Mandela was arrested during his struggle to abolish Apartheid a number of times. A quick AI search on Google lists four arrests starting in 1952 and ending in 1962 with at least one additional informal detention in there for good measure. The number of times he was arrested is not that important for the purpose of this blog post. Most of these involved a brief stay in jail followed by a release; most of these arrests were, after all, unjustified from a democratic society perspective, which I get that South Africa was not. But the last one was pretty significant. It landed him with a life sentence with 27 years served at the time of his release in 1990.

Mandela was sentenced to prison in June 1964. As a black man imprisoned for activities in organized resistance to Apartheid, he could end up at only one place: Robben Island, an Island long used to separate undesireables from the rest of South African society (it started as a leper colony in the 1800s) just off the coast of Cape Town that was pretty much escape-proof due to its remoteness. A prison with 1,000 or so inmates and 310 armed guards with German shepherd dogs to watch over them. No women. No white men. No colored men. Just black men. Robben Island was only cruel enough for black men in the Apartheid era. Mandela would remain at Robben Island until March 1982 when he was moved to Pollsmoor Prison on the mainland.

Today (like the Mandela House), the prison is a museum. It was the first place I put on my Cape Town list when we decided that our South Africa trip would stop in that coastal city.

Robben Island's quarry. I have two substandard photos because I was on the wrong side of the bus. I'm electing to post both.

Tours of Robben Island are guided only. A boat takes you from the harbor across the water; a bus takes you around the island; and then a guide walks you around the prison itself. The star attraction on the tour is undoubtedly the cell of Nelson Mandela (shown in the photograph two photos above). Mandela was secured in a single cell in a wing of the prison reserved for ANC leadership so those at the top of the organization would be unable to influence the men sharing communal cells. It didn't work. He was moved to Pollsmoor because he was still leading men at Robben Island from a solitary cell.

The stop at Mandela's cell was useful as a touchstone in our Mandela history quest. The title of this blog post is actually Mandela's prisoner number at Robben Island. I've visited prison sites on my travels before. Robben Island sounds like it ranks up there with the worst.  

Some things we learned.

For prisoners on Robben Island, 23 of the 24 hours of the day were spent inside in confinement, either in single cells, solitary confinement or communal cells. New prisoners and leadership of the various groups imprisoned on the Island were generally confined to single cells. And leadership meant leaders of outlawed political movements like the African National Congress (ANC), of which Mandela was THE leader. The other hour in the day? Two 30 minute long sessions outdoors.

Upon arrival at Robben Island, each inmate was issued an identity card which you had to take everywhere. Caught with no card? 24 hours solitary confinement. Second occurrence? 48 hours solitary with no food. Third "offense"? Six months solitary with reduced diet. And the diet didn't sound that great to begin with. Prisoners at Robben Island received a "Category C" diet which in the 1980s meant porridge with rice, corn, soybeans, powdered egg and fish powder on weekdays with a small piece of actual meat on weekends. Before the 1980s it was worse. Category A and B diets were not for black prisoners.

Robben Island identity card.

Before 1979, sleeping on Robben Island was on the concrete floor and the bathrooms in the cells were one red bucket per prisoner. Those 30 minutes of outside time per day? Bucket cleaning was part of that time too. Contact with the outside world? In the 1960s it was two letters and two visitors per year. That would be relaxed to six by the 1980s. 

Oh, there was one other place that outside time was permitted...hard labor at the quarry breaking rocks. With no protection from rock dust or the blinding light reflected off the white stone by the hot African sun. Inmates who spent a lot of time at hard labor on Robben Island later in life reported extreme difficulty with bright lights and couldn't cry because of damage to their tear ducts by the daily rock dust.

Justice in the prison was handled by the prison court. Discipline was handed out via whippings, days or weeks in solitary confinement and even extensions to prisoners' sentences. Sometimes inmates died. If they did, they were typically buried or cremated and their remains deposited somwhere anonymously. If families were even told that their relatives were no longer on Robben Island alive, it was usually the "alive" part that got omitted. More often it was a lie about the prisoner escaping.

Sipho talking to our tour group.

Pretty much everything we were told at Robben Island was inhumane and chilling. We didn't visit Robben Island for fun or amusement. We did it to honor everyone who was confined there mostly for just disagreeing with people in power. And that included Nelson Mandela. 

There are places in this world that we can visit as tourists that are powerful. Robben Island is one of those. It is most powerful today because tours through the prison are guided by ex-inmates. Our guide was Sipho, who was a resident on the Island from 1984 to 1989. His crimes? Being a member of the ANC and recruiting others to be members, including recruitment outside the country. He was arrested with five others and was tried along with four of the five. The fifth died from torture by the police. There will come a day when there are no more prisoners left to guide people around Robben Island. When that day comes, this experience will be less powerful. There is power in listening to someone who has actually lived through this kind of experience.

Liliesleaf Farm, Johannesburg

How did Nelson Mandela get from Soweto to Robben Island? The answer is at Liliesleaf Farm.

Liliesleaf was an ANC safe house in a white neighborhood on the north side of Johannesburg. The property was purchased by Arthur Goldreich and Harold Wolpe (both of whom were white) with funds provided by the South African Communist Party with a little help from both Cuba and the Soviet Union. Goldreich lived in the house with his wife and two sons, effectively creating the illusion of a family living in suburbia complete with black servants working around the property, including a driver named David Motsamayi, which was Nelson Mandela's cover name while he was at Liliesleaf.

Liliesleaf was purchased in 1961, which was right at the time when the ANC was moving away from non-violent resistance following the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and into violent armed resistance. That change was resisted by Mandela until he realized no matter how non-violent the ANC was being, they were met with increasing violence in their engagement with government forces. Eventually, that realization caused Mandela to push to establish an armed wing of the ANC, uMkhonto we Sizwe (or MK) which meant "Spear of the Nation" in English.

During our travels in South Africa, we learned that the ANC's struggle against Apartheid changed with each decade. Passive resistance in the 1950s was followed by armed resistance in the 1960s. That changed to student protests in the 1970s and world condemnation and sanctions in the 1980s.

In 1963, the police raided Liliesleaf Farm. They were tipped off by a neighborhood resident but also someone inside MK. There's no record that I'm aware of that identifies the MK informant and Gabriel, our guide for our Mandela Day in Joburg, corroborated this information. He also, however, said that everyone knows the informant was later assassinated at his hone in Soweto. How he knows this when nobody knows the identify of the information, I have no idea. But he seemed pretty sure of his information.

The 1963 Liliesleaf raid resulted in the arrest of a number of ANC leaders and effectively shut the property down as a safe house. Nelson Mandela was not one of the leaders arrested that day, because he had already been arrested, tried and sentenced to five years' imprisonment the prior year for leaving the country without permission and inciting workers' strikes. The reason Mandela was out of the country was to secure support and funding from other countries for the ANC's newly launched MK initiative, although during his trial the South African government didn't know that.

That's where Liliesleaf comes in.

Nelson Mandela's desk and chair from his room at Liliesleaf.

While the police didn't find Mandela himself at Liliesleaf, they did find extensive evidence of his involvement in the founding of MK. That information was supposed to be destroyed at Mandela's direction, but whoever was directed to destroy the documents apparently decided there was too much historical value to these documents and he instead hid them in a coal bunker (I'm honestly making up the "too much historical value" thing but what else could the decision be?). And of course, the cops searched the coal bunker.

Five year sentence for Mandela leaving the country without permisson? Let's make that "life" after the discovery at Liliesleaf.

There are innumerable tours around Johannesburg chasing down sites related to Nelson Mandela. I had a hunch that we should go to Liliesleaf and very, very few tours stopped here. It was so worth it. The story of the history of the ANC safe house told through storyboards and videos involving personal recollections by the residents was gripping. We were almost alone out there on the day we visited which was good for us but honestly concerning if that's a typical day.

Liliesleaf also has an exhibit dedicated to the history behind MK, including the story of Mandela's tour around Africa to secure funding and how MK smuggled arms and ammunition into South Africa. The arms smuggling was conducted in secret compartments of a safari truck set up specifically to do cross-border safaris into South Africa. The safaris were legit and tourists paid to be on the trips, having no idea they were actually riding in a truck smuggling weapons being used by South African revolutionaries. In the films in this part of the property, pretty much all the tourists interviewed were proud to have unknowingly fought against Apartheid.  

The picture below is a terrible photograph but it shows the 4" wide slot on one side of the safari trucks that was used to smuggle arms into South Africa. Cool stuff!!!

All told, we probably devoted two full days to Mandela and Apartheid tourism in our approximately two weeks in country. It was nowhere near enough to understand all the atrocities that the South African government committed against its own (black) people. At the same time, there is a ton to digest in many, many sites, particularly around Johannesburg. This is some heavy stuff and absorbing it all takes time. 

The one regret I have about our Apartheid time is the very little time we spent in the Apartheid Museum itself. I know I already complained about this. Honestly, it was so rushed that we could have skipped it entirely and not lost anything, I feel. But, if that rushed visit was the tradeoff for visiting Liliesleaf, I'll take it. Our time at the Farm there combined with our visit to Soweto and Robben Island likely got us the best overview we could have gotten in a couple of days. We are smarter and wiser for our time chasing down Nelson Mandela. Our perspective is forever altered, as often happens with quests like this.

We did not visit Sun City Resort on this trip. We didn't need to.

Our last morning in South Africa was spent at the top of Table Mountain, the flat-topped mountain that dominates Cape Town's skyline. On the cable car ride down from the top of that plateau, we looked over the water in Cape Town harbor and located Robben Island. That was pretty much the last thing we saw in South Africa before we headed home. This trip was worth it. For Kruger and fossils and penguins and even Apartheid. I'm done blogging about Africa for now. On to the next trip.

The view from Cape Town's Table Mountain. Robben Island is the island in the bay.

To Our Children's Children's Children

So it's our first full day in South Africa and it's about 10:30 in the morning on a Saturday and we are standing in a cave pretty much in the pitch dark. No, it's not safari time yet; that will come in a couple of days. Because there's a risk of head-bumping (you know...due to the almost complete lack of light...), we are wearing hardhats. Our guide is standing in front of a fenced in area within the cave called the Silberberg Grotto. He's equipped with the groups's only flashlight and he's telling us about some human remains that were found in the cave in the early 1980s. The skeleton was called Little Foot and it is remarkable because it demonstrated that human ancestors could walk upright more than 2 million years ago. Cool, right? 

The Silberberg Grotto is within the Sterkfontein Caves, a limestone cave system about an hour's drive north and west of Johannesburg. The caves are a part of the multi-site Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site celebrating South Africa's contribution to the evolving story of human evolution. Little Foot wasn't the first skeleton found in the Sterkfontein Caves. That honor belonged to a skeleton called Mrs. Ples. Mrs. Ples (who ultimately is now pretty much acknowledged to be male and not female) was discovered in 1947 and is important as one of the most perfect skulls of our species' ancestors. We saw the spot where Dr. Robert Broom discovered the skull of Mrs. Ples on the way out of the Caves.

So Sterkfontein Caves is super-significant in the study of human evolution, right? The answer to that question is unquestionably "yes".

But it may be difficult to see that on a first visit. Very difficult.

Where Little Foot was found.

Mrs. Ples is pretty much universally acknowledged as an Australopithecus africanus and the remains of her (or him) are dated at between 2.1 and 2.8 million years ago, although this number has shifted around a bit over time. The fact that there is a 700,000 year range on the actual date should tell you how precise this dating stuff is.

Little Foot was first also thought to be an Australopithecus africanus and was dated at a similar vintage as Mrs. Ples, although just like Mrs. Ples, Little Foot's actual speculated age has shifted around a bit from just a bit older than 2 million years to almost 4 million years old (the exhibit signage at Sterkfontein Caves still has the older date). 

Know what else has shifted around a bit? Little Foot's species. That skeleton is now classified as an Australopithecus prometheus, although there is some good amount of debate about that classification.

So let's get this straight...there were two different species of Australopithecus roaming around at the same time on our planet? 

Well, no, it doesn't appear that was necessarily the case. Although maybe. Or maybe yes. There may actually have been three Australopithecus species that were contemporaneous. Ever heard of Lucy? From Ethiopia? Louis Leakey? 1974? Also an Australopithecus but dated to about 3.7 million years ago and neither an africanus nor a prometheus. Lucy was an Austrolopithecus afarensis.

Which one is the ancestor of modern man (meaning Homo sapiens)? Maybe all of them. Maybe none of them. Or maybe some but not others. Maybe there was really no overlap between these different species but maybe there was. Maybe they evolved into the same or different species. The real answer is we don't know. I probably should have put a giant asterisk on that "one of the most perfect skulls of our species' ancestors" statement in the second paragraph. 

Australopithecus. Which one it is, I don't remember. In the exhibit at the Sterkfontein Caves.

What we do know is that Australopithecuses (is that the right pluralization?) walked upright and that anatomical change represented a departure from the other apes that were around on our planet at that time, and in fact may still be around. But we don't know how that happened. We lack the scientific evidence to understand how the evolution occurred on that issue. 

So we must understand how we got from one or more species of Australopithecus to Homo sapiens, right? How we evolved from upright-standing, early people with longer arms and much smaller brain cavities into the large-brained, apex predators ready to destroy the whole planet in spite of ourselves that we are today, right?

We don't. Not really. Let's come back to that.

After our couple of hours over in the Sterkfontein Caves, we visited Maropeng, which is effectively the main visitor's center for all of the Cradle of Humankind properties. The main building at Maropeng resembles some sort of giant truncated cone covered in grass at the end of a long, paved walkway. Inside the building are exhibits about the evolution of humans and the development of human society and technology. There's also some kind of weird, non-sequitur indoor water ride that communicates about zero information and is not stimulating in any way. 

There is a ton of information inside Maropeng. All that stuff about multiple species of Australopithecus wondering around southern and eastern Africa is covered in great detail. Lucy. Mrs. Ples. A possible common ancestor between modern man and modern apes found in present-day Chad that dates to 7 million or so years old. It's all in there along with images and fossil records and all sorts of other things. Although Little Foot as a prometheus is pretty much absent. That last part may be because the information keeps shifting around a bit or a lot. 

What else is in Maropeng? All sorts of stuff. Need a timeline of human development alongside a record of the appearance and disappearance of different species? Want to know when the domestication of dogs or cattle occurred relative to the appearance of the wooly mammoth or more recent human ancestors (like Homo Erectus)? Then Maropeng is the place to be. Want a depressing account of the future of fresh water on our planet? Also inside Maropeng.

That last one by the way is chilling. Global consumption of fresh water is doubling every 20 years. There's only so much of this stuff to go around and humans won't stop breeding. We visited two Mayan sites earlier this year where the populations exhausted the planet's local ability to support their growing ranks. That sort of thing is coming on a much larger scale sometime later this century or next century and it's not going to be pleasant when we start running out of water to drink.

So we've got Mrs. Ples and Little Foot and all sorts of evidence of human evolution all over South Africa and elsewhere and a giant building full of facts about the same thing and we can't trace our ancestors back definitely to ascertain where exactly modern humans came from? 

That statement is correct. And it's because there just isn't that much evidence out there.

Mrs. Ples and Little Foot were found in the part of the Sterkfontein Caves that we visited in the morning. Know how many other specimens were found there? Zero. And people only realized Little Foot was a human ancestor about 15 years after the initial discovery. If someone hadn't taken a close look at the four human bones found in the mid-1980s and realized they were actually human and then sent a team back out to see if the rest of the skeleton was still there (it was) we'd have Mrs. Ples and that's it from that site. 

There have been other remains of humans found in other parts of the Sterkfontein Caves. There was an especially large find in the Dinaledi Chamber of those caves that produced the remains of at least 15 early hominids. 

There have also been other finds of ancient human remains all over Africa. This Cradle of Humankind in South Africa is not even the first Cradle of Humankind we have visited. We pulled into Tanzania's version of this same concept at Oldupai (or Olduvai) Gorge on the way from Ngorongoro Crater to Serengeti National Park in early 2018. At that site, there were discoveries of human bones dating back millions of year, including a skull, a partial thigh bone and some teeth of a fourth Australopithecus, along with more recent remains and tools from about 17,000 years ago.

Replicas of Little Foot's skeleton (top) and Mrs. Ples' skull (bottom).

So let's add all of that up on the Australopithecus side of things. Two skeletons from one part of Sterkfontein Caves and 15 (maybe) from another part and a few fragments of a skeleton from Oldupai Gorge. Yes, there were other skeletons and partial skeletons found elsewhere on the continent but come on...is that enough to establish a record of human evolution over millions of years? Probably not.

Part of the problem here (along with the millions of years) is the fact that mammal bones only get fossilized under extreme situations like sudden mudslides or things that like which capture solids and eliminate oxygen at the same time. Those kinds of conditions just doesn't happen that often as crazy as that sounds. Combine that with the fact that human ancestors millions of years ago were probably pretty for larger creatures and likely spent very little time preserving the remains of their dead and it's really not surprising there is very little out there in the way of traceable evolutionary history. 

So where does that leave South Africa's Cradle of Humankind as a tourist attraction? Oddly, it leaves it as both underwhelming and super-exclusive at the same time. 

On the underwhelming side, we spent a lot of time walking around some caves to see one spot where one of the two skeletons in that section of the cave were found and then visited another building that shed a lot of light on the path to discovery of our species' evolution. There's no conclusive answer on that subject because we just don't know. There's not enough to go on.

On the super-exclusive side, there are only so many spots on this planet of ours where real progress in finding evidence of our ancient ancestors as a species have been found. To say that we passed right by two spots where that record of our past existence was found in a single day is amazing. 

Sometimes on our trips around the world we get complete experiences that are incredibly fulfilling. This day wasn't one of those because it couldn't really be. But we've added another site that provided evidence of human evolution to our list. I am sure there are others out there where we will re-engage on this stuff in the future. No regrets on this one.

Cradle of Humankind No. 1 (Tanzania; 2018) for us. More of these to come?

Penguins

I have three South Africa blog posts left (including this one) from our late October / early November trip to the very bottom of the Dark Continent. Two of the three are either pretty heavy or involve a lot of research or both. Those two may have to wait until 2026. I think it's OK to stretch this thing out a bit. I do, after all, have plenty of time until our next trip (in March). I want to make sure I do those two posts justice.

In the meantime, here's something a bit lighter. Mostly. Although it will end up being pretty heavy too. And quick.

There have been, and there continue to be, in our travels, some creatures that have continued to elude us trip after trip after trip (we see you, flamingos!). We managed to knock one of those species off our "seen" list on this trip when we ran into two packs of painted dogs on the same day in Kruger National Park. After Kruger and Joburg, we headed over to Cape Town and the Atlantic coast of South Africa for five days or so. Time to take swing at knocking another one of those sought after, but so far elusive, species off our list: penguins.

Our unseen penguins story is not as long and tortured as some other species we have looked for in various corners of the world (we see you again, flamingos!!) but we have chased these flightless birds in both South America and Oceania. In the Galápagos Islands of the coast of Ecuador, we were half-promised a swim with those islands' namesake penguins but missed them entirely. Three or so years later, we managed to see fewer than one hand's worth of penguins on and off New Zealand's Stewart Island, including a couple of empty evenings waiting for the little blue penguins to return home for the night. 

We felt better about our chances with the African penguins near Cape Town in South Africa. And as it turns out, with good reason.

Our first African penguins. On Robben Island.

When we started planning our trip to South Africa, and particularly our time in Cape Town, penguins landed pretty near the top of our must-see list very, very quickly. Blame or credit Netflix's Penguin Town series or just our general research when it came to what to do and see in and around Cape Town. If there was a possibility of penguins, we were in.

There is exactly one species of penguin on the continent of Africa, the aptly and totally appropriately named African penguin. I had never necessarily heard of African penguins growing up as a budding but-really-never-a-possibility-as-a-career zookeeper in England because at that time, these birds were known as jackass penguins, a nod to the sound they sometimes make, which sounds a bit like a donkey, I guess. They are not only the only penguins in Africa, they are the only penguins in the old world. All the other species of penguin are either in South America or Oceania.

African penguins are inherently cute, right? I mean how could you not love these birds that stand upright on two feet with two flippers that look like arms and are just so, so easy to anthropomorphize. Squint and ignore the distance and you could almost believe an African penguin is a miniature person. If there was any doubt about this issue, we found a sign on this trip that identified African penguins as "charismatic megafauna" or simply "adorable".

Know what else African penguins are? Endangered. But not just endangered. Critically endangered. It may seem impossible from the abundance of penguins in this post but it's true. Read on. 

Critically endangered species are species which are categorized as facing an extremely high risk of extinction in the wild. At the beginning of the nineteenth century (the year 1800 for those of you challenged by numbered centuries like I am sometimes), there were an estimated four million African penguins on our planet. 

You know what's coming here, right? 

100 years later, those numbers were cut by about 60%. Just 1.5 million at the turn of the twentieth century. By about the year 2000, that number had dropped by about 90% to a total of maybe 150,000 of these birds in the wild. Maybe. That's a population that's spread around the coast of South Africa and Namibia, mostly to be found breeding on islands right off the shore of the continent.

It gets worse. 

Of course it does!

10 years after the turn of our current century, we were down to just a bit more than 50,000 wild African penguins and they were pegged for extinction in the wild by the year 2026. That's next year!!! Based on our visit this year, I feel pretty confident that there will be some African penguins in the wild beyond next year but I don't really know based on what I've seen. Maybe they make it to the middle of the next calendar decade or maybe a bit beyond based on recent prohibitions on fishing in penguin feeding grounds. But it ain't good.

African penguins have a maximum lifespan of about 14 years. In those 14 years, it takes them about four of those years to get to breeding age. That means they have about 10 years maximum (emphasis on maximum) to crank out as many little penguins as possible so the species can survive. How many eggs does a typical penguin couple lay per year? One or two. That's it. Same mate each year. Same nest site each year. Two chicks maximum. 

What could go wrong with those two chicks reaching maturity? Plenty. Let's start with death of one of the two penguin spouses. That doesn't necessarily threaten the chicks after they are hatched but it for sure might delay or just entirely prevent birth. What about the nest location being destroyed / co-opted for some use by man? I'm sure that slows up things too. Then there's the three months of constant feeding required at the beginning of the chicks' lives. Let's hope mom and dad (one has to watch the nest, after all) survive that process. Then, of course, there are predators intentional (gulls and rodents, anyone?) or unintentional (I'm thinking man here...).

So let's say they make it through mom and dad feeding them for a few months, then they are ready to swim and feed for themselves (young African penguins are called blue penguins) and after a couple of years they will molt and get their adult plumage after that and it's ready for kids of their own after that. 

Assuming they make it, that is.

All that growing up and raising traditionally happened off shore, meaning on those islands around the African continent. We visited one island off the coast of South Africa (Robben Island) where we did see some African penguins. But the majority of the penguins we saw on this trip were on the mainland. And here apparently man has once again intervened, not by threatening the penguins on the islands but killing off a lot of the birds' predators closer to shore making it safe to mate and raise a couple of baby penguins on the mainland.

Man is an equal opportunity killer of wildlife, it seems. Like we didn't already know that.

Our destination to see these penguins? A place called Boulders Beach. Apparently four penguins showed up sometime around 1984 and started a very exclusive colony. Since then, it's grown a bit. Today's estimates on the internet (dangerous, I know) look like anywhere between 1,500 to 4,000 birds. Not bad. But not 4 million either.

Call me scarred by past experiences hunting down penguins and flamingos and things like that but I have to tell you, I was expecting very few penguins at Boulders Beach. The fact that they nest there didn't make any difference to me. I expected a struggle to see any penguins at all.

Then we saw the ticket booth. OK, if they are charging admission, there are pretty much going to be some penguins.

What we found beyond the entrance gates were a lot of penguins completely free and not caged within feet of us. And I do mean feet but in some cases, it was really inches. It felt like an exhibit but it actually isn't. Man didn't make these penguins start nesting here. They just decided to do it one day. And they are still there in great numbers regardless of mankind erecting an entry booth and a souvenir store to profit off the birds' presence.

It felt like there were a lot of penguins on the beach and in the water. Not 1,500 to 4,000 but a lot. Hundreds maybe. Certainly not four figures. They were standing, walking, swimming, exiting the water, shaking water off, lying down and just generally not doing anything much except being penguins in the middle of the day in South Africa.

We also saw the whole lifecycle of the African penguin on that beach. From adults to molting chicks-becoming-adults to blue penguins and even chicks. Although I guess not eggs, so maybe not the whole lifecycle. The two chicks we saw were really honestly within arm's-length of the boardwalk for the humans if were had been silly enough to reach into the bushes lining the sides of that raised wooden path. We didn't reach out. 500 Rand fine AND the "Penguins Will Bite" sign was front and center in my mind if I even had a notion to reach out and touch one of those fluffy chicks.

WILL bite, not MIGHT bite. WILL.

A few observations here...

First, if it's action you are looking for at Boulders Beach, the water is where you need to be. There's a whole lot of sitting around on land and a whole lot of zooming around in the surf. African penguins can apparently swim 20 kilometers per hour and can dive to a depth of 200 feet when chasing their fish of choice which is usually sardines. You won't get to see much fishing or diving near the Beach but you will see a lot of fast swimming. I'm pleased we got to see this and take pictures of it from the land. We'd seen little blue penguins in New Zealand from a boat and it's way easier to use a camera to photographs penguins on land than on a boat.

Second, the tell-tale feature of a mature Africa penguin is the pink patch above their eyes. And in an amazing I-can't-believe-nature-works-this-way way, this tiny little pink patch allows the penguins to control their body temperature. If the penguin ever gets too warm, the body sends blood to this pink patch to get cooled off. These machines that are living beings are just incredible. No way would a species designer (I realize there is no such thing) would ever add this feature to a two foot high bird that can't fly and spends a ton of time fishing in the ocean. This nature stuff...crazy!

Finally, if these extinction numbers are in any way accurate and if man cannot find a way to preserve and protect and environment for these creatures to survive long-term, what an incredible privilege it was to spend about an hour or so among and around these birds. I especially appreciated the fact that I found a fellow tourist hunched over peering into the undergrowth at one spot which allowed me to find the two chicks that were sheltered within (a picture of one of the two is below). These young penguins are part of the future for this species, if they can make it to breeding age and don't have their environment destroyed by people. I can only hope today that things don't go that way. This experience was amazingly special despite its brevity.

So that's it for me and penguins. I know we found just one species of penguin in South Africa but penguins are off officially off my list of species that have eluded me for the entirety of the travel with purpose phase of my life. Thank you, South Africa. I can only hope that future generations get the chance I got in November of this year.

Now...about those flamingos. 

Lots of penguins; two penguins; a hidden chick; and the entrance gate. 

Status

I'm done traveling for 2025. My last night in a hotel was a couple of nights ago (for work). So in a completely non sequitur way, it's confession time. Why? Because it is. And it's also not the first time it's been confession time on this blog by any means but here goes another one: I'm a little bit fascinated or obsessed or whatever you want to call it with attaining status in travel rewards programs. 

There...I said it.

Now, if you know me at all, I know what you are probably thinking. It's the free stuff.

And you are totally right. It IS the free stuff. I'm not ashamed. I love getting stuff for free. I'll take anything remotely useful for free. And if it's travel-related, whether it's free hotels or flights or access to lounges or other sorts of perks, I'm all over it. I LOVE free stuff. Nothing better. I'm a moocher through and through. I mean, who isn't in love with free stuff?

There is some irony here, because in all my years of serious traveling and despite all the stuff I've gotten for free, I have rarely achieved any sort of status in any sort of travel rewards program. In 2016, if I'm remembering right, I stayed at enough Best Western properties to get either Platinum or Diamond status (can't remember which) and it got me pretty much nothing except some bonus points on future stays. Not that I'm against bonus points. These things all add up and some programs have 100% bonus points at some status levels.

Grand Hyatt Tokyo. Nice hotel. Very nice when it's free with lounge access.

The last three years (2022 through 2024) before this one were a little different. Based on my credit card spend in the years 2021 through 2023, I managed to get Hilton Diamond status. And I have to say the perks are wonderful. Room upgrades, lounge access, free food, express check-in and a custom baked birthday cake (thank you, Hilton Imperial Dubrovnik) made our travels easier, cheaper, more convenient and in the case of the birthday cake, more everything. And...100% bonus points on stays!!!

But all that other time I've spent focusing on traveling the last 12-1/2 years? I got nothing. All these years of traveling and all I have is a bit of status from two hotel chains for four years and I got the best part of that from using a credit card.

That all changed last year. Or maybe it's this year.

All that traveling for work that I sort of disliked and ranted about last year? Got me some status. Some hotel status. Some train status. Some airline status. Not all of these are the top tier but I got something from three different travel rewards programs. So what did it do for me? Well...read on.

Amtrak Select

What It Is: Select is Amtrak's first tier of actual earned status. Below Select is simply Member, which is free and conferred on anyone who signs up. I break down the Select member benefits this way: (1) a 25% bonus on points earned by traveling on Amtrak; (2) some coupons (two each one-way upgrades and 10% off); and (3) two single-visit lounge passes. Full disclosure, if you achieve Select status for the first time in a calendar year, it looks like you get the coupons and passes twice, once in the year you earn status and once at the beginning of the next calendar year.

What It's Done For Me: 

More points? Love them. As I said before, these all add up. The more you earn, the more stuff you can redeem them for. And Amtrak's points are actually really redeemable pretty easily for free trips. Coupons? I haven't used the discount coupons but I did (on this last trip) use an upgrade coupon to kick me from Acela Business Class to Acela First Class. I have to say...Acela First Class is pretty darned nice. Best food I've had on any form of transportation I've been on this year. The only thing that could make that experience better would be a smooth ride but that's not really that possible in the United States on rail. Oh well! Can't have everything I guess. 

I have also used some of the lounge passes. I have managed to visit the Metropolitan Lounge in New York's Moynihan Train Hall twice. The food is decent but not amazing or anything. Both times we've visited have been in the late morning so we've had a late breakfast or early lunch (or maybe both). I love lounges. They are far better waiting spaces than anywhere else in Moynihan and like all good lounges, it comes with free grub (although not free booze).

The Metropolitan Lounge also has one perk that most lounges skip: its balcony overlooks the main passenger hall of the Moynihan Train Hall. It's a calmer view of what is sometimes a chaotic experience down on the floor. I appreciate lounges with great views and so few lounges have them (I love the old lounge overlooking the runway in the original Washington National terminal). They are usually squirreled away in some interior space and then they sometimes make them even worse by sticking them in the basement. You don't get that with Amtrak in New York.

United Silver

What It Is: Like Amtrak Select, Silver is United's first tier of actual earned status. I break down United's Silver benefits this way: (1) a 40% bonus on points earned by traveling on United; Group 2 boarding; (3) upgraded seating (for free) at ticket purchase and check-in; (4) a free checked bag in economy; and (5) space-available upgrades. This last one is pretty much the holy grail of airline status benefits.

What It's Done For Me:

More points? Again, I'm good with more points, even if it's going to take a long, long, long time to accumulate points to get me anything free on an airline. Still, if I'm going to save up for a long time, adding 40% to each deposit helps. Maybe sometime in 2027, I can actually get a free flight.

Group 2 boarding? I do love this benefit. You can get this benefit with some United co-branded credit cards but I don't have one of those right now. Better seats at purchase and / or check-in? I also love these benefits although I resent loving this. Seats on planes are getting ever smaller so we can squeeze like an extra half-row in somewhere. This is just giving us back some of the space that they took away. Still, I'll take those two extra inches for free rather than paying $49 or $79 or whatever it costs these days. Checked bag? Can't remember the last time I checked, but I do need the Group 2 to get early access to that overhead bin.

So that leaves the space-available upgrade. As a reminder, this is the holy grail of airline status. You get to show up with an economy ticket and be magically upgraded to business or first class. Since I've had Silver status, I've taken flights to Boston (three times there and twice home), Tokyo, Calgary and South Africa and I have not even come close to getting this benefit. Am I taking the wrong flights? Maybe. Expecting too much? Probably. For perspective here, I checked the upgrade board at the gate on a June flight from Dulles Airport to Boston's Logan Airport and there were 22 people (which may be more than one upgrade each) on the board and I wasn't on it. For a flight that had maybe 24 or 28 first class seats. Upgrade? Forget about it. No holy grail for me. 

Hyatt Globalist

What It Is: Unlike Amtrak Select and United Silver, Globalist is Hyatt's top tier of status. I really worked hard (staying at hotels primarily for work) to get this and I only just made it in December 2024. I break down Hyatt's Globalist benefits this way: (1) a 30% bonus on points earned on stays at Hyatt properties; (2) eligibility for upgrades, including to suites; (3) access to Hyatt Lounges, although those are only at Grand Hyatt and Hyatt Regency properties; and (4) milestone rewards along the way.

What It's Done For Me: 

Like Amtrak's extra points and United's extra points, more points are always welcome. If there's a complaint here, Hyatt's top tier bonus is less than United's first tier bonus for actual status. Hilton (if you didn't pick it up earlier) gives their top status 100% bonus. 100% > 30%.

Upgrades are nice, but I have to say that in the entirety of run this year with Globalist status, I don't think I've gotten a single upgrade. This is not a comparison to other hotel rewards programs but I find Hilton and IHG are much more forthcoming with upgrades based on status.

So that leaves lounge access and milestone rewards. Here's where Hyatt pays off, especially with the milestone rewards.

Lounges in hotels can be anything from questionably beneficial to real added value in a hotel stay. We don't stay at Grands and Regencys (the only Hyatt properties with lounges, in case that was missed earlier in the post) much but we did three times this year. The lounge at the Regency in Calgary was forgettable, although that may have been because they diluted the experience somewhat because the Stampede was in town and they allowed the actual lounge space to be used as something else for the event.

The Grand Hyatt in Tokyo and the Regency in Cape Town were very, very value added. The Grand in Tokyo had just a spectacular buffet breakfast and lounge access most afternoons. I am sure lounge access here saved us a ton of money on food. Either that or we just grossly overate some meals. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, because I know for sure we overate some breakfasts. OK, all breakfasts. Free breakfasts is a perk of Globalist status but the breakfast in Tokyo was next level. 

Our regency experience in Cape Town was almost as deluxe from a breakfast standpoint but the two hour happy hour every night by the pool was much, much appreciated. It allowed us to kick back in quiet after each day of touring around the Cape and bridge our day to retiring to the room for the night. Plus we got to interact with the hotel staff at happy hour and get some insight into life in South Africa. 

Amtrak Acela First Class meal. The best meal I've had on a train or plane this year.

What I really love about Hyatt's program is their milestone rewards. 

When you earn status in Hilton's rewards program, your first milestone reward happens at 40 nights, when Hilton bonus-es you with 10,000 points (which is about 1/6 of a night in a reasonable brand in a good city). By that time with Hyatt, you could have earned a free night coupon, 9,000 bonus points (about 45% of a night using the parameters above) and a Guest of Honor Award to allow you or a guest to stay as a Globalist in a Hyatt property for up to seven nights or a suite upgrade for a similar stay. At 50 nights with Hyatt, you can add two additional suite upgrades and at 60 you can add two additional Guest of Honor Awards and another free night coupon. That's in addition to 5,000 more points.

This year, we used both our free night coupons, both suite upgrades and gifted a Guest of Honor Award to our friend Bryan so he could get Globalist benefits with us in Cape Town. The suite in the Cape Town Regency was enormous. I swear it was bigger (and much cleaner) that my first condo.

So what does 2026 hold? Well I still have Amtrak Select and United Silver status. I will continue to appreciate the extra points and the lounge in the Moynihan Hall in the train station New York. Unfortunately, I couldn't manage to get enough stays to make it to Globalist with Hyatt. I'm stuck at Explorist and will have to live with the downgraded benefits. 

But I do still have Hilton Diamond status. Hilton extended it as a courtesy for me this year after three years in the program which I very much appreciated. Next year, I had to have it again. I found a way. 

Sometimes when you stay in hotels with status, you get custom-made birthday cakes delivered to your room. Thanks, Hilton Dubrovnik.