The Biggest Goddamn Hole In The World

Apologies for the language in this post title. I blame Clark Griswold.

There are times in my life when I realize how lucky I am. March 2026 is one of those times. 

Last weekend we visited the Grand Canyon in Northern Arizona. Do I feel particularly lucky that I made it to that National Park in 2026? Not particularly. But I do feel lucky that it was my third trip there. I mean it's in the middle of nowhere and I've been there three times. A lot of people in this world are never able to move much beyond the place where they were born or the country where they live. Some folks scrimp and save so they can take a trip of a lifetime or get away for a week in a year. This was a weekend trip to some place that I'd already been to twice that a lot of people would have on some bucket list and not be certain that they would ever get there. 

I feel lucky to have been able to do this. After I've already done it twice before.

The first time I laid eyes on the Grand Canyon was in the summer of 1984 when my dad took an all-expenses paid recruiting trip (HE was being recruited) courtesy of a startup aerospace firm in the Phoenix area. At least I think it was a startup. I mean I really don't remember if I ever even knew. And the all-expenses thing probably didn't cover our side trip to see the Grand Canyon. Whatever. Close enough. That's why we were there in '84.

What do I remember about that Grand Canyon trip just after I turned 16? Pretty much nothing. I couldn't tell you what we did or what we saw, although I feel pretty confident that we looked down into it and that three of the four of our family members took a ride in a small airplane into the Canyon and that I don't recall actually walking into the Canyon at all. And on the airplane thing, it was probably below the rim. Not 100% sure. That memory (or lack thereof) is actually one of the inspirations behind me writing this blog. I reminisced about what I could not recall from my first visit to the Grand Canyon in the very first post on this blog back on my 45th birthday.

Trip number two? 26 years later. July 2010. Solo. On that trip I was determined to do one thing I hadn't done in 1984 and that was to actually walk into the Canyon. Not like all the way or anything but at least so I could get below the rim a good distance. I joined a ranger walk first thing in the morning with a big bottle of water I probably picked up at a convenience store somewhere near where I was staying (this was before I routinely took a water bottle on vacation) and spent maybe an hour and a half on a hike into and out of the Canyon. Cool stuff.

Now I have been there a third time.

The Abyss. Hermit's Rest Shuttle Bus stop number seven.

On a most basic level, the Grand Canyon is essentially a very large gash in the Earth in an otherwise very, very flat high desert plateau sitting about 7,000 feet above sea level. How did it get that way? Quite simply...the Colorado River made it that way. Over a very, very long period of time. Like millions of years. Sound farfetched? It did to us too a little bit but the land around the Grand Canyon is relatively soft and the Colorado River carries abrasive material like sand and rock particles that can cut through the sedimentary rock in the area of the Grand Canyon.

So how grand is the Grand Canyon? How about 270 miles long, 18 miles wide at its widest point and about a mile deep. Does that make it the biggest goddamn hole in the world? Maybe, although that question is really tough to answer. The Grand Canyon is not the longest canyon in the world (it's second) and it's not the widest canyon in the world (it's also second) and it's not the deepest canyon in the world (it's sixth). The Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon in Tibet is both longer and way deeper than the Grand Canyon but it's also way narrower. On a volume basis, maybe Clark Griswold was right. Either way, it's pretty darned big. 

Probably some good advice for Instagram influencers.

With all that going for it, the Grand Canyon must have been an early add to the National Parks portfolio, right? I mean we all know Yellowstone was number one but this place must have followed shortly thereafter, right? Like first 10 or so? 

Not so much. Try 14. February 1919. The same date as Maine's Acadia National Park and after South Dakota's Wind Cave and California's Lassen Volcanic. Why so long? Totally speculating here but this canyon thing is in the absolute middle of nowhere and despite its size, it was probably an undiscovered gem for quite some time.

Undiscovered by some. Those that were here before 1492 knew about it all well and good.

There is evidence of man's presence in and around the Grand Canyon 10 to 12 thousand years ago. There are 11 different Native American tribes which claim part of the Canyon as part of the ancestral homeland. But once Europeans started claiming parts and eventually all of what is now the American west, they didn't seem to be bothered about a massive canyon. Spanish explorers led by Hopi guides first visited the area in 1540s but apparently didn't see much point in the whole thing. Neither did anyone else for about the next 300 years. It pretty much sat ignored for three centuries.

Then in the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States started mapping the Colorado River. Miners followed after that, seeking copper deposits in the area but apparently it didn't take long before it became obvious that tourism would be more profitable than copper mining for early European settlers. President Benjamin Harrison protected the Canyon as a Forest Reserve in 1893. Theodore Roosevelt elevated it to National Monument status in 1903. Then in 1919, it got to full National Park status. 

The Grand Canyon is claimed as an ancestral homeland by 11 Native American tribes.

So that National Park property...it covers the entire Canyon, right? Ummm...no. Not remotely. On the South Rim of the Canyon, really the easternmost 30 miles are easily accessible (the North Rim was close when we visited last weekend). The Park goes beyond those limitations, but not by road. And with Flagstaff experiencing a +24 degrees above normal heatwave in our time there, we were in no mood to hike about beyond the paved limits of the Park for very long. Or at all.

And actually and honestly, the heat isn't why we chose to not hike beyond points we could drive or be driven. We just didn't want to hike in the backcountry. 

I would venture that the majority of the visitors to the Grand Canyon National Park don't make it the full 30 miles or so of the easternmost portion of the Park. I would imagine most visitors stay within the less than three miles from the Grand Canyon Village to the Grand Canyon Visitor Center and maybe a bit beyond to Yaki Point. There's plenty of overlook-ing to do into the big hole that is the Canyon and both major trails to walk into the Canyon are within that span (the Bright Angel Trail at the Village and the South Kaibob Trail at Yaki Point).

I base that venturing on two things: (1) I believe that's exactly what I did the first two times I visited the Park and (2) the amount of people we encountered this year when we moved beyond the less than three miles or so noted above.

Views from a viewpoint just east of Mather Point looking west (top) and east (bottom).

We decided we were not going to do what most people do. Yes, we walked to Mather Point from the Visitor Center and we did walk on one of the two trails that start within that span, but we wanted to go places that are more remote. Where there would stand a chance of being fewer people. We hopped on the Hermit's Rest Shuttle Bus in the morning and rode that route all the way to the west end, with three stops along the way. Then in the afternoon, we drove all the way out to Desert View at the eastern edge of the Park to see the historic 1932 Desert View Watchtower. And of course look into the vastness of the Canyon.

Our trip west and then back east again on the Hermit's Rest Shuttle took us about 2-1/2 hours. the Park's website says it's an 80 minute ride but that's not allowing for any stops. We stopped at four places and got a different perspective at each one. We (or I) stood not that close to the edge of a stone shelf overlooking the Canyon at Powell Point and we first laid eyes on the Colorado River later on the ride at Pima Point. In between those two we hit The Abyss where we looked what appeared to be about straight down a couple of thousand feet into the Canyon.

I think it is easy to dismiss the views in person and the pictures we look at after leaving the Grand Canyon as the same. Sure, the colors of the eroded and collapsed walls of the Canyon are the same sorts of reds, yellowish-beige and green with each mile of the Canyon you travel. It's also easy to look out over the rim of the Canyon and just be overwhelmed with the size and claim that you just see the same thing everywhere you look. Cliffs. Rocks. Towers. Gullies. Bare trees at the rim and tiny, hardy evergreen shrubs that can cling to life in a place without much water lower down.

But it's not the same. It's not just a hole in the ground that's identical from place to place and from mile to mile. It changes. I know this if for no other reason than we were awed in places that we visited along the South Rim and we were less impressed with some spots. The Canyon really does appear more vast in certain places than others and the appearance of the Colorado makes a difference in those views. If you need any other proof of this lack of same-ness, ride the Hermit's Rest Shuttle in the sideways-facing seats on the left side of the bus (facing the Canyon on the way out). In that seven mile drive, you will see a Canyon that changes as you ride. What a privilege to be able to do that.

Views near the Bright Angel Trail Head (top) and at Pima Point (bottom). Note: NOT the same.

If you want a little more distance to your vista, you can get that at the Desert View Tower. We didn't manage to go into the Tower while we were there and view the landscape from the top of the Tower (too long a wait on timed admission tickets...) but the Canyon edge that you walk along to get to the Tower is not strictly facing across the Canyon. You actually get to look down its length just a bit.

And it seems to go on forever, which from the edge of the Canyon and the distance our eyes can see I suppose might be true. The visibility in that part of Arizona is incredible. I'm sure it's due to the flat-ness of the land. Two days after our Grand Canyon visit we were at a viewpoint at Petrified Forest National Park and we could see the San Francisco Peaks north of Flagstaff on the horizon easily. They were 108 miles away from the spot we stood. You can definitely see for miles and miles.

If you need any convincing about the flatness of the land, check out the horizon on most all of these pictures. It's perfectly at eye level and it's pretty much perfectly flat.

Desert View.

So we had to take a little bit of a hike, right? 

I was so impressed with my walk into the Canyon on my last visit in 2010 (the South Kaibab Trail, I think) that I wanted to do it again. I think once you start walking in the Canyon, past walls of rock and through natural stone arches and along ledges with hundreds or thousands of feet of drop next to the path you are walking along, you get a different perspective on the place. You are no longer walking along a high desert plateau but are really following the Colorado River down into the depths of the Earth.

We didn't need to do a long hike here. We knew that we weren't going to make a dent in the full mile depth (that's depth, not walking distance) down to the bottom of the Canyon and we were very attentive when we came to the sign showing a shirtless white dude with a very sunburned back vomiting his guts out because he tried to walk to the Colorado and back in a single day. I've done my long hiking days. I've walked to Machu Picchu and Arches National Park's Delicate Arch and to the top of Mount Misen on Miyajima Island. I've also walked far enough in a day to find gorillas in the Ugandan mountains and fossils in the Canadian Rockies. I don't need to do every hike out there.

Walking up the Bright Angel Trail.

We picked Bright Angel Trail, a gently sloping and switchback-ing path wide enough to accommodate several humans or maybe a couple of humans and a mule train passing each other if they needed to. We saw no mules on the way down or up, by the way. But there was certainly evidence of prior mule activity. Mules don't wear diapers and their owners don't have to pick up the poop. Tread carefully.

We set our stopwatch on the phone for 15 minutes and walked down. 16 years ago, I was told that it would take about twice as long to get out as it took to walk in. I didn't time it that day but I did this year. It took us 25 to get out. Pretty close to double. 

I think seeing the inside of the Canyon is important. It is valuable to feel the temperature rise, even with a little walk down, and wanting to long for shade pockets to rest, particularly on the way up. Seeing and feeling and hearing the difference below the rim resonates. It's not the same as it is at the rim. Looking up at where you used to be (and let's be honest, we made it maybe 150 or 200 feet down into the Canyon so maybe 3-4% of the way down) and realizing how you got there was an essential experience for me, possibly because the land is so very flat at the Canyon rim. It's just an experience you can't get without making that walk.

We could have easily walked further. Not to the bottom of the Canyon all the way to the River but I will say the images from the bottom in the movie shown in the Visitor Center make getting there look awfully appealing. It's a completely different environment down there at the water's edge. 

There was a time I considered doing that. Walking all the way to the bottom and staying overnight in one of the huts they have down there a mile down into the Earth. That time is probably gone. I've accumulated a list of places I want to get to that is far, far longer than I will ever get to. I'm thinking my third trip to the Grand Canyon is likely my last. And If it is, it was a pretty good one. I feel confident I did three things in Bright Angel, Hermit's Rest and Desert View that I've never done before. What more could I ask for?

At Powell Point. It IS pretty grand.

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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?