South Africa

I recently came back from an amazing trip Volunteering in South Africa and then backpacking up the East Coast through Swaziland and Mozambique. I met so many amazing people and had such an awesome time so I thought I would post up my photos with the stories behind them.


This gorgeous little girl is named Aviwe. She's a beautiful girl I taught whilst I was volunteering. She got teased a lot by the other girls because her mother couldn't afford to have her hair braided. She also had extremely bad eyesight and would walk back and forth from her desk to the front of the black board to see the writing. She never had pencils and had to borrow them off the children around her. One day I came to school and gave her a set of color pencils and pens and the look on her face was to breathtaking. She seemed so shocked which I found was extremely hunbling. Seeing the immense effort she put into her work there onwards was heartwarming and was the highlight of my whole trip.





I took this photo outside of class one day whilst the children were praying before the lesson.






These three are my favorite photos I took of the whole trip. At this point I had been volunteering for a month in the school and had started conducting a range of interviews with the people of and supporting the township I was working in Imizamu Yethu. On this day I tagged along with Africa whilst he took a German couple on a township tour. As we walked up Mandela road there was music playing competing against the singing from the church. I love how much personality the children of Imizamu Yethu and the Sentinal school have and these photos are no exception.




I came across these children when the American volunteer, English volunteer and I were walking though the back streets of the township. These children caught my eye as they hobbled along sharing a pair of flippers!


I adore this photo. After finishing my volunteering I decided in a day that I wanted to ditch my plans to stay in Cape Town for the next month and rather go backpacking. The next day I had bought a bus ticket and was on my way up the East Coast. When I first planned it I thought I would just go through the Garden Route but from everything I heard from the other backpackers I ended up deciding on Mozambique as the Mecca of my trip. At this point I was half way through my journey and met up with Simon, an Australian guy in Durban who I had met once or twice and had to decided to come along as sporadically as I had. I arrived in Durban by midnight and the next day we hired a car and started making our way up to Mozambique. After one very random nights stop over in St Lucia, Simon taught me how to drive the manual hire car and within 20 minutes I was driving us to Swaziland. This is when we had just crossed the boarder from Durban to Swaziland after the rain had stopped. Simon took it while I was driving, happy to see clouds again because apparently the sky in Cape Town is always "boring clear blue".





If ever there was a more appropriate time for the Moby soundtrack from The Beach film to be playing in the background it was this moment. Whilst staying in Coffee Bay half way through the Trance Sky I went on a hike with Nathan and a few other people. The hike went for about ten kilometers up and over some of the most contrasting and breathtaking scenery. This point was coming to the end of the hike called "Hole in the Wall". There was no one around but the small group of us. We swam all the way out to the rock, climbed up the inside of the rock, and when the right wave came we jumped off into it! It was such fun and the water was so warm, it couldn't have been anymore perfect.


This is a Sangorma or Witch Doctor of the Imizamu Yethu township who I interviewed a day before I left to go back home. She tole me that she learnt her craft through her dreams and she was able to boost the immune system of people with AIDS yet not cure it. She was a very interesting woman and her room was filled with jars of twigs and seeds. The sticks she is holding are extremely important to her because you cant be a Sangorma without them. They were an entire cows tail and cost 500 Rand (around AUD$75) which was a huge amount of money to her.

This was in Swaziland when Simon and I were driving back from a HUGE hike. We decided we wanted to hike down to a waterfall and jump off it. We got our selves a map and took our tough little hire car out. We followed the tiny trail and came to a fork in the mountain to what felt like nearly a total drop. We could see another water fall about a kilometer or two away across a mountain but there was no track. After studying the map we decided to make our own track across the mountain which turned out to be a lot harder than it looked. As we made our way across the steep rocky mountain and high grass the snake factor began to creep into the back of our minds. We came half way up the mountain which was now a lot steeper than we had expected and were half way between the waterfall and the top of the mountain which would lead back to the track which would we could find our way back with. After much deliberation we decided it would be too hard to make it back up to the top of the mountain if we went down to the waterfall and we weren't sure how much steeper and rocky the mountain would get if we continued down. We eventually made it back to the top and promptly decided to go to the one hotel in Swaziland to get a cocktail. I took this photo as were driving back.

OTHER FAVORITE PHOTOS