Johannesburg: Climbing and Driving Adventures

I flew into Joberg and was met at the Airport by Bertrand, a friend I met in Waterval Boven. I stayed at Bertrand's flat for my four day stay in Joberg.

Saturday, July 5th we went climbing with Michelle and I coached them a little. I didn't do anything really hard to give me ankle some more time to heal. That night we went to Michelle's Uncle and Aunt's place for dinner. We ate some "Fat Cakes" which were like pan cakes that you stuff with cheese and syrup or veggies stuff or minced meat (which I didn't have). Their family
was wonderful and we were all laughing and trading stories.

Picture: Bertrand leading.

Picture: Michelle leading the same route.

Sunday Michelle had to work; however, Tara was there and we went climbing at the Choss Pile a local Joberg crag just outside the city. We had TONS of FUN and Bertrand pushed himself a bit and learned a few new tricks to help his climbing. I was so happy for him because I can see how fast he's getting better. Tara pulled down a few 5.9 and 5.10a's to make a day of it.

That night we went out to dinner with Tara's family who are so wonderful and well travelled. They are all so warm, have the best stories, and are just super fun to be with.

The following day was Monday and Bertrand was super generous to lend me is Buckie (Truck) to drive to the Apartheid Museum. Frightening as this is I drove it downtown since that is where the museum is.

Unfortunately, the museum wasn't open on Monday so instead I went to Gold Reaf City where you can get a tour of a real gold mine. We descended 226m underground into the mine where they showed us how the storied the explosives, how they cart out the ore and how they keep the electricity going and the air breathable (now dust). Bertrand is a mechanical engineer and works on products for the mines and he said they haven't changed the mining technology too much since then. They look and feel pretty much the same today with the exception of the roof being a little higher.

Picture: Me next to the explosives lockout in the mine at Gold Reef City.

It was funny because before I took the tour I met up with this woman name Laurie from Seattle. She was very friendly and had been intending on going to the Apartheid Museum as well but found it closed. She had also joined our tour of the mine. We chatted a lot and she told me of her daughters who where my age and just a little younger.

Once the mine tour was done we headed off to the amusement park to enjoy the rides. For our first ride I picked the biggest roller coasters. It was hilarious, she held my hand as we went through the first few loops. Once we were done we took a picture of the coaster then headed onto something a little smaller as we both were a little dizzy from the last one. We did the bumper boat and the log ride before we both called it a day because her ride was there to take her back to the hotel and the sun was starting to get low.

Picture: Laurie from Seattle on the Log ride.

That night Michelle cooked a wonderful fish burger dinner and Bertrand and I watched King Lines on his laptop.

Tuesday was my flight date so I woke up and packed my bags. I headed to the Apartheid Museum and arrived in the early afternoon and spent the whole day there till 5 PM. That place is very moving, the courage that many had to resist oppression. So many lives lost and how ruthless it was living under that regime. I felt humbled. I really enjoyed the exhibite on Steven Biko which detailed his life and his moment for Black Consciousness and non-violence. This was a story I had long wanted to hear and see since hearing the Peter Gabriel song about him in my youth.

Picture: Apartheid Museum, "To Be Free is not merely to caste off ones chains, but to live in such a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others." Nelson Mandela.

That night Bertrand and Michelle drove me to the airport we where we had one last dinner together and I jumped on my plane to London. I've now been here the past few days staying at Audrey's house with Adrian.

We got out for a day of bouldering on Thursday night and I'm still sore two days later. My ankle seem to be looking much better now that the swelling from the plane has gone down. Tonight the three of us are driving up to Sheffield for a climbing competition that Adrian and Audrey are competing in.

Now only a week away to the Vispassina in Hereford. I'm starting to get excited.

I hope you are all well at home and the sun is shining.

Pilanesberg Game Reserve

We were staying in Kwa Maritane, a four star time share and resort. We pulled in here at 9:45AM for a coffee and to find out what time we could check in. I was impressed by how nice the resort was. The complex was actually inside the games reserved and there was a "hide" right next to a watering hole as part of the resort. The was quite interesting since you had to walk down a 200m tunnel to get to it and it was sunk into the ground so you would look at the animals eye to eye while they were drinking. Unforetunately, there we didn't see any animals there but there was an elephant that arrived while we were out driving around looking for game in the afternoon.

The weekend of the 18th, Les and Ros took me to Pilanesberg game reserve for the weekend of driving through the games reserve. We woke up at 7:00 AM Saturday morning so we could get out of the house by 7:30AM. The drive North East to Pilanesberg took around 2 hours and we arrived before the heat of the day started to be felt.

After finding out that our room probably wouldn't be ready for a few hours we decided to head out into the games reserve. Once inside, we only needed to drive for 200m before we came face to face with a several Zebra munching away right next to the road. The details of each and every game siting doesn't make for good reading here online so I won't go into the details.



After a few hours and lots of game later we stopped into the Pilanesberg Centre where you can get out of your car and have lunch and a cold beer. The centre looks out onto a open grass land and I was able to see two female lioness' lazing about in the shade of a tree about 1 km into the open grass plain.

After a nice lunch we returned to Kwa Maritane to check in and for Les and I to head out on a nature safari that Ros had kindly organized for us.

The tour went long and I got a much more upclose view of several animals that I hadn't seen in the drive earlier in the day, the most notable of which were the Giraffe, Rhino, and Alligators. The tour when to the early evening past sun down and we did manage to see the eyes and hear a pair of mating Lions before returing to Kwa Maritane in time to catch the Sharks vs Lions rugby match.

Les had gotten so nice pork chops and some boerewors (farmers sausage) which he cooked up on the BBQ which in RSA is known as a Braai. The food was delicious and Les' team, the Sharks, won their match insuring that they made it into the super 14 semi-finals.

The next day we relaxed in the morning after checking out of Kwa Maritane and then drove back into the games park. This time not 2km into the park we ran into a traffic jam as there was a herd of Elephants blocking the road next to the Lengau dam.

Les and Ros have had experience with the elephants in the past and elected to turn around and drive around them rather than wait till they elephants moved on. This turned out to be a good idea since we managed to drive around for an hour to our picnic destination, eat a late lunch and then driving back we encountered the herd on the road again. Thankfully this time they had moved off the road but were still skulking about on either side.

We return to Johannesburg that night to have dinner with Matthew, Les and Ros' son, and his girlfriend. I set up skype so that we could have a chat with Les Senior, Mom (Margaret), Dad, and Holly that night. It was nice to have a good chat with the family at home and for the RSA relatives to connect with the BC clan.

The next morning I packed up and caught the bus to Waterval Boven.

Welcome to Africa, a few days in Johannesburg.

I have been in Joburg since Tuesday. So far this place has been rather eventful. Within 10 minutes of clearing customs I stumbled around half awake waiting for my luggage to appear and managed to loss my passport. I couldn't find it and nobody had turned it into the lost and found. I didn't want to but had to assume the worst and filed a police report on the missing passport. After wandering the airport for a hour and a half filing reports and checking the lost property, Ros, the wife of my second cousin, and I finally made our way back to their place in Randburg. I checked my email to find that my passport had been turned into the BA desk and being held there for safe keeping. So after lunch we drove back to the airport to retrieve my passport. Les Woops.

Since my cousins' computer was working really slow I decided to help them upgrade the RAM as it was woefully inadiquate. We went out the next day and got some RAM for 1/4 the price that their computer guy had quoted and I installed it. However, it didn't work quite right, the 1024 MB stick was only showing up at 512 MB. I found this strange and check into the current revision of the BIOS (this is the Basic Input Output System; the lowest level of a computer which controls everything). I have upgrade many of these in the past and found that there was an online upgrade program. As per the normal procedure (since this is one thing that can physically break you computer) I made a rescue disk. In the 20 or so BIOS upgrades I have done over the years I have never had to use one of these. So off I went with the MSI (Microstar) Live Update and sure enough, the firmware upgrade finished completely and then failed after 2% of the verification process. No matter what I did, I could not get it to reprogram properly. So I rebooted in hopes of using the recovery disk to reflash the BIOS. Lets just say that it didn't work and the screen wasn't even online all I got was several beeps indicated a video output failured. A touch of panic set in as I had just destroyed my cousin's work computer and it was old enough to be unable to replace the motherboard with a new one.

With the laptop that was still functional I did some research into it. Apprently I was only one of many who had destroyed their BIOS for their MSI MS-7222 mother boards and the forums showed discussion on recovery methods from Feb 2007. You think MSI would have atleast gone to the trouble of preventing more people from doing this but apparently that falls outside their realm of concern for their customers. The forum suggested a few idea on how to repair it using a boot floppy (who has these anymore) and also contacting MSI in the Neatherlands where they might ship a new BIOS flash part which could be place on the board. I decided to follow both avenues for repair. I sent an email to MSI field application engineers requesting assistance (to which I still haven't gotten a reply) and create a boot disk. To do this I would go to the computer store where we bought the RAM.
This morning Ros dropped me at the computer store to attempt the recovery process. I had to remove the floppy disk drive from the dead computer because the shop didn't have any functionat 3.5" floppy drive that worked and when through the process of trying to create the boot disk to reflash the BIOS. After 4 hours of struggling I gave up and called Ros to be picked up.

My next avenue for success would be to track down a replacement mainboard and possibly call MSI for assistance. By this time Ros was starting to get a bit stressed over the status of her computer and with reason. Restoring a BIOS is no trivial task and the prospects were looking increasingly bleak. I didn't think there was a location in the area which would have a programmer and without home ice advantage I didn't even know the names of potential place that might even have programmers.

I decide to use what I had learn of distribution and support from my time at Xantrex and look into who the distributor of MSI was for South Africa. Thankfully there was only one and they were located in Midrand which I had never heard of. I called them and they pass me through to technical support who assured me they had a programmer and could program it but without any guarantee that it would work. All I had to do was bring down the chip and/or PC to be programmed with an image of the BIOS that I wanted put on it. As it would turn out, Midrand was between Johannesburg and Pretoria only about a 30 minute drive.

Ok, so now the situation was under control, we had a solution that could work. The only problem was that the alarm company was outfitting Les and Ros' house with additional security since there had been a crime wave in their neighbourhood so she could go. Les had appointments and was unable to drive me. So they had their Afrikaans employee drive me over there. I got quite the treat spending time with him. He knew quite a lot of history of the area and had mentioned that Ghandi had in fact lived in South Africa and was hiding in some caves near Johannesburg before he went back to India because they believe he was an illegal alien. This is in part where Mandela learn his peaceful approach to change.

Finally, I arrived at the MSI distributor's office and had the BIOS flashed and a sticked of 1GB RAM that worked for the mainboard. The computer all repaired I breathed a sigh of relief an returned to Les and Ros' triumphant.

So far, I have met a few South African and they have been a pleasure to work with. Tomorrow should be interesting and I know that my time in Waterval will be fun. Tomorrow night I go to Matthew, Les and Ros' son's restaurant for dinner. Ironically he is a the owner and chief of a french restaurant. So while I didn't eat much french cuisine in France I will get my chance in South Africa.