Anyway, upon landing, we managed to sort out our rental car and navigate ourselves to the m2m KZN regional office, located in a suburb outside of Durban. We spent the next 3 days working out of the office there with Lungile, the regional Monitoring and Evaluation Coordinator. I’ll spare you the details – nothing too out of the ordinary, as we were just working around the clock day and night on more data abstraction for this upcoming report. Pinetown wasn’t that exciting of a suburb, though it was pretty (lots of rolling green hills covered with lush vegetation).
Saturday afternoon we decided to put down our work and go experience Durban. We had asked Lungile where we should go, and she said “oh you have to go to the Sun Coast Casino” at which point we sort of smiled and said “yeah sure” and thought to ourselves we would never to choose to hang out at a casino when given one day to experience a new city. Instead, we were left to our own devices, armed with only a few old brochures and maps left in our B&B.
Well, things didn’t pan out quite as well as we had hoped...Durban on the whole just didn’t turn out to be that exciting. Wenli and I kept feeling like we were missing something, even though we tried to hit up all the main points on the maps we had taken from our guesthouse. The places we did spend time at felt like they were about 10-15 years past their prime (and in retrospect, our map had a similarly weathered look).
Anyway, one of our first stops was a beachfront area where we grabbed a late lunch of bunny chow (apparently the one must-do in Durban is to eat bunny chow – the city is famous for its Indian food).
As we wandered around the beach area (along with a ton of surfers), we noticed that from a distance what had mistaken for statues were actually giant sand sculptures. It was really funny when Wenli asked “does that statue look weird to you?” and I looked over to see something resembling a man getting eaten. Yes, admittedly the first group of sand sculptures we stumbled upon were quite bizarre: one with a man being eaten by a leopard and another one serving as an ode to the death of the Rihanna/Chris Brown relationship...such very odd choices for a tourist attraction (if you look at the statues up close, you’re supposed to drop a couple of rand in the sand for the artists), but I guess sometimes it pays to be original?
We also found more normal statues of animals
Along with some very impressive renditions of the new World Cup stadiums
The Soccer City stadium in Joburg
The new Durban stadium
After the beach, we did a little impromptu road-side stall shopping and then headed toward the waterfront area, which supposedly had lots of shops. After driving back and forth up and down the waterfront and not finding anything, we finally realized that the small group of neon lights we almost overlooked was what we were aiming for – once again, we had kind of overestimated the grandeur of the experience. After walking through a small, run-down shopping center where you could apparently buy any piece of tacky crap you ever wanted, we emerged onto the waterfront dock area where there were a bunch of restaurants lined up. We got pretty excited about the prospect of having dinner on the water overlooking the city lights (which were quite nice)...until we realized we would be eating at our choice of fast food chain restaurants ranging from the equivalent of McDonalds to Applebee’s. Needless to say, not our ideal eating situation when in the city of fantastic Indian food.
At a complete loss of what to do, and having driven around downturn Durban for long enough to get the impression that nothing was happening anywhere else, we decided to head back out to the hotel/beach area and try our luck with the casino Lungile had mentioned, since it was the one thing we were told to do. As we approached, we quickly realized it was exactly the happening place it was promised to be – the parking lot was packed, cars were backed up to get inside, and there must have been thousands of people there. So yeah...a casino inside of a mall is where we spent our evening in Durban. This included each of us losing R20 at the slot machines, then playing arcade games where we were definitely the only ones over 12, and eating our supposed-to-be-fantastic Indian food dinner at a mall restaurant. And then we gave up and went home. Needless to say, I still really feel like we totally missed Durban, but then again I have no idea what we were supposed to see.
Wenli demonstrating adequate excitement over the prospect of a night at the casino
From the parking lot of the casino the night before, we were able to see the new Durban stadium built for the World Cup (further evidence that we were in fact in the right place? where else would they put the stadium except where they want tourists to be?), so on Sunday (the day we were flying out), we packed up and decided to drive by and check it out. This time we were map-less (having returned the one we were using to the B&B), but we didn’t have too much trouble getting there. We also made a brief stop at the beach along the way to take in the view.
You can see the stadium at a distance to the right
The stadium itself was very impressive, I must say. It has a huge arch that goes over the top of it in the shape of a “Y,” apparently made to represent the “Y” on the South African flag when seen from above.
Stopping at the stadium was definitely our best tourist decision of the weekend. Unfortunately, however, it was also a quite popular place to be on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, so we ended up having to wait in line for over an hour to finally be able to take the cable car to the top. It was pretty cool to see the cityscape from up there, though it’s too bad you couldn’t actually see the pitch below you. Still, the experience made me even more excited for the World Cup festivities to begin!
See the tiny cable car to the right? Gives you an impression of how big the stadium is!
Going up...
Looking down at the seats below
Beautiful views from the top
Including of the lovely casino, haha
And going down...
I'm so excited for the big event! Less than a month!!
The long stadium wait, in combination with the fact that we didn’t exactly know how to get to the airport/how far it was (remember this time we were map-less, and also, the new Durban airport happened to open on May 1st thus we were flying out of an airport in a completely different location than the one we landed at), made the drive before catching our flight a bit nerve-racking, but we made it. At least the scenery on the way to the airport was nice - beautiful rolling greeen hills
So, in conclusion, I don’t really know what to say about Durban. Of course it was nice to see it, but I still think we were a bit lame ending up at a casino. I would have liked more time to explore the countryside and culture outside the city, I think. One thing I did really like about Durban was how much more diverse it was than Cape Town, in the sense that there really weren’t white people everywhere and there seemed to be a much bigger black middle class. In Cape Town, the activities we can afford and generally like doing are pretty much limited to those with money, which translates into white people. In Durban, most places we were I felt like I was one of very few white people, if not the only one. It was kind of an eye-opener to me about how weird and segregated Cape Town truly is. Further reason why it’s good to get out of the city sometimes. Thank you m2m for letting me see so many new places!
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