We will soon be a group of four but for now it is only us: Uta (Civil Engineering) and Mara (Communication Design and Media).
Our adventure started on Friday, 20th. Climate Day. And we were flying almost halfway around the world. To start a recycling-related project. Irony off.
All together the flights took roughly 20 hours departing from Berlin at 7 pm and arriving after transit stops in London and Johannesburg in Port Elizabeth (PE) at 3:30 pm. Exhausted but looking forward we stepped out of the airplane, walked across the runway and left the arriving hall. We looked around, read the signs of the people waiting to pick someone up. But there was neither Uta nor Mara written on any of them.
No sign with our names. No familiar face.
Five minutes of panic, a heart beat rate touching the 200 and a decent amount of adrenaline later we were happily sitting in the car of our South African partners making our way towards the place we will call home for the next days.
Roughly 1.1 million people are living in PE and the surrounding areas. And it seems that every second one is throwing their rubbish not in the bin but on the street. At least that was our first impression when going through the city. Unfortunately it was not only a first impression: another walk the next day made clear that this is really an enourmous problem. There is (not only but mostly) plastic everywhere.
The view from every lookout point we found so far is dominated by PE's massive port. Since the first Europeans started cruising around Africas southern end (beginning in 1488) they always stopped in PE. So PE was already an important harbour city when in 1820 Sir Rufane Shaw Donkin named it after his wife and created the open space which is still existent until today.
Apart from the Donkin Reserve we also found some other nice spots and the beaches (we already admired them from the airplane) are simply amazing, despite the rain which wetted us from time to time... (Weather was really not South African style on sunday. It was more like a german March than a South African September...)
With this I will end the first episode of "News from South Africa". See you next Sunday.