i like south africa and so can you!

Sponsorship for this post has not yet been provided for by the South African tourism board. It comes free of charge, pro bono, gratis... besides it's no great secret that I'm a fan of my homeland.

This list should convince you to like it too, if you didn't already, and tell you what you can do about it!

So here goes.

1. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela

As he celebrates his 90th birthday next month, we mark our fifteenth year since the end of the disgusting apartheid era, nobody liked it, especially Nelson. He spent 28 years cooped up on an island prison brooding over it and yet he maintained a nonviolent stance toward effecting change in his country. (Incidentally, Gandhi developed his nonviolent protest while living in south africa)

Side Note: I was friends with his God Son at school and he visited a hospital my dad was working at to rename it. Morgan Freeman is playing him in a movie coming out later this year.

Your Turn: Buy a poster, read "Long Walk to Freedom," or celebrate his birthday with some friends on the 18th of July.

2. The uKhlathlamba Drakensberg Mountains

The drakensberg is one of the most beautiful places on earth with lush valleys and gorges leading up to majestic basalt escarpments that surround the tiny country of Lesotho. It's name translates from Zulu and Afrikaans to mean "Barrier of Spears" and "Dragon mountain," so it's not surprising that it inspired the setting of Lord of the Rings. It is considered the biggest art gallery in the world comprised of 35,000 individual bushman paintings dating at least 40,000 years ago. The Tugela Falls, located in the top right corner of the above picture, is the second highest in the world.

Side Note: After becoming the first man to climb mount everest, Sir Edmund Hilary regularly frequented the area on holiday with the Mrs, because, he is reported to have said, "it offers great hiking and a chance to regain feeling in your toes after a nasty case of Himalayan frostbite." Also home to baboons (more later).

Your Turn: Come for the vistas, stay for the... well also the vistas.

Get creative! Start a "hike of the month club." It's just like a book club, only you get together and discuss the hike that none of you really had enough time to do.

3. Baboons

This may seem a strange selection, considering the wealth of great African animals (lions, tigers, elephants, zebras, etc), but baboons provide a remarkably apt social analog. One can refer to them as a metaphor for almost any situation. Here's a purely hypothetical example, with completely fictional characters to illustrate this point:

Ian meets Calculus Girl. Ian likes Calculus girl. Ian thinks Calculus girl's attractive, but she shows alarming potential to be annoying, using phrases like "fudge monkey's" and "uh oh spaghetti o's." The warning bells go off in Ian's head, but he decides to find out the true nature of Calculus girls personality. Alas, poor Ian forgot to heed the wise allegory of the baboon and fell into the great trap of the cute but incredibly annoying girl.

So if you feed a wild baboon, it loses its fear of people and starts rifling through rubbish bins and becomes a pest. And then you have to shoot it!

Moral of the story: young Ian shouldn't have fed the baboon.

Side note: This sort of aesop's fable type logic can be adapted to fit anything!

Your Turn: Try to incorporate more stories of baboons into daily conversation.

4. Shopping in Traffic

Traffic jams, congestion, no problem! Here in south africa you can now satisfy all your shopping needs from the convenience of your own car. Need a sack of potatoes, or fruit or flags for supper, well you needn't look far as there is probably a friendly vendor haggling outside your window. The rest of the world could learn a thing or two from this. Why go to the drive through, when the drive through can come to you! A typical sales pitch might sound something like this: "Cheap, Cheap! Cheaper than Cheap!"

Side note: At the 2003 national street vendors workshop some topics of discussion were: "Apples and Oranges: the congressional distribution of," and "Boxers or Briefs: an ethical dilemma."

Your Turn: A double major in business and african relations is tailor made for street hawking, though a little over qualified.

So you like?