My Days of Traveling - (3) Kevin Slean I dredged for diamonds along the Skeleton Coast and worked the gold mines(WRCM) near Krugerdorp South Africa and since I didn't agree with apartheid I had no choice but to move on. Heading north to Rhodesia/Zimbabwe was no different then South Africa so I decided enough is enough and what I saw I did'nt like and I knew it could'nt last so I continued to head north overland all the way to Cairo. Apartheid meant some restrictions on the whites but not as severe as how the Africans were treated. Basically it was not a very comfortable political situation to live in for me. Soon after my vistit to Southern Africa Zimbabwe-Rhodesia,South Africa,Lesotho,Namibia-Southwest Africa,Swaziland,Botswana,Mozambique and Malawi I stoped by the the FRELIMO office in Dar es Salaam Tanzania hoping to visit the FRELIMO camp in northern Mozambique. They were more interested in what I thought since I traveled all over and what a coincidence because soon after that visit mine shafts were blown up in South Africa which I think was the signal to the beginning of the end of the apartheid regime. Came across the notorious Jonas Savimbi and his cronies in a hotel in the town of Arusha near Kilimanjaro Tanzania. It didn't take much to upset him because he shouted at me across the hotel lounge that he would pick me up and throw me through a large glass window. I had no quarrel with him, it was all because I was waiting for my food & drink that I ordered and 15 min/20min passed by and I asked the waiter can I have my beer at least because I was dying of thirst after being walking in 100 degree heath and besides there was no one else in the place and at that Savimbi went into a ragging fit standing across from me in the lounge. It seemed to be part of the course to be picked on and ending up in a confrontation with one guy or the other on the road but that was not always the case. I have met alot more decent people then those who seem to have a chip on their shoulder over one thing or the other. There was one other nasty instance when I was in a restaurant in Sofia Bulgaria when this African guy sat himself down opposite me at the same table and started babbling about how great Moscow was and the soviet system was. His anti-west lingo and telling me also that I looked typical British. After awhile this guy eventually got to me so I tossed this large table that we were sitting at and everything on it on top of him and he ended up sprawled out on the floor with everything on top of him and I was asked to leave the restaurant immediately which meant they didn't want any attention brought to them by the authorities.They rushed me out of that restaurant as fast as they could with out paying. My dancing ability was put to the test during the interval of a dance festival in a football stadium in Sucre Bolivia high in Andes, performer wearing very elaborate sequin costume's and also in the typical dress of the Andes. A gringo performing in one of there customary dances was a novelty to the crowd. Rio,NewYork,CapeTown,Dublin,Nuremberg,Bangkok,Copenhagen,Sydney,San Francisco,London are great towns and so is Buenos Aires but Lima has the weather and the right balance of a life style that I prefer. Lima has it's areas Miraflores, San Isidro, Barranco. My favorite restaurant's/cafe's in Lima, the Haiti Cafe in Miraflores, Mangos at Larcomar over looking the Pacific Ocean(daily buffet), La Carreta brings you back to the colonial days, Punto Blanco is down on the beach that has a incredible sunday buffet. Kibbutz Giat Heim Israel wasn't to bad if you could adjust, it had a totally different alternative life style. Took a ride across Australia from Rum Jungle/Batchelor up in the Northern Territory to Brisbane on a truck load of barrels full of uranium because of the rain we got stuck in the mud in the middle of no where for three days south of Mt Isa,the dirt road turned to glue and I ended up having to sleep on the barrels of uranium on the back of the truck. Khotso Sethuntsa from Lusikisiki Transkei South Africa was one of the many great character I came across on my travels who had 22 wives and probably more plus as many concubines as wives and fathered 200 children and probably more. Known through out Southern Africa only as "Khotso" but to many the greatest herbalist of them all that made him into millionaire. I paid him a visit one day and I was told I needed to be wearing a jacket. The only piece of clothing I could come up with was a pancho I bought in Chile. A wife shouted out a window and asked what was that I was wearing, after some haggling between me the guy at the gate and the wife in the window I got through the the large double gate's wearing my pancho. A few month's later there was a picture of Khotso in a South African newspaper wearing a poncho but there one thing Khotso failed to realize that there is a pancho made for women and a pancho made for men.

• published: 23 Dec 2012
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