Going back in time a bit

Salamu.

I can finally tell you the news which I have been somewhat elusive about over the past few weeks. I have handed in my resignation at my current company and am making a move down to the warmer climates of the land of the Zulus where I will be a Cricket Writer for one of the country’s oldest daily newspapers.

Hopefully then I will be afforded full access to my blog page and I wont have to act like a scaly bastard using proxy hiders and such!

However, this means that I wont have to wait until Easter to get out hand at Kings Park because the first purchase I am going to make when I settle down in Durban are season tickets to the Shark Tank so I will be able to get “out of hand” every weekend! This also means that I will have to make a last run at Hooters in Johannesburg!

My last appearance there included chatting up a rather young, busty waitress who was showing ample cleavage (not unusual), breaking the record and drinking 8 litres of beer in a single sitting (very proud of this), and leaning out of the window of Stalkers car pumping Duck Sauce’s new number: The Big Bad Wolf and howling at the Askria!

I KNOW! I KNOW! I am a hooligan when I am drunk! But it isn’t me, it’s my alter ego: Ahmed the Lebanese Terrorist!

Fortunately Ahmed doesn’t have permanent residency both in South Africa and in my sometimes rather disturbed mind so I can go to Hooters and actually walk out there sober as a judge. The problem is that when that happens Adam’s (Stalker) alter ego: Sao Feng comes out.

I have spoken about one of my more sober occasions at Hooters here before. It was the time that myself and Stalker were made to feel old by the waitresses. I have always been fascinated by human nature and how smells, tastes, songs, movies and even seasons can take you back in time to a particular juncture.

On the night we were made to feel like old bastards I heard the Armand Van Helden number: MY MY MY MY played in the radio on the way to Hooters. This took me back to a time where I was driving down Jumeirah Beach Road on my way to visit a then girlfriend of mine. Dubai 2006 was one of the most adventurous years of my life. All the top songs that get played from 2006 take me back there. Shakira’s Hips Don’t Lie takes me back to Scarlet’s and the World Cup Soccer Match match between England and Sweden, the night I met my Essex Girlfriend. R Kelly’s Burn It Up takes me back to a Sheesha Bar near Deira City Centre where me and the boys, one of whom was Essex Girlfriends brother who often used to rip through Abu Dhabi with me, had to play Poker (for money) in the back room of the bar so as not to raise the suspicions of the Askria who we had to pay off more then once anyway!

Anyway, back to Hooters, it was the night of the Cricket World Cup final and we had to have a shot on Gary Kirsten who was coaching India at the time. I had a Philly Cheese Steak Sandwich, which again took me right back to Dubai and Charley’s Grilled Subs where you will not get any better Philly Cheese Steak Sandwich anywhere in the world! ON MY LIFE!

On all of my trips to Durban I stop off at the Caltex Garage in Van Reenens Pass which is exactly half way to Durban. I always have a Double Chicken and Cheese Burger from the Country Burger Inn at the garage because they are the second best chicken burgers in the world.

These also put me on a trip of nostalgia to Mozambique 2004. This was my first holiday out of the country and a whole group of us were driving in convoy. We were hungry and decided to stop off and get a bite of something to eat. We find this marooned hull of a ship near Xai Xai with tables and chairs outside of it. Interested, we go in and find it is a restaurant. So we order a chicken & cheese burger and the following excerpt is a certified classic.

Me: I would like a chicken burger please.
Cashier: What part of the Chicken you want?
Me: Breast please.
Cashier: Very good.
He then turns to the back and starts screaming at his accomplice in the kitchen.

Cashier: Hey Manuel! Trazer uma galinha para a frente! [Hey Manuel! Bring a chicken to the front]
Manuel: Que porra é essa de? [What the f##k for?]
Cashier: Porque eu quero jogar cartas com ele seu idiota! Eu tenho uma encomenda de um hambúrguer de frango aqui! [Because I want to play cards with it you moron! I have an order for a chicken burger here!}
Manuel: Eu dice que com este talhador de carne! Dê-me dois segundos, o frango está chegando! [I'll dice you with this meat cleaver! Give me two seconds, the chicken is comming]

Manuel then brings this LIVE chicken to the front, slaughters it in front of me, cuts out the breast and then as he is about to go to the back and cook it...

Cashier: não se esqueça de colocar um pouco de queijo sobre ela seu idiota [dont forget to put some cheese on it you moron]
Manuel: Doente tem que perguntar a sua irmã e seu cousen para virar na cama para que eu possa obtê-lo embora [Ill have to ask your sister and your cousen to turn over in the bed so that I can get it though]

Despite this gruesome spectacle, and the rather interesting conversation which I understood every Word of, it was by a COUNTRY MILE the best chicken burger I have ever had!

Airport Madness and How Spar is 'Good for You'

Salamu.

Sometimes life has a very nasty way of taking something that you were looking forward to and F##king it up. I mean by making the experience so un-enjoyable that you stop and ask yourself: 'Do the ends really justify the means?'

So I flew to Zambia on Tuesday and I am a firm believer in getting to the Airport early for International flights just in case there are some nasty surprises in store. I was only due to check into my flight to Lusaka at 5:55 pm, but I arrived at Ortia at 3:30pm. I walk up to the SAA desk and ask the lady to check me in. She tells me that there is a problem with my ticket and what insued was three hours of me phoning the company who organised my trip to Zambia and swearing them broken to the stage where SAA called the pigs for me at the departure terminal who told me that they would 'clap me in irons' if I did not 'display a greater level of self restraint and decorum'. NIGGA PLEASE! LIKE A PIG EARNING MINIMUM WAGE KNOWS THE MEANING OF DECORUM! But I never told him that.

Eventually I got flight tickets 20 minutes after the flight closed. I had to make like Jessie Owens and break all sprinting records running to the boarding gates from the ticket counter. People were giving me daggers as I pushed in at the passport control desk but it needed to be done.

I got on the flight and an associate of mine asked me why I held the plane up, I told him that we would catch up in Zambia as I am ready to kill someone. What i didn't notice was that at the exact moment that I said that a flight attendant was standing behind me and said to me that it was not the best thing to say on a plane full of passengers and that if I dont make my way to my seat then she would have to call the pigs for me.

I tried my luck once...I doubt I would be so lucky a second time.

I was livid at this stage and found my seat. I was so pissed off and aggravated that I didn't even flirt with the two really cute blonde sisters who were sitting in the same row as me on the other side of the isle! And they were the cutest little things I had seen in a LONG TIME!

Being in Zambia was amazing. I got some really good stories and got to peruse a shopping center to see how our African brothers live.

And I came to the conclusion that Zambia should just be made another province of South Africa! No bull-shit. They have Shoprite, Mica, Mikes Kitchen, Wimpy, News Cafe, Rhapsodies and Ster Kinakor. All South African founded brands.

Another famous South African Brand which I saw was SPAR! So I popped in to pick up a few things for the fridge back at my hotel room. And to my amazement they sell alcohol at Spar! And I am not talking about your run of the mill Wine (which is sold at Spars in SA as well) but Beers and Hard Liquor!

And a beer in Zambia costs R6! Ask any South African when last they paid R6 for a beer and they will have to go back more then 10 years!

So I filled my fridge at the hotel room with my second favorite beer in the world (Mosi) and did some work. I then went to have some dinner.

I didn't eat at the hotel for the very reason that I was not keen to pay an arm and a leg for a toasted sandwich that would make me more hungry then anything else. So I ventured back to the shopping center where I ate at the ZamChick Inn. Which is a piss poor attempt to rival KFC.

Talk about a limited menu. You have a choice of either 1 piece with chips, 2 pieces with chips, three pieces with chips, four pieces with medium chips or five pieces with 2 medium chips.

So I go for the four piece as I am ravenous. It took 10 minuets to prepare and the chicken was EXTREMELY brown. Either they had deep fried it really well or deep fried it in oil that was a week old. I was hoping it was the former.

I then had to be up at 4:15 in the morning on Youth Day to make a 7:15 am flight. I have never been asked to see my passport as many times in my life then at the Lusaka International Airport. Not even in ZIMBABWE when they KNEW I WAS A JOURNALIST!

All in all Zambia was awesome but I was so run down when I got back to SA that I slept most of my Youth Day.

Fun times!

Making a comeback and dollars in Zim

Its been a long time since I wrote anything for this blog, but I thought that today is as good a day as any right?

I love traveling to other countries, who doesn’t right, but unlike most I want to travel to different African countries before I spread my wings further. And my count is increasing. So far I have visited, Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique, Kenya, and Zambia.

If you had to ask me which country in Africa Id like to visit least. Zimbabwe is up there along with Somalia, Ethiopia, and the Sudan. But low and behold. The company sends me to Zimbabwe for a mining indaba last week.

You know that a country is F’D up when you are reading up on the internet about travel requirements to Zim and you get a random bitch and moan like this:

I’ve always said that traveling into Africa is interesting and has its challenges. Seems like Zimbabwe has more challenges then most. The Harare International Airport is quite nice and more sophisticated then Lusaka International and has its walls adorned with pictures of their beloved president for life Bob Mugabe with his ridiculas F***ING Adolf Hitler moustache. Anyway, we had to fill in a yellow form on the plane stating who we were, where we came from, and what our occupation is. For the whole flight I was contemplating as to whether I should put down that I am a journalist. I did, and well I got asked every question under the sun at the immigration desk. They then took my camera’s batteries away and gave them back to me when I left the country.

I was given my own bodyguard in Zimbabwe as they love to rob white people who they perceive as tourists and hate journalists even more then they love robbing the whites. Anyway, on my way to the ministry of information in downtown Harare you pass the only construction site in Zimbabwe, which hasn’t seen any work in over 2 years, a power station that doesn’t work, and potholes that resemble craters. You see a lot of stray dogs running around the capital and people walking around with domesticated warthogs on leashes as pets.

The political landscape in Zim is also interesting. At the conference, Mugabe was calling for a stop to international sanctions from the international community. The next day, Prime minister, Morgan Tsvangirai said that there was no international conspiracy to undermine Zimbabwe. Two points of view, who do you believe?

One comment that went down very well was when Mugabe told the organisers of the conference: "Its so nice to see some white faces in the audience, I thought I cased them all away."

And don’t believe for a minute that traveling in Africa is cheap! Zimbabwe has caught on pretty nicely. Since the fall of the Zim Dollar last year, the country has adopted the Rand in the South of the country and the US Dollar in the North of the country. I was put up in the same hotel as the indaba and internet access is $6 an hour, a bottle of water is $6 and a can of coke is $2.

I made it back in once piece and rest assured….I will not be wanting to go back anytime soon.

Go into Africa and you will learn to appeciate South Africa

All the readers and fans of the Lions Den are probably wondering why the hell I never made my Super 14 predictions last week and have not even mentioned that the Sharks are playing a bit shit at the moment.

After I came back from my holiday in Durban, my company saw it fit to punish me and send me to Zambia for three days to cover a mine opening.

And let me tell you about Zambia. I had fun, I really did, but Zambia is F’D Up. Anyone who complains about South Africa and the way it is becoming should be strung up and be forced to spend 3 days in downtown Lusaka or Solwezi.

I can guaren-damn-te it that they will appreciate South Africa.

The purpose of my visit to Zambia was to attend the opening of Africa’s biggest greenfield copper mining project, the Lumwana project. The schedule was pretty tight with the South African delegation being flown in by charter flights.

So I get to the plane and it’s a 20-seater aircraft that I cant stand upright in! Already not good! Then the seats were so cramped that the armrest was jabbing into my side the whole flight.

Now I don’t trust any plane that dont have jet engines on the wing, so I was a bit concerned when the plane had two outboard propellers. I got stuck at a window that looks onto the wing, and halfway through the flight I notice that there is a F ING LOOSE BOLT ON THE WING! So during a 3 hour flight, I spent 1 ½ hours feking focused on the loose bolt. I was so ready to drop the pilot as soon as we landed!

So we arrive at Lusaka international and there is one plane in the whole airport! I couldn’t believe it. The Fekking place was like Sleepy Hollow! The pilot then tells me that the airport is usually like this with an average of one plane arriving at the airport every three hours. Now lets put this in context, air traffic at OR Thambo averages 15 planes an hour, Harare International 9 planes an hour and Jomo Kenyata , Kenya’s national airport, 7 planes an hour. So one plane every three hours should make Lusaka International the deadest place on earth!

We were put up in the Intercontinental Lusaka, which is the best hotel in the country. It’s a five star hotel which I had one gripe about.

It’s a five star by Zambian Standards, but a three and a half star bed and breakfast by South African standards. However, the Zambians are not scared to charge you bladdy Burj Al Arab (seven star) prices! For a single room where the aircon doesn’t work all the time unless you put your rooms key card in a holder, the fridge is empty, and there aint even a bathrobe to steal the Zambians are charging you $450 a night!

So we whent for dinner the night of our arrival to the Lusaka Sports Club which houses the highly recommended Marlin restaurant. You open the menu and the bastards are charging you 56 000 kwatcha for a T Bone steak. I was interested to see this so I ordered one, and when it came, in true African style, they bring you half a cow on a plate! I wont lie to you this thing must have weighed at least 1 and a half kg.

The only gripe I had about Zambia is the fact that we spent basically 2 ½ days travelling for half a days event! On the Friday we were up at 4:45 am to catch a flight from Lusaka to Solwezi. We arrive at the airport and the bastards had another charter flight waiting for us. This thing was even smaller then the first plane where I basically had to crawl to my seat. The plane had a propeller on the nose of the plane, could only seat 8 people, has a top speed of 80 kms an hour, and a SCOUSE PILOT dragged straight out of the slums of Liverpool! Once we landed in Solwezi we took a bus to Lumwana. Lumwana is in the North Western province of Zambia, which is rural. Driving to the mine brought back memories of my travels to Mozambique in 2004. You see 10 km of F All, then a few huts, then a main street of shops where the whole town congregates.

The event was due to start at 10 am, but it was attended by the Zambian president who had to talk crap to the tribal chiefs for an hour and a half before the thing started. As with all openings, there are a lot of speeches to go through and the speeches were not terribly long, except for the fact they had a interpreter bastard who had to translate every paragraph from English into Thsware!

After the opening it was on the bus again to Solwezi and on the same SCOUSE AIRWAYS charter flight to Lusaka.

One thing that must be said about the Zambians is that they love their president. The pres attended the event which was attended by 1 000 locals with only two bodyguards with gats! In SA the bladdy Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry has a 15 man police escort wherever she goes!

I highly recommend traveling in Africa purely because nowhere else in the world will you get a situation that the beer is cheaper then the cooldrinks!

A bottle of coke, there are very few cans in Zambia, costs you 5 000 kwatcha while a bottle of Mosi beer costs 4 000 kwatcha! I am not a beer drinker! I don’t like the strong bitter taste of the South African beers. But I was in Zambia and had to try a Mosi.

It is actually a nice beer, well rounded and brewed with water from a spring near the Mosi-oa-Tunya, which is Thsware for the Smoke that Thunders, which normal people know as the Victoria Falls!

Here again the Intercontinental Zambia are scaly bastards! At the Safari Bar in the Intercontinental, the beer costs 11 500 kwatcha. So I took a walk in downtown Lusaka at 8 pm to find Mosi beer for 4 000 kwatcha. I found it at the BP garage down the street which sold every liquor available in Zambia. Let me repeat that in bold for you. YOU CAN GO TO A BP GARAGE IN ZAMBIA AND BY ALCOHOL! Imagine how molar the South Africans would get if that were possible here! Warren Jaffer would be in heaven!

Anyway its election day tomorrow! And the Alexandra massive are going to boycott the election because they are upset about RDP houses! Now these people are reasoning like C&*%S! Im sorry to say it, and I apologise too those who take offense to my cussing! But they are reasoning like C&*%S! Instead of using their votes to vote out the African Ninja turtle Congress, they wont vote at all!

ONLY IN SOUTH AFRICA! O.N.L.Y I.N. S.O.U.T.H A.F.R.I.C.A!