Charles Apple

I’ll fly out early Saturday to start my latest visual journalism expedition: Two weeks of training and consulting for a group of newspapers based in Cape Town, South Africa.

I’ve done a lot of teaching here in the U.S. — especially this year, and I’m grateful to all you folks who showed up at my sessions and gave me glowing evaluations — but this will be only my third trip outside the country.

My first-ever international teaching trip was actually one of the first workshops I ever taught, twenty years ago: A five-day gig at the Echo newspaper group of Sunderland, England, in October 1989. One of these days, I really need to drag out all those photos and tell you about that trip.

Teaching at the Sunderland Echo,
October 10, 1989. I still had hair then!
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Two years ago, three other very talented folks and I taught a three-day infographics and news design session for IFRA in Manila. That wasn’t long after I had converted my work from the old VizEds bulletin board forums to this blog format, so I live-blogged the entire trip. If you’re looking for a way to kill some time, begin reading that opus here.

Teaching in Manila, March 30, 2007.
Less hair but more brains. I hope…
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So while it’s fair to say I’m an experienced traveler, It’s also quite accurate to think of me as an inexperienced international traveler.

Right away, of course, I had to rush around to pull together what I’ll need for the trip. The first thing I needed, I thought, was a visa. I didn’t need one of those to travel to England or the Philippines.

I found an official South African government web site that suggested I might need a visa. Which caused me some panic when I realized I didn’t have time to get one. But then I found two other web sites — one from the South African government and the other by the U.S. State Department — that stated pretty clearly that I did not need a visa if I’m staying less than 90 days.

The next thing I needed to do was to upgrade a few of my travel accessories. My big red CNN luggage tags keep breaking, causing my suitcase to look like every other dark grey suitcase in the world. So Sharon insisted I get some brightly-colored identifying grips for the handle:

We also bought new, TSA-approved luggage locks, which we found on sale at Brookstone, down at the mall.

I also needed a new set of electrical adapters. My new MacBook will run on the 220-volt power they use in Cape Town — hell, a Mac will run on just about anything — but I wasn’t so sure about my various chargers. Brookstone had this cute little color-coded voltage converter for less than 40 bucks:

I also wanted to read up on the country, so I went down to my local library and checked out everything they had on South Africa. Which was a lot more than I would have thought:

And, of course, I bought a travel guide. I stuck with my favorite, Dorling Kindersley:

Over the years, I’ve collected a number of these DK travel volumes — usually, sadly enough, for places where I’m invited but then the plans fall through. They’re written from a British perspective, but still very, very helpful; they’re written more tightly and illustrated more lavishly than other travel books:

The language they’ll be speaking at the newspapers is Afrikaans — that’s the language in which they publish, as well. It’s an offshoot of Dutch, but I’m told everyone there speaks English as well. So that should cover my pathetic single-lingual abilities.

A number of folks suggested already I go see the movie District 9, set and filmed in Johannesburg. Yep; I took my wife and daughter to see it on Tuesday. It scared the bejezus out of me. Mostly, it made me wish I had renewed all my immunizations.

I’ve also studied up on the monetary system there. The unit in South Africa is the Rand — and no, it’s not named for Star Trek’s Janice Rand:

This afternoon, I see a Rand is worth $8.0105 American. That’s down about six cents from last Sunday. I guess that means the U.S. dollar is getting stronger — at least in that region of the world. I’ll have to make a cheat sheet I can carry around to keep straight all the conversions.

They’re putting me up at the Westin Grand Cape Town Arabella Quays. (Whew; what a mouthful. Can I just say “the Westin”?)

Looks like an interesting place…

I’ll leave Norfolk at 6:20 a.m. Saturday via United Airlines for a quick hop to Dulles airport in Washington, D.C.

…Where I’ll sit through a layover of 11 hours and 20 minutes. (Dulles, by the way, is only a four hour drive up the interstate from here. Hey, is anyone in the D.C. area game for a meet-up?)

My South African Airlines flight leaves Dulles at 5:40 p.m. Saturday afternoon and arrives in Johannesburg at 5:20 p.m. Sunday evening, after nearly 12 hours in the air. I’ll have a brief layover there and be in Cape Town at 10:20 p.m. Sunday. Which is 4:20 p.m. here in Virginia.

Sharon and I are planning to communicate the next two weeks via iChat. We’ve already tested our systems. It works just fine… As long as I’m broadcasting to her from two feet away. We’ll see how I do from 7,800 miles away.

As I write this, I have about 61 hours until departure. I’m trying to clean my home office — pretty much in a shambles after the projects I’ve been working on lately — getting a little advance work done for the blog (Birthday posts through Labor Day! WooHoo!), and study up for the work I’ll be doing there.

And, of course, pack. That, too.

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EXPEDITION TO SOUTH AFRICA

You’re reading the first chapter of my journey to Cape Town, South Africa. Find the second installment of this tale here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 at 4:24 pm and is filed under Charles Apple, Travelogue, Trip to South Africa, Workshops. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.