I took a trip to South Africa at the start of the pandemic. I wrote a little bit about it in my post about China.

I had been living in Beijing for a couple of years and I just started a new job in Xi’an. It was going to be a big increase in pay and a better opportunity. But a month into the new job and the Wuhan virus broke out, so they shut down the school.

The big Lunar New Year / Spring Festival, when China goes on a it’s big holiday, was just around the corner. So they decided to shut down early and open back up after the holiday. With this extended holiday, I decided to visit my friend and coworker in South Africa. Spoiler alert – the “holiday” is still going on 2 years later and the school is still closed.

A friend from Scotland just happened to be travelling Africa at the time to so we decided to meet up. His plan was to see how many countries we could see, and I was going to travel with him until I could get back to China. We ended up taking a week traveling from Johannesburg to Cape Town hitting the countries of Eswatini and Lesotho along the way. Along the way we had many adventures. We did a safari in our rental car. We got too close to a rhinoceros and scared ourselves.

When we landed in Cape Town, the virus hit the world stage. It was then that we realized that it was not just going to stay in China. The continent went on lockdown. Because of this, airbnb had some really inexpensive places so I got to stay in a two-story house overlooking the ocean in nearby Glencairn.

Anyway, here’s a picture I took of some zebras in South Africa.