Postcard from South Africa #2 – Durban Beachfront

This post doesn’t really have anything to do with the first Postcard from South Africa post, but I should probably put a link in anyway. It has more to do with this post.

Going to South Africa is all sorts of culture shock. But one of the things that surprised me the most when I went there with my then-girlfriend in 2010 was that there weren’t really any taxis as we know them. I was also told that it wasn’t safe to take public transport, and tourists didn’t have much choice but to hire cars to get around. I couldn’t accept the taxi thing, though: surely where there is demand from tourists and locals, there must be taxis? It turned out there were some in Cape Town – they’re called “meter cabs” – but not in many other places.

Going back in 2014, though, there were a lot more, including in Durban. It seems to be a much less formal setup than in NZ, with more independent operators than large companies. Uber also seems to be taking the country by storm – when you’re cautious of your safety, and many of the cab drivers are independents so you have no real way of knowing how legit they are, an app that lets you book a driver and see the reviews they have is pretty appealing.

South Africans do use “taxis”, but the word means something very different than it does in New Zealand. Essentially, taxis are minivans like the one below, which operate a sort of informal bus service. There are very few full-size buses, but these taxis seem to travel along fairly well-defined routes, although I doubt if there’s any kind of timetable. As far as I can tell, drivers are completely independent and don’t coordinate with each other at all, so there might be five taxis passing your stop in ten minutes or there might be none.

Every now and again, well-meaning people (and the odd sprawl pusher) ask why New Zealand cities don’t adopt minivans as part of their public transport, with minivans making it easier to serve more different places (and “point to point” service) compared with larger buses. Even the most basic financial analysis, though, shows that it won’t stack up – the labour costs are too high in countries with a reasonable minimum wage, the capital costs are too high, and there’s not much fuel efficiency gain compared with private cars, so not much saving there either.

Like Auckland, Durban is a city defined in large part by its coastline – although the main beachfront, next to the CBD, probably has more in common with somewhere like Surfers Paradise. Good surf, high temperatures and the odd shark. The beach carried on unbroken for seven sandy kilometres, lined with retail stalls, amusement parks, pools, casinos, hotels and the occasional car park. The picture below probably isn’t the fairest one, a typical shot of the beach would show more people and fewer car parks, but this is the one I’ve got:

The promenades along the beach have been upgraded, and a typical summer day now sees plenty of families walking, cycling and generally just enjoying the beach. It was a sight that made my now-wife very happy, as these improvements have made the beach much more accessible and family-friendly than when she was growing up there.

As our cab driver told us, there are now a lot more tourists coming to Durban, and the city is vying with Cape Town to attract more international visitors. Anywhere in the world you find tourists, you’ll find locals cheerfully devising schemes to part them from their money, such as the one below which I’m going to call a gaudily decorated rickshaw thingy, although there may be a more technical term for this. This probably isn’t a very effective means of transporting people along a 7 km beach, but I think it was at least 35 degrees and humid on the day I took this photo, so let’s all have a moment of sympathy for the poor bugger.

One last shot, taken from one of the many piers along the beach:

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