Football World Cup South Africa

Attending a football world cup was a once in a lifetime experience for us, especially as the 2010 cup was the second time NZ had ever got into a world cup. We secured tickets in December 2009 and started planning our trip. Unfortunately plenty of South Africans saw it as an opportunity to make a buck, and we received some totally outlandish quotes for accommodation, but some far more reasonable as well thankfully. In total we spent 16 nights there, staying mostly in B&Bs and driving ourselves between games.

We split this blog post into overall impressions, games, tourism, and Kruger park.

Overall impressions

Well the football was amazing, we were the proudest kiwis. The party we had that night after the first game we will never forget – it was like we had won the world cup, not drawn our first game. One of the highlights was catching up with so many footie friends; many of whom we knew were going, and many of whom we bumped into along the way.
Organisation ranged from super efficiency (we could have been in Germany the way Pretoria organised the park and ride) to almost a riot with people fighting to get on buses at Rustenburg stadium to get back to the park and ride. Similarly, some areas were prepared and able to cash in on the party, and others weren’t (like the bar in Nelspruit which fit about 1000 people and had two people working on the bar. Seriously, two).
We mostly stayed at B&Bs and generally they were pretty good, especially Elonda in Pretoria – the owners are like our South African grandparents they took such great care of us.
We ate some brilliant meals along the way, including impala, ostrich and hartesbeast. Dean was particularly fond of his various types of biltong.

All up, we drove around 4000kms in 16 days, which meant a couple of 7hr drives. The toll roads were excellent, but the secondary roads were often pretty dreadful. Some amazing drives - through the Kruger was our top drive, the two hour drive to the first game in Rustenburg was hard to beat for the anticipation, and the drive out of the Kruger down to Polokwane was incredible for the different view of life away from the big cities.

South Africa, as most people acknowledge, still has a long way to go in addressing the issues from apartheid, but everyone that we met and talked to was really positive about the potential that South Africa holds.

Games

We went to all three New Zealand games and we also had tickets that followed the winner of NZ's group (if NZ didn't make it out) through to the semi final. We thought we should at least watch one knockout game, so we stuck around for the R16 game in Pretoria and offloaded the other tickets for a fair face value price.

The first game was NZ v Slovakia and the atmosphere was incredible - lots of loud, excited kiwis and a great spirit of all having travelled such a long distance to support our heroes. NZ went 1-0 down pretty early in the second half and our spirits dampened a little - a strange feeling as we went there not expecting anything but of course hoping for something. Then along came little-known Winston Reid who scored in injury time at the end of the game, earning NZ its first ever world cup points. We were totally ecstatic of course, and the party that night felt like we'd won the competition, a night we'll never forget.

The second game was a few days later v Italy at Nelspruit. The stadium there was built especially for the competition, with the pillars holding it up designed to look like giraffes, and the all the seats striped like zebras.

This game had drawn a lot of attention as of course Italy were the reigning champs and everyone expected them to walk all over New Zealand. But we sure showed them a thing or two, with Shane Smeltz popping one in pretty early into the game. That silenced the Italian fans and got us on our feet for the rest of the game. Unfortunately for NZ though, we were up against a world-class team at pulling dirty tricks, and an undeserved penalty was awarded to Italy, with them drawing 1-1. Still a pretty fantastic showing from NZ, drawing even with a team like Italy. We were quite chuffed at that, especially as our accommodation was hosting the Italian team and Italian supporters for lunch and had quite rudely kicked us out of breakfast early that day to give them time to prepare. Ha, we showed them.

The third game was in a fairly dismal little town called Polokwane (our accommodation was dreadful, there was nothing to do in the town, staff at the stadium charging an arm and a leg for average food and drink were begging for tips - just a bit of an embarrassment to be hosting world cup games), against Paraguay. Ending with a nil-all draw was a bit of a downer, as was the heavy handed actions of riot police who forced us all to leave straight after the game. The party that night though was another fantastic one as we knew we wouldn't see our kiwi friends again for some time. The DJ got hold of someone's ipod with about 4 kiwi songs on it (Slice of Heaven, I see Red and a couple of others), so they were played on repeat throughout the night, along with the official world cup song by Shakira that we didn't grow sick of (not even being sarcastic, we're still fans and can do the dance on demand). We were of course sad that was the end of the cup for the All Whites, but we were so proud of how well they'd done.

The R16 Pretoria game was held at Loftus Versfeld, and was Paraguay against Japan. Neither team were particularly ambitious in normal time, the game ending at 0-0 after 90 minutes. Unfortunately, not much changed in extra-time and the game fizzled out into penalties. Luckily the penalties came inbuilt with drama. Sitting next to Reece, a kiwi we met at our B&B, as the Japanese 4th penalty taker stepped up, he said never trust a left footer - and the poor guy went and missed, giving Paraguay the advantage which they took and on they went to the Quarter Finals.

Loftus Versfeld is an old rugby stadium, and it really showed that you need different things for different sports, and that stadiums have come a long way in terms of facilities and spectator comfort. Being a Tuesday afternoon, and two unattractive teams, Pretoria didn't really get behind the game, so it was another partially full stadium.

The games were great, but it was always disappointing to see lots of empty seats at the live games. This was probably down to a combination of the long way to come for the overseas fans, and overpriced tickets for the locals - a real shame.

Tourism
We learnt a lot about South Africa on this trip, not just what we were taught in high school history. Highlights include a visit to the Voortrekker monument, the Apartheid museum (which was excellent, and had one of the best guides to get the most out of your visit) and the Battle of Blood river monument (about 40km drive down an poorly maintained dirt track, and there in the middle of nowhere, at the site of the battle, is a full sized laager (circle) of replica wagons, amazing).

Another highlight was a visit to the Cullinan diamond mine. We did the full tour which meant getting kitted out in full safety gear (took Dean back to his NZ Rio Tinto days and Lou was quite fond of her helmet) and travelled 763m below ground inside the working mine. There we walked the passageways and saw kimberlite (the rock diamonds are found in) being scraped out of the earth and carted up to ground level. Amazing to learn that for every 100 tonnes of rock, they find about 2 carats of diamonds - it made us appreciate the price we paid for a small keepsake in the gift shop as we left (rude not to support the local economy and all that).

We shouldn’t have bothered with an official tour to Soweto, which all the guide books said must be done on an organised tour. We could easily have driven there ourselves and visited the couple of museums we did on the tour, saved ourselves a lot of money and been perfectly safe. A shame really, because it was an interesting place to visit, and we’re glad we did, as our expectations were quite different to what we saw (we imagined mile upon mile of shanty towns – this is not the case, it’s actually quite a nice, safe area with some excellent museums, and our (white, female) tour driver told us she’d be quite happy in Soweto at night, and the only way you’d see her in the middle of Johannesburg would be dead).

Kruger park
On such a tight schedule we only had two nights to spend in Kruger park – a national park the size of Israel. We stayed in bungalow/huts in the Shingwedzi and Mopani camp sites which were excellent – fully equipped, we could have stayed for a week. In just two days we were really lucky to spot four of the big five (elephants, rhino, lions, hippo – no cheetahs/leopards), especially as our camp sites were in the north of the park where there are more trees and game is harder to spot. We also saw crocs, lots of giraffes and zebra, wildebeest, warthog, buffalo, monkeys, some beautiful birds and thousands of impala and the like. One of our souvenirs is the skin of one, which happily lives alongside our NZ lambskin on the floor of our lounge.

We were incredibly lucky to spot lions in particular, we only had a sedan, but a couple of 4 wheel drives had spotted a lion and lioness in the bushes, so we pulled up alongside. Then we saw the same lions on a night drive that evening and watched them for ages, plus spotted another lion (who had likely been playing wingman and lost out, according to our driver).

And finally, a video to sum up the party spirit of the kiwi fans.