South Africa 2003

I’ve been thinking about South Africa a lot lately. I spent almost a month there during the summer of 2003 in between my freshman and sophomore years in college. I was visiting my grandfather who was teaching at a university in Johannesburg through the Fulbright Program. Most of my visit was spent near Johannesburg, but we also drove to Kruger National Park and later took a trip to Cape Town. My memories are very hazy from our time in Cape Town. I had a terrible sinus infection and was either loopy from the cold medicine (which felt a lot more potent than cold medicine back home) or loopy from the fever.

Digital photography was definitely not what it is now (in other words, I knew this puppy wasn’t going to do South Africa justice), so I took my film camera and dozens of rolls of film with me. Mostly slide film, because for many years I loved slide film almost as much as life itself. I’d saved up almost a thousand dollars scooping ice cream to buy a Nikon Coolscan and I went to town scanning slides for months after the trip. I still have the film in storage somewhere, but for now, all I have are these scans. (Some of which were only scanned in at a 4×6 size, because 19 year old Emily was INCREDIBLY illogical and straight up dumb when it came to file management.. woh wohhh.)

Airport security was not fond of me and my huge ziplock bags full of film.

Anyway, here’s a bunch of scans from a decade ago from South Africa.