Author: jdewyze

White Folks Fun

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Sunday evening, March 14
On our first day in South Africa, when we drove around Johannesburg with our guide, Danie, Steve and I were both struck by how much the center city reminded us of an aging city in the US heartland, Detroit, say, or Cleveland. But Friday when we left the famous “Garden Route” (between Port Elizabeth and Mossel Bay) behind us and a few hours later entered the South African “Winelands” region, we felt transported instead to the European Alps. Our destination for the night was Franschhoek, once a French Huguenot settlement and now one of the most important centers in the world’s 9th largest wine-making country. Surrounded by tall and rugged mountains, the town occupies a huge green valley. Vineyards have been staked out on the valley floor, and they also climb up the foot of the slopes. It reminded me of Switzerland… or Galt’s Gulch… or some combination of the two.

In Franschhoek we were staying in the “guest room” of a couple named Marilyn and Charles Chance, and we arrived too late in the afternoon to visit any wineries. The Chance’s room for rent was large, pretty, and outfitted with a king-sized bed and excellent linens, with its own entrance from a beautiful garden located within a gated housing development designed to look like a vineyard. We didn’t enjoy it as much as it deserved, as we were harried from the long day of driving 75 mph on narrow 2-lane roads with lots of passing. Instead we walked around the town for a bit, then headed for Le Bon Vivant, recommended by our guidebook.

The guidebooks say that Franschhoek is where you find the finest cooking in South Africa, and this restaurant was cited for being one of the best. So we threw caution to the winds and ordered the five-course tasting menu (actually six, including the little seafood-mouse-topped-with-cucumber salad amuse-bouche), accompanied by five different wines. Considering that we’d enjoyed a five-course feast at the Phantom Forest in Knysna, as well as a complicated and superbly executed meal at The Fernery (our last stop on the Dolphin Trail adventure), we probably should have shown more restraint. But would a pilgrim to mecca not visit a mosque? How could we dine in the gastronomic capital of South Africa without seeing what one of their best chefs could do? (Such was our reasoning).

It was all extremely impressive: other mousses (tomato, raspberry), intriguing meat combinations (medallions of grilled eland atop roasted pork, things I’d never tasted ever (cold smoked eel soup!). I’m not enough of a foodie to declare how this part of the world compares to other haut cuisines in other regions, but it certainly was a respectable competitor, and the skill and thoughtfulness was evident not just in the fine restaurants. Yesterday we ate lunch at one of the wineries, and (still feeling overindulgent about the previous night’s repast), we only ordered starters. Mine turned out to be a healthy pile of smoked salmon on blue-cheese-flavored shortbread, served along with a mushroom mousse, baby salad greens and an asparagus coulis. (Steve’s “beef baguette” starter was so huge, he could hardly work up any appetite for the rest of the day.) The lunch offerings, plus a bottle of water, cost $18 (including the tip).

More than just the food Impressed us. The last Dolphin Trail hotel and the place we stayed the next night, in Knysna, both ranked among the best commercial lodgings I’ve ever experienced anywhere. In both, we occupied wooden chalets, superbly equipped with amenities I’ve never seen before (insect repellant! flip-flops! raincoats!) along with the more standard teas and coffee and biscotti and creams and lotions. The king-sized beds in both were clad in zillion-thread satiny cottons. Both commanded unique views. Our chalet at The Fernery (which, btw, is also a working commercial fern farm) overlooked a deep, wild gorge leading to the ocean, and you could slide and fold up an entire wall in the bathroom, climb into the oversized tub, light the candles and gaze upon the wilderness without any barrier between you and it. You couldn’t open up the bathroom walls at the Phantom Forest, but they incorporated so much spotless glass it felt as if they were open. And they provided protection from the vervet monkeys who thrive in this forest (and at one point came to check out our patio — and us.)

These hotels were our big splurge of the trip, and they carried a cost beyond dollars. Unlike everywhere else we’d stayed up to then, it wasn’t possible to easily engage with other guests (overwhelmingly white, as were the other diners at the Bon Vivant). Indeed they were designed to insulate each couple or small group within little bubbles of luxury. While this is a marvelous thing if you want to bathe outdoors, other travelers often can be entertaining (at least to us).

Similarly, the pleasures of our wine-tasting outing yesterday sprang principally from the excellence of the wine and the extreme beauty of a couple of the wineries. The weather was sublime, we motored over gently rolling hills, vines pressing in close on each side, and found ourselves in elegant, opulent tasting rooms with heart-stopping views of the Stellenbosch valley; they were at least the equal of anything I’ve seen in the Napa Valley. At the Engelbrecht Els winery, we sat out on a stone terrace to taste the four bold reds. Nearby a guitarist played softly and sang American ballads. Other murmuring white people sat at other tables.

It was easy to imagine we were in a glossy, prosperous country, filled with mostly white-skinned inhabitants, and protected from any hint of strife. We were glad to experience it, and we could understand why other travelers with a greater passion for wine or more miserable home climates might want to come here and hunker down. But more than one night would not have interested us. We were happy to press on to Cape Town, our current and final site for South African explorations.

Goodbye to the Dolphin Trail

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Wednesday evening, March 10
Sadly, we saw no dolphins today. (We hear January is the best time for that.) We saw no otters, either, though there was plenty of otter dung. Apparently their practice is to rise early from their dens among the rocks along the ocean, then creep up the streams that trickle down from the bluffs, snacking on fish and crustaceans and whatever else they can find. They ascend for about 1000 feet, chill out up at the top, then make their way back at the end of the day.

Stan also pointed out where porcupines had dug under bushes, seeking tasty roots and ants. Polecats do something similar, and we saw those scratchings too. We failed to spot any bush pigs or snakes, and the closest we came to baboons today was a couple of deposits of their excrement, “You can recognize it because it looks a lot like human’s, ” Stan told us. Still, for all that we failed to see, for as much as much as my (bad) left knee aches at the moment, this two-day hike has to rank among the most memorable of my life.

For one thing, our weather luck was wonderful. It was so hot when we drove from Pt. Elizabeth to the park Monday morning that the air flowing through the vents into our (un-air-conditioned) car felt like it was coming from the heater. An hour after we checked into the park cabin, the moisturizer in the tube in my suitcase was still hot to the touch. But Tuesday (the first day of our hike) dawned much cooler and a mix of clouds and sun made the trekking ideal. Today was even mistier, even foggy at times, but that too felt refreshing. By the time we stopped for our final picnic lunch, distant thunder was rumbling, and we expected we might get soaked in the final stretch before we reached the Fernery lodge. The rain held off, however, until just a few minutes ago. Now it’s pouring amidst thunder and lightning, a goodsend in this parched region.

At the picnic in the woods, where another Fernery employee named Marius had arrived to set up a table filled with homemade bread, gourmet cheeses, cold cuts, salad, and a pudding pie, Marius asked if we usually hike when we travel. Although there’ve been a few memorable exceptions (e.g. the Inca Trail), we had to say no. And the question made me wonder why we’d chosen to do so here. Why escape into nature for two days, when our goal has been to gain better understanding of the people and cultures within South Africa?

Getting to know Stan actually did wind up advancing that goal nicely. Our leave-taking yesterday was emotional; it amazes me what a relationship one can form in just two days. Beyond that, however, I’d have to say I’d suspected the physical beauty of this trail would justify hiking it. And it did. The plant life alone was enchanting — so many plants that are fixtures of life in San Diego — agapanthus, calla lilies, ice plant, society garlic — growing wild here, and so much many more wonderful things I’d never seen.

We climbed up the sides of cliffs so steep I was gasping at the top, followed trails frighteningly close to murderous abysses, penetrated dark, green leafy sanctuaries that Stan called “the jungle,” but then amended, when pressed. True jungles are actually a bit wetter than these “Afro-montane forests,” he said. But they felt jungly, filled as they were with hidden vervet monkeys and baboons, exotic snakes, huge insects.

Best of all, I think, was the second day, when we descended from the Misty Mountain Reserve to the shoreline, which we followed for several hours. Here the sea meets the land not on sandy beaches but at huge black Table Mountain sandstone formations thickly veined with quartz. The layers have been tilted over the eons by almost 70 or 80 degrees, and the edges worn away so that they look not like delicate lines in a block of solid rock, but rather enormous pancake stacks, with jagged, frayed edges. It almost made me dizzy to look at them — as of the world had turned sideways and I had somehow remained off-kilter. The first time we reached a shore like this, Steve and I both quailed. How could we traverse the daunting jumble of rock? We learned the answer as we followed steady, sure-footed Stan: the formations actually provided dozens of footholds at every turn. You just had to take your time and find them.

Stan was off work today, so Marius drove us in a Land Rover back to the park, along a dirt road that 50 years ago was the only way route for vehicles to get from Cape Town to Pt. Elizabeth. It was an interesting drive, through pine plantations and dairy farms, and when we arrived back at the park, we took an even more amazing trip, on a boat up the narrow gorge through which the Storms River flows to the sea.

Now we’ve into the Phantom Forest Eco-Reserve, recommended by our friends the Zatkins. Tomorrow we’ll set off on the Road More Traveled by tourists — along the so-called Garden Route, to the cape wine country for a day, then finally to explore Cape Town until next Thursday next, when we fly home. It will probably be less adventurous than what we have been experiencing. But I’m guessing it still won’t feel like we’re back in Kansas yet.

Dining with Ecological Disaster

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Wednesday morning, March 10,2010

Paul Theroux, in his Dark Star Safari (which I’m enjoying hugely), comments on how he kept meeting Jobergers with amazing tales to tell. His friend the novelist Nadine Gordimer responds that this is a characteristic of South Africans generally, that their lives have been full of events.

We’re seeing the same thing. Last night after we finished our homemade ice cream and apricot panna cotta, the resident manager at Misty Mountain Reserve, Frank Machetto, regaled us with stories about his experiences leading tourists on camping trips (in tents!) in the bush near Kruger National Park. (“Only had to use my gun once. Never had to kill an animal, thank God. But I’d never take anyone who was nervous. Couldn’t have that.”) An Afrikaner, Frank also discoursed with passion and bitterness about ecological disruptions that have occurred near and far. “They kill the puff adders but then you get an explosion in the population of mice! Or the do-do bird! There are trees that have almost disappeared because the seeds have to be germinated in the gut of the do-do bird. But they’ve been gone for 100 years!”

This place is even more upscale than our forest cabin in the park: Even NICER linens on a king-size bed in a space as big as a living room, with a deck commanding a 150-degree view of the Indian Ocean. Circumstances have also conspired to make it feelas homey as our B&Bs in Joburg. The preparation of our excellent meal last night (spinach soup, tuna roulade and home-made bread, medallions of kudu shoulder with a pepper sauce, curried chicken, roasted potatos and squash, broccoli au gratin, salad, and that awesome dessert) was supervised by Val Lane, the wife of the man who dreamed up the idea for the Dolphin Trail hike. The Lanes for a couple dozen years had run a dairy farm on this site, but Dave Lane was a passionate fisherman and hiker who believed there had to be a market for a less arduous way of experiencing this incredible coastline than the Otter Trail backpacking. He and the owner of the Fernery (our lodging tonight) worked out a partnership arrangement with the national park, and the Dolphin Trail hikes were inaugurated in 2001. Tragically, Dave died suddenly four years ago, and when Val concluded she wasn’t up to running the operation by herself, she hired Frank and his wife Rose as resident managers.

Misty Mountain Reserve, as this place is now known, can accommodate 18 guests, but we were the only ones in the dining room last night. A group of five arrived sometime after us last night, but they were staying in a the family quarters and “self-catering.” So Steve and I were again the only guests at breakfast today. Frank announced that he had “slept like a baby. Woke up every hour and cried for my mama!” He jokes a lot. Yet soon he was talking again about the ominous current drought and wildebeest-borne diseases and advancing desertification. “As soon as cattle were brought into Africa, unfortunately that was the end of Africa,” he said. But we’re about to hike for a second day in at least an island of the Africa that has existed for millenia.

Hiking with Puff Adders

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Tuesday, March 9

As I commented to Steve yesterday, we’ve now begun the luxury portion of the program. I had mixed feelings about this, after we’d checked into Tsitsikamma National Park (on the southern coast several hundred kilometers east of Cape Town.) Sure the views from the deck of the park restaurant and from our wood cabin — azure ocean with huge breakers crashing on the dark jagged rocks and shooting white spray high into the air — were the stuff of postcards. And our queen-size bed was clad in a much higher grade of linen than we’ve yet seen on this trip. But I felt like we’d left Africa. Except for the workers in the restaurant and shop, everyone was white, and a very high percentage were old, overweight, and Northern European, folks who obviously took pride in (and spent a lot of money on) their elaborate encampments — not merely tents but also lanais and shaded patios and barbecuing areas. Near at hand were scullery rooms where they could clean their dishes in comfort and self-service machines for washing their laundry.

Today my ambivalence resolved. As luck would have it, Steve and I were the only tourists starting the Dolphin Trail hike this morning, and our guide for the three-day adventure is a black African named Stanley. For more than four hours, he led us up steep escarpments and through primieval forests and along paths that hugged precipices plunging to the sea. Spend that much time hiking with anyone and you can learn a thing or ten. Our conversation was at least as varied as the terrain we hiked through. We learned that Stan is 37, married with four kids ranging from 4 to 14, a fluent speaker of Xhosa, Afrikans, and English. He’s worked in tourism for 8 years and yesterday celebrated his first anniversary of leading hikers along the Dolphin Trail. He confided that his dream was to become a guide on big-game safaris; the obstacle in that path was the tuition. (Schooling to acquire the Class 4 certification needed to do such guiding would be close to $10,000.) We talked about what it means to be “colored” in South Africa (as Stan’s wife is). Tomorrow I’m hoping to probe his view of South Africa’s future.

I also learned that I lucked into the best possible hiking choice for us. The most famous hike in South Africa is a 5-day trek along something called the Otter Trail which starts near the Tsitsikamma park administration building and can require reservations almost a year in advance. It’s also quite basic — full-on backpacking in which you have to carry and prepare all your own meals. While much more expensive, our Dolphin Trail trek allows us to carry only a small daypack. Our other suitcases are transported each night to our lodging, which on this second night is even nicer than our “Forest Cabin” last night. In a few minutes, we’ll go to dinner in the main building and (with any luck) have our best meal so far in South Africa. (Up to now, we’ve consumed a lot of stews, curries, and barbecue. Decent food but unspectacular.)

Stan will collect us tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. and he says it’ll take us almost 9 hours to cover the 10 kilometers to our final destination, set amidst a forest of ferns. Perhaps at some point we’ll swim in a natural stone pool next to the sea. With luck we’ll see dolphins and otters, though I don’t know that either one would thrill me as much as the baboons we encountered this morning, including a solitary male, just off the path and not 5 feet away from where we passed. Hopefully, we won’t run into any puff adders or boom slags, the highly poisonous snakes which Stan says are common in these parts. But even if one bit us, we’d have a 24-hour window in which to seek antivenin. “I think most people who die from snakebites, die because of the fear and stress of being bitten,” Stan declared this afternoon. He sounded confident.

ER-South African style

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Written Monday, March 8 about events that transpired the night before…

If you have to seek emergency care at 10 p.m. in a foreign city, I can recommend Pt. Elizabeth, South Africa. Concerned about my spreading red forehead welts, we’d asked the manager of the Hippo (backpacker’s lodge) where I could get medical advice, and both she and the lodge owner (whom she telephoned and woke up at 9:30 p.m.) recommended the Greenacres Hospital, a private operation about 5 minutes away by taxi. “For us (meaning black South Africans), medical care is free, so the only people you will see there are white people.”

In the waiting room, it was true that no black Africans appeared to be seeking treatment, but one family looked to be Middle Eastern, and there may have been a couple of Indians. (South African racial nomenclature can be confusing.) Probably 80 percent of the staff was dark-skinned, including the rotund lady who approached and asked sympathetically what we required. Hearing my explanation, she warned us that the list of others ahead of me was fairly long and it might take an 60-90 minutes to be seen. When we said we’d wait, she added my name to the bottom of her hand-written list.

How quaint, I thought. No jungle of bureaucracy to hack one’s way through, as in any American ER. After 40 minutes I was escorted to a curtained room where my temperature, pulse, and blood pressure (sky-high!) were recorded with very modern instruments. (Indeed, everything about this facility looked clean, well-organized, and technologically up-to-date.) A nurse soon appeared and logged the details of my complaint and history into a computer. Then we were sent out into the waiting room again, where at last, a lady at the front desk prepared a billing chart for me (a 10-minute operation, including the hole-punching, stapling, and photocopying steps.)

I finally was called to an examining room perhaps and hour and a quarter after we walked in, and shortly, the friendly, energetic (white) doctor walked in. Minutes into my recounting of how my symptoms had developed, a look of confident recognition dawned on his face. His verdict: shingles (which he suspected might have been triggered by the sun exposure I got in the game reserve.)

Since I’ve never before had shingles (but did as a child have chicken pox), I’m bereft without my trusty companion, the Internet, to fill me in on everything I now would like to know about this malady. I have to trust that the anti-viral medication the doctor prescribed will make the welts and pain disappear within a week or so. We filled the prescription the next day in Pt. E, which has a small-town feeling — most of the homes in the areas we drove through looked as innocently unprotected as those in Clairemont — no barbed wires, no fences. And when the first pharmacy didn’t have the Zelitrex in stock, they sent me down the road to another. There, Penny the pharmacist, only had 17 pills, but she gave me those and printed out a tidy label, explaining what had been dispensed so that I could get the balance at another pharmacy down the road.

Most fascinating to Steve: the entire ER experience cost 420 rands (about $56), and that appeared to be the doctor’s fee. I have no idea why we were charged nothing for the use of the private hospital facilities. About half of the Zelitrex prescription cost $65.

Whether because of the Zelitrex or the pain medication also prescribed for me, the shingles haven’t been much of a nuisance. There’s some pain, but it’s tolerable. Sadly, though, I’ve also finally caught Steve’s cough/laryngitis.

Still, I’m so excited by the prospect of a day of hiking in this beautiful place and confident I can power through the afllictions. We depart for breakfast and then the trailhead in 5 minutes.

Still more whining about the Internet in South Africa

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Thursday, March 11
Can the Internet in Nigeria possibly be so much better than it is in South Africa? But if it isn’t, how could all those scammers possibly operate, without dying of frustration??@!! As I’ve been doing.

I’m now sitting in the lounge of the most expensive hotel we will enjoy on this trip, one of the nicest hotels, in fact, I’ve ever stayed at. The Internet actually WORKS here, unlike the very nice place we stayed last night, where it theoretically works, except when it’s raining. Which it was, when I tried to use it. The quite nice place where we stayed the night before had no wi-fi. Frank, the manager, used it only via some card he plugged into his computer. Very confusing.

My problem now is that I THOUGHT I just uploaded four posts, written over the past three days. But I don’t see them yet. Can they be lost in cyberspace? Is blogspot aging them, like fine bourbon?

Stay tuned.

More good and bad news

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Monday, March 8
Good news: the Baz bus arrived early, driver barreled through the night at maniacal speed, we didn’t crash, and arrived 45 minutes early. Early enough so that we decided to go to the nearby emergency room and have my splotchy red painful patch looked at.

Bad news: I have shingles!!! The legacy of childhood chickenpox, I presume.

Good news: I don’t have some tropical pest worming around under my skin, preparing to penetrate my brain (my worst nightmare.)

More good news: I was able to get online at the Hippo Backpackers — just 20 rand for 30 minutes.

Bad news: The Internet is so painfully slow (as usual), my time is almost up. Plus it’s time for us to head to the airport, pick up our car, drive to Tstitsikamma National Park and start our 3-day hiking adventure on the Dolphin Trail.

Backpacker Paradise

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Sunday, March 7
There’s no easy way to get to and from Bulungula, but the best of a bad lot is to take the Baz Bus to Mthatha and then the Bulungula shuttle from there. Once we committed to that, we were committing ourselves to the backpacker’s trail along the Wild Coast. It’s the path of least resistance. You buy a ticket for a week and then you can get on and off the bus at any number of backpacking lodges. The bus picks you up and drops you off at your destinations. I’m not sure we would have wound up otherwise at Buccaneers. But then we would have missed perhaps the most famous backpacker lodge in all Souith Africa.

It was once an overgrazed cattle ranch. But at some point, it came to someone’s attention that the hillside spread commanded the kind of view that would gladden the hearts of young adventurers fleeing the rigors of winter in England or Germany or Holland, or really anyone with a soft spot for idyllic beachy paradises. So starting in 1981 they built a series of cottages and dorms and planted palms and succulents and other dense native vegetation. Today Buccaneers has the soul of an old pilgrimage spot, revered by free spirits and hippie throwbacks and penny-pinching geezers. The walls around the front reception desk (which is built of corrugated zinc topped with a slab of wood) are plastered with notices for surfing lessons, trips to the nearby village market, sporting and cultural outings, rides wanted. The rooms like ours (a double with a bath) are cheap; the dorms and camping spots even cheaper. The vibe is funky tropical, more backpacker’s resort than youth hostel.

Our room was clean (if worn), the bed comfortable, the enormous beachscape from our wooden deck the sort that would command a multimillion-dollar price tag in La Jolla. The pitter-patter of little gecko feet (the resident pest, along with ants) creeped me out for a few minutes after we turned out the light. But we’d been reasured they don’t bite.

Alas, something DID apparently bite me at some point in our travels, and I’m beginning to suspect that the bite somehow got infected. That would explain the red raised welts that seem to be spreading along the hairline on the left side of my face. They hurt too, so we’re going to try to seek some medical attention tomorrow in Port Elizabeth, after we pick up our car.

The bad news is that in order to get to PE, our Baz Bus ride tonight will take five hours (from 5 to 10 p.m.) The good news is that after enduring one hypertensive frustration after another, I finally got online last night and again this morning. (Internet connectivity has been shockingly bad so far, in our experience.) Online, I learned that my nephew Lee has now survived to be one of the last 8 guys and 8 girls competing on American Idol. That’s almost exciting enough to make me want to fly home. Almost, but not quite.

Village Life

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Saturday, March 6
I woke up well before dawn this morning and lay in bed thinking about why Steve and I have cherished this time at Bulungula. We’ve appreciated the staggering physical beauty. I finally got out of bed when I couldn’t sleep and made my way down to watch the sun rise over the Indian Ocean. Alone on a beach that stretched for miles, I witnessed changes in the sky and land that came close to being a religious experience.

But the unspoiled beauty alone wouldn’t justify the harrowing journey and general grubbiness. The facilities aren’t awful. But if the clever design of Mosetlha made camping truly comfortable, in this place, it feels just tolerable. The mattresses on the beds in our rondeval are thinner, and the sea air dampens everything and makes the room smell of mildew at times. I never detect the stink of cow manure, which amazes me, because that’s what the floors are made of. Dried, it produces no dust and feels comfortable under the bare foot. The composting toilets at the lodge do stink, though, and the kerosene-heated showers produce water that you can bear to stand in naked. But it’s hardly pleasurable.

Instead, what’s fantastic about Bulungula is the way that it has allowed us to get to know a few black Africans in a context that feels respectful and mutually beneficial. The lodge is located on communal land, and villagers make up the vast majority of the staff. Moreover, the village works almost as an extension of the lodge. This is a village unlike the image I associate with that word. There’s no central cluster of buildings. Instead the 100 or so dwellings that constitute it are scattered over the hillsides, close enough to be companionable, but separated sufficiently so that you probably can’t hear even screaming arguments among your neighbors. The 800 or so people who live here are scrupulously honest, and violence against strangers is unheard of. There are no locks anywhere, and we leave our valuables out in the open. We’ve heard that this works, in part, because everyone knows everything about every person here. If someone suddenly showed up with a new cell phone or a lot of money, questions would be asked, sanctions meted out (the worst imaginable being banishment from the community.)

Although encouraged, ranging out and wandering throughout the community presents the problem that most of the villagers speak only Xhosa. But the lodge has devised activities to facilitate contact. Steve and I have participated in several. On the first day, 2 young German guys, a young “colored” South African girl, and we were led by an English-speaking 23-year-old woman named Khunjulwa to meet with the village herbalist. The seven of us trooped through the forest, where the herbalist showed us plant after plant that he uses to cure people of ailments ranging from skin rashes to toothache to mental disease. (My favorite was the little root he dug up that supposedly comes in handy when a husband is beating his wife and causing trouble within the family. We were told that if you boil it and both spouses wash with the product, domestic harmony will be restored.)

The second day, while Steve went canoeing on the river, Eva, our Swedish fellow traveler from the first day, and I set off to experience “women power” in the village. For this we had two principal guides named Khululwa and Akhoba (both in their 20s and unmarried, and each the mother of one young child. Apparently, both were able to persuade their parents to let them work (as guides) instead of getting married to whichever local guy could come up with the 10 cows that’s the standard bride price in these parts.) The women took us to Khululwa’s house, where they painted our faces with clay mixed with water in the style considered to be fashionable among women hereabouts. They also tied scarves on our heads and led us down to the stream, where we scooped some water into the plastic containers they gave us, and then tried to walk with these balanced on our heads (the way local women do). This is TOTALLY as hard to do as it looks, and predictably, I sucked at it. (Eva did better.) We also gathered wood from the nearby woods and carried those back to K’s house, where she cooked a tasty lunch of peap (the local version of polenta) topped with chicken and cabbage broth. To eat that, the women threw a bamboo mat on the floor, heaped two plates with the food, and then bade the four of us to join them on the ground and dig in, using our hands.

If these activities sound corny, it wasn’t the specific content of what we did that mattered. What counted was just having an excuse to spend some time together, having the opportunity to ask them questions about themselves and their lives, to see their day unwind as they see it. This meant a lot of time of just hanging out. Sitting on the ground and watching the animals jockey for the bits we dropped. (I was fascinated to see how the big fat hen and her chicks kept the two wistful dogs in their place; she’s lightning fast when she tries to peck out their eyes, Khululwa told me.) Watching various children wander in and pile on the single grimy bed in this room (the family’s kitchen), and watch us back, jostling each other, joking, complaining. Eva and I at times wandered into the other building where Khululwa’s mother was sewing two bags for us (made of cloth printed with images of Nelson Mandela). She worked on an ancient hand-cranked Singer. She spoke a little English and told me she was 48, the mother of 9.

Later, it struck me that I’d made a breakthrough as a traveler. In that village, I was able to flip some kind of mental switch and feel content, even serene, just being with the people there, with no real agenda and no firm sense of when the next thing would happen. And I was pleased by how quickly I could begin to discern their personalities; how quickly the generic Black African Village Women become Khululwa and Ahkoba and Khunjulwa.

This despite the fact that their lives are almost unimaginably harder than mine. All their water comes from those wells (which in recent memory killed 6 children in one bad 18-month period). They live with no electricity, which means every piece of dirty clothing has to be carried to a stream and washed there. The kids (boys, I assume) have to range out over the hills every night to round up the family’s sheep and goats and cows and corral them. It’s easy to believe the villagers are genuinely delighted to have the lodge and its visitors among them, asking silly questions, perhaps, but bringing in desperately needed cash. (Still, the main source of that comes from the men who travel up north to the gold mines. Most of the men of the village do that, the women say.)

There’s talk circulating at the moment that the government has plans to approve that hellacious road to Mthatha. It’s easy to imagine that when that happens the most appealing aspect of life here — the tight family ties and rigorous honesty of the people and freedom that comes from physical safety — may begin to break down. But a better road would mean that it won’t take 2-3 hours to get to a hospital when a child is critically ill. I feel fortunate beyond words to have visited Bulungula now, but if it’s changed in the future, who am I to complain about that?

Welcome to Bulungula

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Wednesday March 3
My scariest travel moment up to now was the time George Jemott led us to a point near the City of the Dead in Cairo where we had to run across an Egyptian freeway at rush hour. Now I’ve got a rival: the moment our Land Cruiser almost tipped over on the way to Bulungula.

The day had started out so well. The backpacker bus had picked us up in Durban as planned, and more or less on time. Although the driver must have been doing 75 miles an hour at times, he seemed sensible enough about passing other vehicles on the road. We stopped twice at roadside complexes that were shiny clean and stocked with chips flavored with chutney and tomato and other exotic flavors. And we arrived ahead of schedule at the Shell Ultra Station in Mthatha, where we debarked from the Baz Bus to look for our shuttle to Bulungula.

On the way to Mthatha, I re-read the materials that had convinced me we had to devote several days to visiting this eco-lodge. The Lonely Planet guide had called it “spectacular,” and the Rough Guide included it among the top 28 Things You Must Do in South Africa. The latter explained that the inaccessible area known as the Wild Coast (in the Transkei region) was one of the only places left in South Africa where traditional African village life still unfolded, with people living in simple round thatch-roofed buildings called rondavels. A Cape Towner by the name of Dave Martin who had worked on a variety of community-development projects had launched the Bulungula Lodge in 2005 in partnership with the Xhosa village of Nqleni. Not only was the lodge located on a cliff overlooking a breathtaking stretch of river and beach, but a stay there could also give you a unique chance to interact with black Africans living in a traditional society.

That sounded great to us, and when the Bulungula shuttle showed up around 3:15 p.m., two friendly Bulungula staffers introduced themselves and ushered Steve and me into the battered rear compartment of the Land Cruiser, along with a Swedish couple around our age, a thin young African man named Pumzileh, various backpacks and bundles and boxes of groceries and other supplies. Then we were off, jouncing over brutal terrain that we couldn’t see because the windows were all too caked with mud to allow any view of the landscape. The thought that this might last for more than 4 hours might have made me quail, but Pumzileh distracted us. He works for the Bulungula Incubator, the companion program started by Dave to launch projects to improve the village’s standard of living. One was to build a primary and preschool. Pumzileh was working on a new one having to do with planting lemongrass as a cash crop.
Since he was moving up in the organization, he had to find a replacement to fill his current job of acting as a liaison between the village and the Incubator. He favored hiring a young man working at the Shell Ultra Station in Mthatha. “I know that he is very responsible. He won the award for top cashier! Just as I did. I trained him!” But there were two other candidates, and Pumzileh said the elders in the village also needed to be consulted, as their view of the candidates might differ from his. He talked in such detail and with such earnestness about every topic that surfaced, it could have been tedious in a less talented story-teller. But he held us spellbound, describing how his gold miner father had disdained education for his children (with two wives); how his mother was surviving since his dad had died (at 56); how proud he was to be he first person from his village ever to fly (to Cape Town) and how poignantly he yearns to someday travel beyond South Africa. At one point, another turn of the conversation led him to recount for us the story of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. “I will never in my life forget how he could not wash out that blood on his hands!”

After two hours, we halted. We were at the end of the “good” road, the point behind which a 4×4 vehicle becomes essential. The owner of the grocery store there lives in a big fancy gated house, and allows travelers to park their cars within its locked premises. A young Dutch couple was supposed to be joining us there, but they’d gotten lost, so we piled out into the fading daylight to wait for them. A half dozen barefoot local kids, ranging in age from maybe 8 to 16, joked with Liesl, the Bulungula staffer, until a strengthening drizzle drove us all back into the Cruiser.

The Dutch couple finally showed up, and we set off again on a drive that Liesl said might take 45 minutes if we were lucky. We weren’t. We jounced up and down and sideways with a violence that I joked should be studied by the folks at Disney. At times, I felt us skidding, out of control, on the slick mud, and for me, the worst of it was not knowing how far we were from the edge of a precipice as the Cruiser tilted this way and that. (By then it was black outside the impenetrable windows.) When we did finally tip over farther than at any point before and then stop, and Liesl scurried back to open the door and urgently order us out, I saw that we weren’t near the edge of any cliff, a relief. Still it was cold and dark and the ground was slick, as we scrambled away from the truck to give Rufus the driver a chance to extricate it.

Somehow he succeeded. We climbed back in and maybe 15 minutes later, we pulled up at the candlelit lodge. The bad news there was that someone had forgotten to fill up the water tanks, so there would be no running water this evening. But dinner, a tasty beef stew, was ready in the large building that serves as Bulungula’s communal center. I’m sitting in it now, a day and a half later, typing. The landscape out the windows probably didn’t look any different 150 years ago. I see beach and cliffs that are at least as pretty as anything in La Jolla. But the only human structures are the few rondavels that dot the emerald hills. The interior of this room feels a bit like a time warp too — back to the 60s. The walls are painted bright salmon and rose hues and they’re decorated with images of cattle and flowers and rainbows. Mobiles made from driftwood and shells and brightly colors glass twist slowly. A driving African soundtrack plays softly. In just a few moments, Eva, the Swedish traveler with whom we shared the Land Cruiser Ride of Death, and I are doing the “women power” outing that supposedly will teach us how to carry water from the well on our heads. That’s how people get their drinking water in the village, but here at the lodge it sometimes comes out of taps.