Saying Goodbye to Indecision

Something not many people guess when looking at me is that I am a huge softy!

When I boarded that train to take me from Johannesburg to Capetown I found myself an empty carriage and I sat in there, alone, and cried for at least the first hour.

I couldn’t decide if leaving had been the right decision. I had this ticket booked for well over a week but right up until 30 minutes before departure I didn’t think that I would actually be getting on that train. Whenever my new friends had asked me when I was leaving Jozzi I had replied with ‘I don’t know’, and I didn’t know, but what I should have said was ‘I have a ticket booked for the 7^th, but knowing me and my spontaneity (read: indecisiveness) those plans could easily change’. But I didn’t say what I should have said and so I ended up leaving without a proper goodbye to anyone.

The morning of the 7^th, after the lesbian First Friday night, I woke up with a horrible hangover and an even more horrible decision to make. I hadn’t actually thought I would be leaving, but for some reason that morning I was plagued with my self-imposed pressure to keep moving, keep having adventures, “be grateful for the time you had and move on” I told myself.

I messaged Chuck, what does he think I should do? But he didn’t reply, I knew he wasn’t a morning person. Rudy was away, he’d given me the keys to his house and an invite to stay while he was gone, but he wasn’t around to bounce ideas off. I packed my bags. But I still didn’t know if I was leaving or not. I cleaned Rudy’s house. I still didn’t know. I walked to the shop and bought a bottle of wine and a plant to say thank you to Rudy, even though I still didn’t know if I was staying or leaving.

I called the train company to try and change tickets, but that didn’t go so well. I messaged mum, what did she think? She said I should go. I called my girlfriend, she thought I should stay. I messaged Ange, she seemed ok with me leaving…. The mixed messages were making it worse.

Then Chuck called, he said he’d be over in 5 minutes.

We went to Xai Xai, I ordered a tea, he ordered a beer and he showed me his blog. He had written one about me before I went to Lesotho and had asked me to write a blog response. So I did. Even though I had never written a blog, or anything really, before.

He showed me all of the people in Australia who had logged on to read my response and he told me I have “pull” that I need to trust in myself and that I should blog this trip. He said some more kind things and I put my sunglasses on to hide my tears.

I called the train company again and finally got through. I could re-book my train for Tuesday which is perfect because Rudy gets home Monday so I would have time to say goodbye to everyone properly. I was told that I only had an hour to get to the station to change my ticket.

Chuck drove me there and while he waited in the car I waited in line. I got a message from Mum which again challenged my decision. She said that she read on my Facebook wall that Marie, my friend from Kruger would only be in Cape Town for one last night and to see her I’d have to leave then…. Argh! What should I do?

So I did the only thing I could think of… I flipped a coin.

Impala head says I go to Cape Town, strange pattern says I stay in Jozzi.

I flipped the coin.

It landed on the Impala head.

I walked back to the car. I still didn’t know if I had made the right decision. I figured I would never know, or that there is no right or wrong decision anyway.

I hugged Chuck goodbye. Twice.

He said that it was his turn to cry now.

I turned my back and walked away.

I sat in the empty compartment beside the one I was going to sleep in that night, I could hear the three women I was sharing it with nattering away but every part of me felt shit. I hate saying goodbyes. I could think of nothing worse than saying goodbye to friends I will possibly never see again.

I needed to call my girlfriend and we spoke for two hours until I ran out of credit. But she made me feel better. I think she was surprised at how sad I was and how frazzled making that decision made me; she has always been a lot more sure of herself than I am in situations like this. Perhaps it was a build up of many things, the whole last two months and how constantly overwhelmed I had felt. Or maybe I had just gotten attached to a place and a time and I didn’t want to say goodbye. When the phone call ended I thought about how much I missed her and that I really can’t wait to see her again. Though nearly half the trip was gone already each day seemed to be going by faster than the day before and I had a lot more places to see. I decided that maybe I didn’t make the ‘wrong decision’ after all. It wasn’t necessarily the ‘right’ decision either but it wasn’t ‘wrong’.

Packing Up and Moving On

The rest of my Lesotho horse trek was much the same as that first day. My inner thighs were tenderised meat, my quadriceps were burning from holding my own weight, my skin was chaffed or red raw from the sun and the dirt and sweat were caked to my skin. But the scenery continued to get more and more majestic, the mountains got taller, the sky got bigger, the air got fresher.

As we passed small villages the children would run alongside the horses holding their hands out for money or sweets, but they did it fairly half-heartedly, not as though they actually expected to get anything, it was said more as though it were a greeting than a request or demand.

When we stopped for lunch one day, two young shepherd boys came and sat beside us and I shared my lunch with them. The four of us sat in total silence at the side of the river. I was starting to enjoy the company of children, in Ghana it was the same, not like children in Australia, here they are polite and respectful.

On the bus on the way back across the border I sat up in the front seat beside a boy of about 7 or 8 years old. He fell asleep and his body slumped against mine, his face buried in my side… it was blissful. I sat there completely still, hoping he would stay like that for the whole trip.

Waiting for the Christian Intercape bus to go back to Johannesburg I met a preacher name Johan – a soft talker with a thick accent which meant he had to repeat everything he said three times. He bought me a coffee, which I turned into a really awkward event as accepting things from people, has always been hard for me. Eventually I took it, wishing I had acted ‘normal’ for once. He insisted on hearing about my travels and we talked a bit about family and love. He said that it was good what I was doing now but that one day I should get married “because nobody should grow old alone”. I wondered if that is what happens when you become a professional Catholic, forced to grow old alone.

I told him that I don’t think I am completely un-marry-able and he laughed.

I took my seat on the bus and peered at the book the man beside me was reading ‘Understanding the Bible’. I leaned over and read a paragraph. It explained that one of the reasons god continued to create man was to carry on his fathers business. It instructed a son that to follow in your earthly fathers business is the same as following in your heavenly fathers footsteps.

I looked around the bus, found an empty seat and moved.

At the next stop I bought a phone recharge card at the Spar supermarket and on the receipt it said:

“For the word of the Lord is right and true; he is faithful in all he does. The lord loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of his unfailing love. Psalm 33:4-5”

I think a lesson was being rammed down my throat here, and wondered if the purpose of my trip was to learn a little more tolerance.

When the bus pulled into the main station in Johannesburg I saw the exact two staff members, sitting in the exact same spot as when the bus departed a few days earlier. How cruel it felt, like time was playing games with me. For a split second I wondered if Lesotho had even existed for me, the mountains, the villages, the shoulder-shaking dancers in that little tin bar.

…….

Lisa, Ange and Lyn took me out to a lesbian night called ‘First Friday’. We sat and ate pizza and watched a very talented, very funny, very crass, drag queen from the US called Scary Mary.

I met a girl that night who told me a story I wish wasn’t true.

When she was in Sydney for the 2000 Olympic Games she was in an ice-cream shop on Bondi Beach with her family and was refused service by the owner who said “we don’t serve Aborigines”

I was in disbelief! In Bondi? In the year 2000? During the Olympics when people from all over the world were there? Lisa said to her “but you don’t even look like an Australian Aboriginal” and I figured to a racist it probably didn’t really matter.

I told her that if she ever comes back to Australia, and I wouldn’t blame her if she never does, but I would show her that not all Australians are ignorant, racist pricks.

The whole time I had spent in South Africa I was hyper-aware of race issues and inequalities, when really, I should have been this aware at home, in my own backyard.

In Rome I was refused service in a café for being/looking gay. In Turkey I had been told off by a man for drinking a beer “a woman has no pride is she drinks alcohol” he told me… prejudice and discrimination is a world-wide issue for sure. In some places it is just better hidden than in others. At least here, in South Africa, people are aware of it and talk about it, and some people, like the people I hung out with, made small gestures to actively try to bridge that gap and make amends for history.

A little village on the side of a mountain

I was walking like John Wayne after six hours on a horse. One side of my face and both hands were red raw from fresh sunburn. I was caked in dust that had clung to my sweaty skin. I was sore, tired and dirty but realising that I would feel far worse the next day when I had to do it all again I decided not to let it bother me.

I had a guide named Michael and three horses, one for me, one for him and one for my luggage, including all the food I would need for the next three nights. The day had been somewhat divine: riding past cornfields, past lone shepherds watching over their flock of sheep or herd of cattle, riding waist deep through running rivers, over mountains, down steep rocky hill-sides and past small villages of no more than a half dozen huts. The sound of cow bells bouncing off the sides of mountains was only ever broken by the occasional child on the back of a donkey calling out “money money, give me money”.

That night we rode into a small village perched on the edge of a mountain where I was shown the hut that I would be sleeping in. I was anxious about where my guide had planned to sleep, it was only really then that the reality hit me – no one in the world knew where I was… I didn’t know where I was, and potentially I was sharing a hut with a man I had only just met. Even though we had spent the day together he had barely uttered a word. His English was not very good, but I suspect quiet was his preferred way of being. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, my mum’s advice before I had left home was to push a piece of furniture up against my bedroom door at night. Well my sister Kelly’s advice had been to always sleep with a knife. That night I took my sister’s advice.

I didn’t really meet the other people in the village. They seemed disinterested in my presence completely. Before dinner though my guide Michael asked one of the girls there to take me on a walk to the waterfall, I knew it was going to cost me money, but I felt like I couldn’t really say no. We walked in silence to the waterfall, I guess that it was about 6km away, and most of it required bush-bashing and rock climbing. I didn’t mind not being able to talk until she started collecting local plants and I was dying to know what she was going to use them for: food or medicine? I would probably never know.

At the waterfall we took our shoes off and paddled our feet. Once again I used my tattoos, piercings and digital camera to transcend the language barrier.

We got back to the village after dark and by the light of some candles I had brought along with me I cooked some rice on a camping stove for both my guide and I. We ate out under the stars in silence and I was calmed by nature at its best – the fresh air, the stillness, the energy from the mountains around us, the smell of fresh air, dirt and cow shit. The village had no lights and no running water. Off on distant mountains I could see specks of orange lights from the fires of other villages, occasionally I could hear the sound of drums carried on the breeze.

I was getting used to the lack of conversation now, I found the silence comforting. An old lady was squatting in the doorway of the hut next to mine picking leaves off bunches of plant. It was too dark to see what sort of a plant it was, so I assumed it was the morning’s breakfast.

I sat and pondered how surreal it all was. Soon enough I would be back in Sydney, the traffic jams, the shopping centres, the night-time lit bright by street lights, the fast pace, the long working days. And all this would still be here. This quiet little village will still be perched on the side of this mountain, the villagers would still herd their cattle by day and silently pick their marijuana leaves at night, staring at the mountains that surround them. And Rudy will get his pilots licence, and Charles will keep blogging, Lyn and Ange will get married, Davy would graduate school, Assane will sell his jewellery and one day maybe fall in love, Sammy will soon have to plant his corn, Kingsley will no doubt find another girl to send poetry to, David will finish his film and life will go on. Each new day will come and go and things will change but also things will stay the same. All of the experiences I have had, the people I met will only exist in memory, in the diaries I keep and the photos I take, and that is just how life is.

After hours of silently pondering life and my travels, Michael got up and pulled a mattress out of one hut and placed it in mine. To my relief he left me alone in there and although I slept with a knife under my pillow I quickly fell into a deep and peaceful sleep.

I awoke just before the break of dawn, heated up some instant coffee on the camp stove and sat alone on the side of the mountain watching the sun rise.

When the old lady emerged shortly after sun up she was holding the branches she had been stripping the night before…. Now I could clearly see what it was – marijuana. Highly amused I pointed at the branches in hand and gestured for her to show me where she got them from. She took me down the hill a little further where fenced off garden of about 10m x 10m was full of healthy looking, thriving marijuana plants.

An old man wrapped in his blanket was gently tending to the garden. I was surprised he let me take a photo. I wondered if they sold it or if it was just for their use only. It was not the only time in my life I wished that I smoked weed (I lived in Amsterdam for a year!).

Lesotho: 'the Kingdom of Heaven'

On the morning I left for Lesotho I was in my usual frantic and un-organised flurry of mess and confusion. Running late for the bus didn’t help the fact that I was already feeling stressed about this trip. I had to figure out a series of different buses, face another boarder crossing (I was still traumatised from Benin, Togo and Ghana’s borders), learn a new currency, and grapple with a new language. I think the safari tour and the relaxing week in Jo’Burg had softened me.

I made the bus on time, which was actually unfortunate because it meant that I didn’t miss the pre-departure prayer. The bus was only half full and I loved having the whole seat to myself until a white woman boarded the bus. She looked around at all the empty seats before choosing the one beside me… was it a coincidence that she picked a seat beside another white person?

She turned out to be a psychologist for the South African Police Service: she worked on the really nasty rape and murder cases. I told her that seeing as I am travelling alone I didn’t want all the gruesome details, but I did ask her if she thinks that crime in Johannesburg is really worse than everywhere else in the world. She said that she doesn’t work on common crimes like theft and assault so can’t comment on those but as far as murders go, in South Africa most cases are one off offenders and serial offenders are not common like in the US. I was hesitant to ask her too many questions that would clash with her workplace confidentiality agreements but it didn’t take her long to pull out her Blackberry and show me recent case notes. She was investigating serious crime in 14 year old boys and found that they all showed positive on tests for marijuana, alcohol and heroin.

Before getting off the bus she gave me two pieces of advice:

1)      “You can’t catch minibuses, they are not safe, they are all black people on there…” then she added, “…though I’ve never been on one”

2)      Get a taxi instead, though make sure it is a white driver, it will cost more to get a white driver, but black people are not safe”

Needless to say I never took her advice and I was never unsafe in a bus or a taxi.

I arrived in Lesotho: the “kingdom of heaven”. More specifically I headed straight for Malealea, a village of about 400 people that was surrounded by mountains. As soon as I checked my bags into a lodge I went out for a walk. I could feel how fresh the mountainous air was and all I could hear was the distant sound of cow-bells chiming.  Everyone I passed stopped to greet me, whether they called out and waved from a distant hill or stopped in front of me to attempt hello’s. One woman who shook my hand said with a huge smile: “we are poor here, so poor, but look around you… it is so beautiful that we are all happy.”

Lesotho looked more like West Africa than South Africa to me. Modest brick and mud houses, dirt roads, humble shepherds wrapped in blankets and tin, shanty shops. But it seemed clean and peaceful, possibly because it was significantly less populated. I was aware that over 35% of the population lived under the poverty line, but it seemed like people in Lesotho were less desperate than people in Togo and Ghana.

I continued my walk for a couple of hours up hill until I reached a hand-painted sign declaring ‘The Gates of Paradise’, aptly named I thought with 360 degree views of mountains as far as the eye could see. The now setting sun was throwing a purple/pink light across the sky and I stopped breathless (from the uphill walk and the beauty) and swore to myself I will not live in cities for much longer.

At the lodge I met a 58 year old British world-traveller named Charles. He had some fun travel stories which was good considering I couldn’t get a word in so at least he wasn’t boring. He had been in Lesotho a week already and had arranged for a local guy to cook him dinner at his house that night. I invited myself to his dinner and tagged along beside him in the dark night of a so far moonless sky. Usually I would find stumbling along dark foreign soils in small quiet villages at least a little bit creepy but here it was just harmonious. We arrived at the man’s house which was a modest stone hut, lit by a dim lantern that cast warm yellow shadows. It was sparsly furnished with the basics - a bed, a table, a couch and two extra chairs. He left us alone in there to go and collect our dinner from his mother and sister’s kitchen… typical African male, earning money from the hard work of his female family members.

Dinner was the Lesotho equivalent of fufu with two pieces of chicken and ‘vegetables’ which was remarkably similar to very salty frozen spinach. I really enjoyed it.

After a fairly silent meal I convinced both men to escort me to the local bar. It was a tin shed with a bar along one wall, protected by a serious looking steel cage, a pool table in the middle of the room and about twenty guys loitering around. The guys were all pretty young and only a few of them were clutching a 750ml bottle of beer, I felt safe by the lack of drunkenness. The traditional music was blaring through a modern sound system; the drum beat was reverberating through the ground. Watching the guys dancing was addictive, I couldn’t turn away. Wrapped in the traditional blankets that Basotho people are famous for, they would shake and bob their shoulders. Sometimes they would shake one shoulder and keep the other still, but always the shoulders were shaking and bobbing. There were two men in particular really getting into it, they would shuffle up and down the bar in opposite directions, always bobbing and shaking their shoulders, beneath the blankets, clutching on to their wooden stave. When they would cross in the middle they would stop standing face to face, slowly bow to each other, shaking their shoulders the whole time. Then they would continue on shuffling and bobbing and shaking their shoulders to the end of the bar, turn around, and shuffle and shake back to the middle of the bar to meet again. They always kept in time with the music, and somehow they managed to make a potentially awkward dance-move look sexy and soulful.

This bar and the lodge I was staying in were the only two places in the village with electricity, so this was the place for the locals to come and meet. I wondered where all the women went. It was not solemn and depressing like the Shebeen in Johannesburg, and it was not seedy like the bar in the slum in Accra. People were sober and full of energy. The smell of body odour was pungent, but not totally repulsive. It suited the rawness of the surroundings.

Getting to Know Jozzi

Rudy’s house was a mansion!

Well technically it was not a mansion, but it was twice as big as anything I had ever lived in and gigantic compared to any house I’d stepped foot into in Africa.

The first morning when I woke up in the spare bedroom at Rudy’s (who I’d just met) house I couldn’t stop giggling. I had been staying at a backpackers in a dorm room of ten beds, where the mattress was so bad my back was bruised from the wooden base, I would sink into the middle with either side of the mattress springing up vertically beside me. Now, I was in a king sized bed, in my own room, with its own TV, with my own bathroom, in a two story house with a private bar, a private swimming pool, a cleaner and a security guard asleep at the entrance. I couldn’t believe my luck.

Over the next few days I settled right in to Jo’burg and entertained the idea of moving in permanently. My instant liking to the place came as a bit of a surprise. Jo’Burg was only ever meant to be a stop-over, it was a launching pad for Kruger and Lesotho, but I had never planned to spend more than a night or two at a time there. It isn’t exactly a pretty city, the public transport is horrendous and the crime rate reputedly very high (apparently there are an average of 1500 murders in Jo’Burg every year; Sydney by comparison has an average of 40). But I never felt threatened there. Even in the central bus station, where all the locals warned me not to go, I didn’t encounter any problems. I ended up in that bus station nearly everyday, and not once did I ever see another white person. I fast made friends with a man there who helped me on the right bus on the first day, after my third visit we were greeting each other with the local hand shake: you shake hands, hook fingers, and slide your thumb against theirs like your clicking fingers. I adopted an ‘I’m a local don’t mess with me’ stance and walked with a long confident stride and a direct gaze that I had hoped masked the ‘I’m really a lost and vulnerable tourist’ truth. I also always made sure my tattoos were visible – a fairly universal guarantee of some degree of street cred.

After a boozy night at Xai Xai one Friday I walked back to Rudi’s home at midnight on my own. When I had told my new friends about it the next day they were horrified. I was reprimanded and warned not to ever do it again. It was interesting that when I had mentioned crime rates and safety in the city before they had all agreed that they felt safe, but they lived behind electric fences, paid for private security and NEVER walked after dark. Many public buildings had ‘no guns allowed’ signs on the entrance which I had thought was an overreaction until a group of guys tried to chat me up one night by flashing me the pistols they had tucked in their jackets.

Jo’burg intrigued me and every person I met was barraged with questions about their views of the place. When I met a girl named Liezel, I said that South Africa seemed a world apart from the rest of Africa, she replied: “On the surface it is, but when you look at the politics, the corruption and the education system it is not so advanced… people are not taught to think critically here… this is Africa and things just go around in circles”.

A man named Eddie told me that two things were important for black and white people here. For white people first it is what car you drive and second it is where you live. For black people first it is what car you drive, second it is what clothes you wear.

I had found the people in J’Burg to be more ‘real’ than that. At least the ones I met anyway. A couple of them seemed hyper aware of the racial inequality and obviously made an effort to pay the black guys who took it upon themselves to watch their parked car for them, even though it was obviously a pointless job.

I asked Liezel why she stayed in South Africa and her reply was “because change is happening and revolution is in the air”.

There was one day in particular when I spent the morning at a local organic growers markets buying overpriced cheese and then doing the rounds of local artists studio/gallery space. After that Ange (one of Chuck’s friends I met at Xai Xai) picked me up in her new red Dodge and we went to a francophone music festival. The crowd there was a good mix of black and white, gay and straight, male and female, it was trendy yet simultaneously relaxed.  After that we met up with Ange’s girlfriend Lyn and we saw a lesbian film at the Out in Africa festival.

On another occasion Ange, Lyn and another girl Lisa took me to the Rosebank markets selling everything from ancient African carvings to modern designer cuff-links. We then went on to possibly the coolest spot in town which is an old warehouse complex converted into food markets, cafes a bar and artist spaces. We ate veggie burgers and drank specialty beers and I felt like I was back in London or Berlin. That was one of my favourite days of the whole trip, the girls made me laugh and I felt like my soul was re-nourished after a frustrating month in West Africa.

Some days it felt like I could have been home in Sydney, I was often doing exactly what I would have been doing at the same time at home. It was a bitter-sweet feeling, I had gotten the holiday-in-my-holiday I was seeking when I flew from Ghana to J’Burg. I was happy and relaxed, yet on the flip-side feeling like I was at home made me miss my girlfriend and my family even more, I was no longer distracted by concerns over where I would sleep and what I could eat. I was also starting to worry that I had gotten too comfortable here, that I was no longer embarking on the adventurous journey I had set out to do. And so I told myself that I had to keep moving, I had to keep exploring and I had to keep challenging myself.

Chuck V

“For kai

By thine face thou shalt be trusted

By thine gait thou shall be known

Chuck V”

My angels, fate, luck, good energy…whatever it was, were totally on my side again the next night.

I was sitting in my dorm room reading and thought I really should go out and find something to do. I was acutely aware of Johannesburg’s violent reputation, and had listened intently to the girls on the safari talking about their experiences of getting mugged several times in this city. But lying on my bed was not going to make for a good adventure story. Of course, I didn’t actually know where to go or what to do. The only thing that I knew was on was the Out In Africa film festival… it didn’t actually sound like an adventure, but at least I was going to be surrounded by my own kind.

I walked to 7^th street to get a cab, but for the first time on the continent of Africa I couldn’t get one. There were always taxi’s, but for some reason that night, a Friday night, there were none, the only two I saw available didn’t pull over for me. I was going to be early anyway, so I decided I may as well have a pre-film beer. I stopped at the most relaxed looking bar – Xai Xai. I didn’t even know that there was a man sitting at the table behind me until I hear him mumble. After three attempts at ciphering through his Afrikaans accent to deconstruct what the sounds meant, I finally figured out he was saying “come chat”. Without too much hesitation I took the empty seat at the table beside him.

At first I found him, Chuck, a bit reserved and critical and I felt judged by his long silences after I answered his questions as truthfully as I could:

“Why are you here?”

“I just kinda landed here on a whim”

An intimidating silence

“Why are you travelling?”

“Cause I don’t know what else to do with my life and Africa seemed like a good place to think about it”

There was that silence again… though now I started to wonder if it was just a thoughtful pause?

“What did I do in Ghana?”

“Studied people… mostly”

“What is your calling in life?”

“That’s what I’d like to know… I have a bit of a shop-around problem. Always looking for perfection and never, of course, finding it”.

He had a very dry sense of humour and a cynicism I was drawn to.

“What do you do with yourself?” I asked him this time.

“I’m a freelancer… another word for unemployed”

He was a writer. He had only started writing a few years ago, but I guess he had found his calling. The TV show he was translating for wasn’t airing anymore and he lost his main source of income, now he was an avid blogger. I had never read a blog before, and he pulled out his laptop to show me a few of his. I read his three most recent, and although one commented on ‘fat’ women I did think that the rest were very good.

He pointed out the two owners of the bar “they are lesbitarians” he said “… and judging by your gait I would say you are too”. I thought about the night in the Canadian embassy where my ‘gait’ was picked up on straight away. But throughout the rest of Africa, even in the Kruger, it hadn’t crossed people’s mind that I even might be.

He drew something out in me which compelled me to be completely honest with him…

“Actually I don’t really know if I am” I confided.

I told him that I had been dating women for ten years now, but that in the last couple of years I had only found a very small number of women attractive and was instead constantly turned on by men. He asked how old I was.

I told him my theory that because I am an animal, and animals are designed to reproduce (whether they can or not or choose to or not) and I am at reproducing age,  so like all other animals I subconsciously am seeking out someone to mate with, and my animalistic instincts are picking up male pheromones.  He said he was thinking the same thing and that is why he asked my age.

He called over the two bar owners with a similar gait to mine and they joined us with a round of shots. They were outspoken, assertive, animated and funny. He spoke to them in Afrikaans and although I didn’t understand a word I knew he was telling them about my current sexuality dilemma.

Chuck asked where I was staying and then said “keep hanging around these parts and by tomorrow you will have a house to stay in free”.

“By tomorrow!” I replied “you’re a bit ambitious aren’t you!”

Then his friend Rudy came and joined us and within minutes of meeting me he had offered me his spare room. No prompting from chuck, just a flat-out offer. Was Chuck my guardian angel? I accepted through throbbing hesitations. I get shy and anxious in all social situations, especially when I know I will have to be social for extended periods of time. I promised that I would cook for him in return.

One of Chuck’s blogs that I read was titled ‘The Darkie Was Right’, referring to a black man as a ‘darkie’. I asked him if that was PC or offensive. He said he had asked plenty of black people and they were fine with it. We talked about the undeniable racial inequalities in South Africa and he called the (black) waitress over to our table to ask her opinion. She said yes there were racial inequalities but that it was slowly changing.

“Just look over there” she pointed to the semi-full seating area beside us.

“I see!” I said noticing that all of the patrons, except one, were white and all of the staff were black.

“It is good” she said confusing the hell out of me. How is that good? I thought. I looked back again and noticed what it was she had been referring to. At one of the tables, the only black patron was having a romantic dinner with his white date. I saw it now, although it was an anomaly it was also a glimmer of hope.

Chuck suggested we take a walk down 7^th street. “This block and the next block are the ‘darkies’ areas” he said. I peered into all the bars and restaurants on those blocks and he was very clearly right - 90% or more of the people in those bars were dark skinned. We walked down the street further to the ‘whities’ blocks. There 99% of the people in the bars and restaurants were white. Across the road were ‘darkies’ bars again and down the street further ‘whities’ bars.

“Fascinating!” I exclaimed.

I consider Australia to be a very racist country but it’s harder to tell than by just glancing into a café or bar. In Australia you have to read the statistics on health, education and prisons to really see the racial divides. Or maybe not… maybe I am just so used to my home that I can’t see it as clearly as I see it in a new place?

After my lesson in racially social divides we wandered back to Xai Xai where everyone was sufficiently liquored up and dancing around the small bar. In Sydney it would have been considered tacky and trashy, but I thought it was fun and even allowed myself to be pulled up onto the dance floor.

I’m not sure if Chuck just relaxed around me or got drunk, or both, but he told me I have a ‘trusting face’ and that I remind him of Johannes Vermeer's painting Girl With a Pearl earring and at the end of the night he handed me that note:

“For kai

By thine face thou shalt be trusted

By thine gait thou shall be known

Chuck V”

I laughed and I loved it!

Trendy Melville

The afternoon that I got back to Johannesburg from the Kruger safari I decided to take a stroll along the trendy 7^th street. I had stayed in Soweto for the few days before the tour but had heard that Melville was actually the place to be. I was dying for a coffee but as it turned out the whole of Melville had a power shortage, something I found out was actually fairly common.

The street was quiet and I wondered if it was always like this or if the black-out had scared people away. I passed a cute little café called Love and Revolution and saw its advertisements for yoga and fair trade coffee… definitely the sort of place I would frequent, definitely not the sort of place I pictured finding in Africa. I peered in to the semi-darkness to be greeted by the owner and his manager. They offered me plunger coffee and a seat next to them, they also offered me use of their laptop and an invite to a dinner they were holding later that week.

The manager Kendall was an adorable gay guy and banter with him was fun and comfortable. He told me about the Out In Africa festival that was on (a gay and lesbian film festival) and said he’d take me to see one… only I was too shy to say yes straight away and spent the next hour trying to turn the conversation back onto the film so that he’d invite me again and this time I could say yes… he didn’t invite me again but at least I had said yes to his dinner.

The lights came back on and the café started to fill up with young trendy hipsters so I left.

Landing in South Africa

I had only decided to go to South Africa a week before I got there. I had been in West Africa for a month and needed a holiday from the holiday. West Africa had tired me out and frustrated me. I was craving reliable electricity, hot running water and most of all vegetables! In the month that I had spent in Ghana/Togo/Benin I could have counted on my fingers how many vegetables I had eaten.

I got off the plane in Johannesburg at midday, by 2 pm I was sitting at a café, a fresh fruit juice in front of me and a salad of mixed raw vegetables on the way. The menu had described the salad including red capsicum, green beans, boiled eggs, tomatoes, cucumbers, olives, avocado and spanish onion. When it arrived it only had capsicum, tomatoes, lettuce, and spanish onion.  I think this lay the foundations for what my opinion of South Africa would evolve into. On the surface it is developed and Westernised, but underneath is a very complex reality. It’s not about having to eat salad with no avocado and olives, it’s about a veneer of refinement covering up a stained reality. It may be a fairly wealthy and modernised country, but it is still Africa. Of course, it could have just been a poor choice of café, and I often struggle to keep my opinions on a place and people neutral, but South Africa is an interesting country with some really tricky, intricate issues.

I was looking forward to doing the touristy thing, so on that very first day, before I even checked into the backpacker’s hostel I had booked a full day bicycle tour of the infamous township Soweto and a four-day camping safari of Kruger National park to spot the big 5. No tour is usually ‘my thing’ but I couldn’t go all the way to Africa and not go on safari!

The bicycle tour turned out to be surprisingly fun and fascinating. It was led by two young guys who had grown up in Soweto and there was just four of us on the tour – a really cool middle-aged couple from the Alice Springs who were moving to Mozambique to start a tour company aimed at educating and employing some of the poorest locals there and a British woman who complained the whole way – about the heat, the hills, the food.

They estimate anywhere between 1million and 5 million people live in Soweto, of course the majority of the people are black with a minority coloured, and rumour has it there is one white person living there. The guides taught us some of the hand signs used to indicate which part of Soweto you are from, and some of the slang such as “hola seven” which means hello for seven days, the purpose being for the next week you are excused from saying hello to the same people. We stopped at a Shebeen (an illegal drinking spot) which was utterly depressing. The dark, hot tin-shed was full of  dopey drunk men and it was only 10am. These men sat there all day and most of the night drinking potent home-made beer which smelled sour and putrid. At the next stop I really challenged my vegetarianism by trying a local delicacy – the roof of a cow’s mouth. It was slightly rubbery and covered in soft white spikes that resembled an echidna’s back. It’s ironic that once people ate this part of the animal because it was all the scraps they could afford, and now it’s considered a delicacy.

Our final stop was at the site of the Soweto Children’s Uprising. In 1976 thousands of school children gathered in the street for a peaceful protest in opposition to the education system at the time which basically taught black children to become servants (clearly the issue was far more complex, my apologies for my crude lack of explaination). The police showed up and opened fire on the crowd of children who began to flee. In total 700 children were killed from bullet wounds to the back of them, and over 4000 children were injured. The Hector Pieterson memorial gave me chills… how can this have happened only 36 years ago!!

The next day I left for the Kruger National Park, one of Africa’s most famous game reserves after the Serengeti. When I first saw the 8 other girls boarding the bus I thought I was in for a painful 4 days with the sort of people I usually take great efforts to avoid: white heterosexual girls who take themselves too seriously, wear fake tans backpacking and complain about the milk not being low fat. But thank God I was saved by two girls from Newcastle, England who were down-to-earth trash bags with a great sense of humour. Whilst the other six girls barely said a word but demanded to be waited on hand and foot, the three of us had fun sitting up the back of the Jeep and drinking at the bar each night.

On our first night camping, before the safari had really began, I left the two Brits at the bar to catch at least a few hours sleep. I stopped to look up at the stars – few things are more humbling than staring up into a sky blanketed with bright stars.

As I stood there a loud clomping sound snapped me out of my trance and a heavy mass of a shadow grunting fiercely bucked past me less than three metres away: a wildebeest. It scarred the wits out of me and I stood frozen and amazed. The next two nights at the campsite I was confronted by warthogs, one who began to charge at me for getting too close with my camera. But that wasn’t nearly as frightening as the lion footprints I found circled around my tent on the second morning. One of the staff confirmed that yes they were lion prints, and in fact a couple had been spotted just on the edge on the camping grounds. Needless to say it took me a few hours to get to sleep that night as I was convinced that every sound I heard was a hungry lion.

On the first day of the safari, within five minutes of entering the park we saw two leopards – apparently one of the hardest animals to spot. And we didn’t just spot them off in the distance, they slank around the car, staring at us with as much interest as we were staring at them.

We spotted everything I wanted to see and more, most of them in the first day. Elephants, giraffes, zebras, bushbucks, nyalas, wildebeest, buffalo, jackals, eagles, monkeys, tortoises, impalas, kudus, waterbucks, wild dogs (also one of the hardest to spot), hyenas, warthogs, hippos both in and out of the water, six lioness’ (though quite a distance away), two cheetahs playing under a tree, baboons, and even a white rhino and her baby. We saw the rhinos on a night tour which was one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life. The majestic looking mother with her almost cuddly baby calf who you could hear suckling. Standing between us and her baby for protection she graciously stood still so we could all get a good look. In a wall-less, roof-less 4x4 we bounced around the blackened wild, a plethora of animals hidden in the shadows. At one stage a heard of a hundred or more buffalo swarmed around the car making it impossible to move.  I couldn’t make out their shape but was swamped by the grunting sounds and their smell and yelped when a few of them butted into the side of the car.Of course, my camera died after snapping the first shot of the night!

I thought a safari would be ‘see over there? Off in the distance! That blob of brown! It is either a cheetah or a rock…’ But it was not like that at all. The animals were often right beside the car, I could see their eyelashes, hear their breath, smell them (especially the elephants!) it was incredible! By lunch the first day I had seen so many elephants, giraffes and zebras that I barely bothered to turn my head to look at them.

The one image that really struck me was the vastness of the sky, starting from a white stripe across the horizon then blending every shade of blue to become a deep royal blue overhead. It calmed me and made me feel inferior.

On the last morning I got up at the dark hour of 5am as usual and assumed I was the first one up until off in the distance I could see that the light was still on in the bar. I went over to discover Lisa, one of the British girls, was still up drinking with a few of the male staff. I decided to join them and ended up having a very interesting conversation with two of them who were in charge of anti-poaching security. Their job is to set up cameras, follow tracks and leads and set traps to catch poachers.

“What do you do if you catch them?” I asked

“We shoot their dogs first then we tie their hands and feet together, shove their head in a warthog hole and shoot them three times in the arse” the head of security replied.

I was sceptical, but all of the staff assured me that they are shot and killed one way or another. I asked the guys what the law says about them shooting poachers and they said the law states you can protect yourself with equal force and if caught a poacher will shoot at them, therefore shooting him back is considered self defence.  This I find believable. Plus the bonus for them is that they have public support – the South African majority does not support poaching.

When one of the guys said “the kaffirs deserve to be shot” I nearly choked on my own tongue. South Africa’s battle with racism is a well known issue, but on the surface it seemed to be a lot less lawless than the rest of Africa, so the image I had of these white guys trekking the safari to shoot at black guys was totally surreal. I hate poachers, but I am not sure how I feel about shooting them. I do think that anyone who trades in illegal ivory should be shot, and anyone who buys illegal ivory too, but unfortunately the ones doing the poaching are very poor, and thus black, locals with not too many choices, and the ones out there trying to shoot them are the white guys with the regular income.

The race based inequalities in South Africa are striking and it didn’t take me long to feel horribly uncomfortable. My table was always cleared by a black person, my bed was always made by a black person, the toilets were always cleaned by a black person. The road works were done by black people, utes were always filled with black workers. I paid a lot of attention to the people around me, I noticed that sometimes the expensive cars were driven by black people not just white people, and that men in suits were sometimes black as well as white. It seemed to me that it is possible for black people in South Africa to be well off, but I never once saw an example of a white person living in a town ship or doing menial labour.