I drove south through the park and made my way
out of the wilderness. The land became
great hills, almost mountainous. Rows
and rows of wrapped banana trees, tea plantations and grid-planted evergreens
carpeted over and down the slopes. I
became reaccustomed to South African traffic: a continual passing and gaining
of everyone on everyone else. Reminded
me of India, but this was tame compared to the triple-lane games of chicken
trucks would force me into on the old N-17 on India’s western coast. I snacked on springbok jerky and followed the
signs south to the airport in Nelspruit.
“Well Hello, Indiana Jones,” the ticket agent
said, full of south African lilt. I laughed.
“Any non-stops to Cape Town?”
“Just missed it, I can connect you through
Joburg?”
“Sounds good, let’s do it.”
I had a couple hours to kill before my flight to
Joburg. And I started to think how all
my time in South Africa had really been among other tourists and animals. I was going to Cape Town now, and being from
anywhere else, all I heard about was violence and crime.
Fear is a funny kind of trip, a very convincing seriousness,
most often unjust - a precaution. But,
none of us get out of this circus alive, so most all fear is a waste of energy,
building for us a pile of regret: the
un-attempted adventures. Wonderful
dreams, unrealized, become a disease. I
wonder: do people become bitter because of the weighty obligations that befall
them, or because of the wonderful things those burdens hold them from? Is it too much to say all ill and evil is
rooted in the good once had, possibly had, taken away or unrealized - only
dreamed? Regret is looking backwards,
fear is looking forwards and I see them working together, being really only one
thing, pinning us from potential.
I’ll let no flimsy feeling convince me of
shadows and safety. And besides, when
they finally make the movie, it’ll need a good ending so I figure I got to go
out and find it.
That all being said, there is the worried
day-dream of getting mugged. Maybe I
should buy a knife, just in case. Do I
really know how to handle a knife? Quick
legs are probably always a better bet.
Still, it makes you wonder, especially considering the Oscar case that
has ballooned this spring in South Africa. . .
Only one way to find out.
I got into Cape Town late, too dark to really
see anything. I rented a car and headed
south on the highway into Cape Town.
New Orleans has Bourbon street, Montreal has St.
Catherine’s street, Vancouver has Granville, and Cape Town has Long
Street. If you took a map of Cape Town
and took a slash along one of the center streets, you’d probably hit Long
street. It is a stretch of bars,
hostels, shops, cafes restaurants, but mostly bars. I had not really planned to hit the party
scene in South Africa. To be honest, it
hadn’t really crossed my mind. I checked
into the Long Street Backpacker’s hostel, got changed and went out. Live music and every place was packed. This was not a place to fear, it was a city
like any other, a place to have fun.
The next day, I hoped to go to Robben Island
where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, but tickets were sold out for a couple of
days. Not a problem, I rearranged my
plans and got tickets for a couple days out.
My other – and most pressing – concern was securing a spot to go
cage-diving with Great whites. Luckily
one of the guys running the hostile was going the next day and he made all the
bookings with a great discount.
All of that settled early, I decided to take a
drive and head south to Cape Point. It
was much like the inverse of British Columbia’s sunshine coast. Both have mountainous land rising steeply
from the ocean, but while British Columbia’s land is covered in evergreen, this
bitter end of Africa was sparse and desert-like. But hot, and not any less beautiful. The road snaked in and around, etched into
the rock-side.
This was one of the few times that I felt only
one thing was missing: a couple of good friends to enjoy the music and the
scenery with.
South of Cape Town, the land juts out towards
Antarctica for miles forming a long sharp peninsula. And naturally, at any
point in the world similar to this, there will be an old vestige of the great
days of sail – a lighthouse.
Somewhere, not far behind me is Antartica
Looking east, mountainous Africa fades into the
distance, and somewhere just on the horizon is Hermanus, the most southern part
of Africa. My hope was that I might go
in a couple of days, but luckily I was open to different plans.
I have a picture of it, but unfortunately it
doesn’t carry as well in life. What I’m
talking about is something strange I saw in the water. Looking closely, one could see huge arcing
bands in the water, both from the east and from the west. It reminded me of being on the Lion’s Gate
Bridge in Vancouver and looking down at the water where the Fraser river meets
the Pacific ocean. There is a very
distinct line and a huge color difference in the water. I’m not read up on the phenomenon of oceans
meeting, but my guess was that these huge arcs may have been the meeting of the
south Atlantic and the Indian ocean.
From the lighthouse I trekked down to the beach
to collect some water. I have a sort of…
eccentric hobby of collecting water from around the world. I have water from the pacific, Atlantic,
Mediterranean, the Khumbu icefall at Everest, the Ganges, the Arabian sea, the
Mississippi…etc. It is a strange thing
to collect I suppose, because water is everywhere and is constantly moving,
going other places and it isn’t really specific to the place where you
encounter it. However, it represents for
me, an ephemeral moment. I am likewise
not specific to any of the places that I visit and so the instantaneous moment
of meeting a part of the natural world that is at the same time from everywhere
else, has for me, a little more meaning than a fridge magnet that was actually
manufactured in China. My body also is
made up of pieces that have technically been on this planet, scattered, in one
form or another for many millennia. All
those pieces have come together so that I may exist, and so too the meeting of
myself with the natural world. All of it
has been travelling a long time, deteriorating and recombining in different
combinations until I’m hunched down with a little bottle submerged in an ocean
I have never before touched.
I always find it a bit inspiring to think that
part of my fingernail may have once been part of a dinosaur, or one of the
oxygen molecules in your lungs might have been breathed by Cleopatra. It gives a whole new meaning to the question:
Where have I been?
And plus, I’ve always had a penchant for small bottles
and this gives me reason to satiate that harmless idiosyncrasy. To hell with baseball cards. No one else has this souvenir.
I trekked around the surrounding area and found
a nice little perch. I looked down as
waves crashed up on rocks, the swells sucking back again to draw up power.
And at the bottom of the world,
I watched rainbows in the spindrift,
the spray shaved back from waves
like sand from the blade of a dune in a great wind.
And at a slow pulse, in each minute,
with each wave,
the blur sharpened with colors,
scattering the light of the sun.
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