Sunday August 17th
Klip Street, Johannesburg
Kate and Bob’s hospitality in Durban included arranging a trip into Zululand, to a bush camp. We left Friday morning, with a car full of supplies and my luggage, and headed North along the coast. The road is straight and long, heading for Mozambique. The city is left behind and in its place, low hills covered with sugar cane, which will grow anywhere., with a huge sugar refinery in the distance. The cushioned hills of cane give way to miles of forestry. Wattle trees start out as innocuous shrubs that then grow atop a very long, bare trunk.
“…the trick is to grow them square,” said Kate.
Apparently, they are working on it.
The indigenous plant life has been cleared to make space for the wattle plantations. The blackened stumps of the previous inhabitants can be seen in amongst the serried rows of the newcomers.
We passed signs for Richard’s Bay. It is a huge port.
“If you could take all the ports in Africa, they would fit in it.” said Bob and he should know, being a shipping pilot in Durban. He had a job in Richard’s Bay for eighteen months or so and so Kate and he lived there when the port was in its earliest stage of development. No shops, post office or anything much. Now, it is another story; terraces of grey smelting works and factories line the horizon.
We drove for a couple of hours or so and stopped at a market. Kate bought baskets for home and local avocados and tomatoes. I was struck by the more laid back atmosphere here. We had passed settlements with gardens and small farms. Traditional, circular thatched houses on the same plot as newer models reminded me of the crofts of the Outer Hebrides. Traders by the roadside were selling pineapples that they had grown, baskets they had made from the palms on their land. People are happier here, have a better lifestyle I thought. And on one level that is undoubtedly true, but the spectre of AIDS flits from house to house here and has been catastrophic for rural women. South Africa has the largest number of people living with AIDS in the world and women bear a disproportionate part of the AIDS burden in Southern Africa:
As of December 2005, there are 5.3 million HIV positive people in SA.
There is an unfolding catastrophe for women as 30-50% of pregnant women
(age specific)attending ante-natal clinics are HIV+
In Africa, AIDS has created 14 million orphans.
Source: Abdool Karim, S.S.& Abdool Karim, Q. (Eds). (2005). HIV/AIDS in South Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press.
We drove on and turned off the freeway onto a rough, red, dusty road and bumped our way
along it until we reached the railway line, a single track heading to Mozambique. We crossed it and eventually came to the gateway of Bonamanzi , our destination. I was wearing Tabard from head to foot; not some quaint garment but insect repellent par excellence, It’s a malaria zone, but Bob reckoned relatively risk-free. However, given that last year I was bitten and ended up with a bubonically landscaped arm, I did not want to get bitten at all.
Kate and Bob were last here some eight years or so and the place is now somewhat more refined. The tree house that they stayed in had been moved from in the tree to next to the tree. There is still an upper-branch level verandah accessed by a vertiginous staircase or a helter-skelter ramp. We used the ramp. Number 12 was the best, we reckoned, as it was more off the beaten track. We saw wildebeest, reebok, springbok, kudu (a demonic looking beast with corkscrew horns) and a charge of warthogs, thin tails held vertically, during our stay. There were lots of inverted cone-shaped depressions in the sand around the house. Bob explained that these were the traps of an insect called the ant lion. They make the hole and sit at the bottom. Ants come trolling along and find themselves taking a spiral trip ever- downwards into the ant lion’s awaiting jaws.
After a stroll at dusk, we returned to light the brai (the Africaans word for barbacue that everyone uses here) and get down to the serious business of roasting meat. The brai hadn’t been refined as well as the house and so we ended up making use of the oven to finish off the cooking. We made a luminary out of the charcoal bag, some of the ant lions’ sand and a candle and ate on the verandah by the light of a very full moon. It was great to be outside, accompanied by the sounds of insects and frogs and such, eating good food in even better company. We went to bed early and awoke early. More food on the verandah and then we headed back to Durban. The experience had made the effort worthwhile.
We bid fond farewell at the airport and I flew back to Johannesburg.
And so here I am, on the last day of my trip. The sad news here at Klip Street is that Charlottes nineteen-year –old dog died whilst I was away and so the house is wreathed in sad silence – no clippy-clippy of its little feet on the floor.
I am going to meet Sibongile and Mercy for lunch and then try to fit everything in the suitcase ready for the late night flight to Amsterdam. This has been an extraordinary trip. I know that I will be reflecting on it for some considerable time to come. The people I have met and worked with, the relationships forged and nurtured, the places I have been, have amounted to a wealth of deep experience that I could never have envisaged.
Tata for now…
Comments