No Stopping for Lions (23 page)

We motor to St Lucia on the coast via Hluhluwe Umfolozi Park. This park is made up of two distinct game reserves and is managed not by SANP arks but by the local provincial authority, Ezemvelo KwaZulu–Natal Wildlife. Although the park is said to have the Big Five (lion, leopard, elephant, rhino and buffalo) and to be well stocked with game, we catch only glimpses of small herds and lone animals so decide not to stay overnight.

St Lucia is a different matter, a town wedged between river and shoreline, where crocs sleep on the banks of the estuary and hippos wade in the swamp below our apartment window. It's a service town really, once just a base for rough and hardy fishermen but now the centre of tourism and the management hub for the surrounding iSimangaliso Wetland Park, a World Heritage site. The residential parts of town are green and neat but the main street has already outgrown itself with many accommodation options, and tourists busy with arrangements for estuary cruises, whale watching, deep-sea diving and game drives.

On our second day in town we drive into the park and are unprepared for this wonderful place. Very unprepared, as we've left cameras, binoculars and guidebook behind. After immediately spotting a glossy grazing hippo we turn a corner to see three whopping great white rhinos in a grassy field on our right. They wander around with massive heads to the ground, nibbling, kicking a sod, staring with little dumb eyes at the wildflowers for minutes on end. ‘Would make a good photo,' we keep muttering to each other.

After that we come across a dazzling array of animals — large herds and an even larger variety of species — all scattered around, grazing the grasslands and wandering the vegetated dunes. One thing I had read in a Ezemvelo KwaZulu–Natal Wildlife pamphlet beforehand was that the driving force behind the ecology of these wetlands is the continual comings and goings of the hippos, estimated at over a thousand, as they move through the waterways onto dry land to graze. The pamphlet went on to say that park management has embarked on a huge program to rid the park of non-indigenous flora and the evidence of this is all around, with hundreds of acres of planted forests cleared to reveal coastal plains and river systems.

On the return road we call in at Mission Rocks, and apart from dodging little antelope, the shy red duiker, continually sneaking across our path, the highlight is a sign by the walking track to the beach from the car park:

Beware of Animals.

Hippos, Buffalos, Black Rhinos, Crocodiles and Leopards

Inhabit This Area.

What, no lions?

Neil's Aunt Elizabeth lives in Umhlanga Rocks, a resort town on the KwaZulu–Natal coast 20 kilometres or so north of Durban, the province's major city. It's a small-town Surfers Paradise with high-rise apartment blocks crowding the beach and large securityfenced residences in suburbs on surrounding hills. Most of the faces in the street are white, and there's a bright holiday feel to the place that must be a breath of fresh air to weekending Durbanites and Jo'burgers. When we arrive the town is jumping and it looks for a time as if we won't get accommodation. At the twelfth hour we book a unit in a big time-share beachfront property. It's okay but we want more, so after three days we move into an apartment on the thirteenth floor of a swanky place where we live like kings. Each day we collect Elizabeth and the three of us sit up in our eyrie, drinking tea, watching the sea and taking many photographs of ourselves and the coastline running all the way to Durban. Neil and I tell ourselves that the enjoyment she's getting from experiencing her town from a different perspective is worth the additional outlay.

The Troopy's sales campaign is stalling. One buyer has dropped out, one really wants it but can't afford it, and the third can afford it but is acting cool. Neil spends time each morning in an Internet café in an attempt to keep the dream alive, but negotiations are at that stage when it could easily become a nightmare. Although Neil is still optimistic, he's progressing the option of shipping the Troopy back home and makes a tentative booking on a vessel that departs Cape Town six weeks before we're due to leave. Not ideal, but the only berth available within our timeframe for a Troopy-sized container.

Elizabeth, tactful as ever, doesn't comment one day after Neil and I have a hairdressing session. Neil appears with a slightly patchy number three after I dropped the clippers, and I emerge as a brunette, although I was hoping for more of a Paris Hilton look. One of the things that I insisted on packing in the Troopy before it left Sydney was a year's supply of my hair colour, but my calculations were out and the stockpile dried up somewhere in Kenya. Subsequently I've been reliant on local supplies, but I've discovered that what's in the box seems to bear no relationship to what the box says is in there. I've had colours that are totally different to the description (as in Umhlanga), colours that don't colour at all, and factory-sealed boxes that are missing one of the components. I strongly believe that manufacturers treat Africa like the Third World continent it is and, like drug companies, off-load expired and inferior stock here. Sick of my rantings on this subject, Neil suggests that I should take it up with the local MP, or the World Health Organization. They're sure to give it priority.

Port Edward is not a big port, it's not even a port at all but a green and leafy enclave for weekend Durbanites tucked away on the KwaZulu–Natal South Coast. We spend three nights at The Estuary Country Hotel, an estate built on grassy slopes around an old Cape Dutch manor house. It's very calming and pretty, with long views down the estuary to the beach and white Cape Dutch-ish cottages and palm trees reflected in the water. The beach is small but a good one for walking, and we are content to go down there in the mornings and afternoons then drive around the region on little excursions in between. Sometimes we have surprise visitors because the hotel has started on a refurbishment program and our room is the first to be completed. Staff, workmen and other guests are curious to see the glamorous new furnishings, so we get used to a light tap on the door, a head around the corner followed by, ‘Oh hello, just looking.' Rather than being annoying it's kind of nice and friendly — we just have to remember to be appropriately dressed at all times.

The road south of Port Edward passes through a region that was once called the Transkei, but which now forms part of the Eastern Cape Province. When he was at boarding school Neil spent his short holidays here on the farm of a schoolfriend's family and he has a soft spot for this starkly beautiful place. Now it's famous as the home of Nelson Mandela, but for three centuries it's been a land of determined and resilient people, the Xhosa. Today it's cold, windy and spitting rain but the people don't seem to notice. We drive through high, rolling and treeless hills separated by grasslands and deep valleys. Homesteads are dotted about everywhere, the houses painted in cheerful colours like bright turquoise and lolly pink. Men carry a
kierie
, a short wooden club used as a walking stick in times of peace, and everyone wears a blanket. Neil remembers a time when these were always red and woollen, but these days brown is favoured and microfibre has been discovered. Men herd their stock on horseback and young ladies with white-painted faces walk along the road. These hills have only ever seen a handful of white farmers and now there is no sign of a European face. It's one of those areas in South Africa that could easily be a separate country, so detached does it appear to be in both place and time.

We arrive in Port St Johns under heavy rain and through the most spectacular of entrances. The road winds steeply down from the hills of the Transkei then suddenly crosses the Umzimvubu River and we're so awe-struck by the high precipitous cliffs through which the river cuts that we don't realise we've actually arrived. What a forgotten little town in such a memorable location. This stretch of coastline is known as ‘the Jewel of the Wild Coast' and apparently Port St Johns jumps with holidaymakers during the school holidays, but now it is sleepy and slightly seedy, with lowkey family resorts along the riverbank and old, poorly maintained cottages fronting the beach. It could just be the bad weather, but the over-riding feeling is of a place that has forgotten the magnificence of its surroundings.

We press on for another 20 kilometres or so to Umngazi River Bungalows, unconvinced that they'll offer anything more than we've seen in town. But first impressions aren't bad and they have a bungalow free for one night, and once shown to it we're immediately captivated. Someone with a bit of style has put some thought into the design and fittings and it is light and breezy, but the main draw card is the spectacular view over the river mouth and the pounding cyclone-driven surf beyond.

This place is advertised as a family resort and they take this claim seriously. Signs in reception advise that you must pre-book for day care, for nannies and for all sorts of fun-filled family activities. Young couples with pre-schoolers wander about, coddling and chastising and discussing the opening hours of the nursery. Lunch is a traffic jam of designer strollers and toddlers tottering around between the chairs. Even our bungalow has a cot in the spare bedroom and at the bottom of the king-sized bed stands a crib, which the porter immediately stores away when he sees the horrified look on our faces.

I can't shake the feeling that this is all a bit weird. It's a holiday in a giant nursery of strangers and something that I would have thought all sane parents would avoid. We leave the next morning and on the drive out we have to concede that no place is totally ideal. We might never find that perfect little haven where the accommodation is as wonderful as the surroundings and where we could happily melt into both for a week or two.

Further down the coast, East London is the port city where Neil went to high school, and we're here for old time's sake. We do a sweeping tour of the old school, the pool where Neil thrashed the opposition in swimming galas, and the movie theatre where he liked to scare himself shitless watching horror movies on Saturday afternoons. I like the place but he can't get over the fact that now the main street looks like one in any other scruffy country town and the department stores, which were once very classy, now have armed guards at the doors and iron bars over the windows.

Decent accommodation is scarce, as East London has become another place where government officials like to hold conferences, but somehow we manage a front room in a sea-facing hotel. Along with everyone else we're at our window watching the colossal seas demolish the beach in front, a result of extraordinarily high spring tides on top of the tail end of Cyclone Favio. That night we eat in a restaurant on stilts over the sea, with spotlit breakers crashing and white water foaming under the floorboards. A seal at the aquarium next door stretches out on his slippery-dip and as he succumbs to sleep he slides into a heap at the base, a contented flipper occasionally waving in the breeze. Outside, a barefoot old man with bright alert eyes asks for a coin. After Neil obliges with a few rand I think it a good idea that he also hand over the shoes he's wearing, which he intended giving away anyway before we go back home. We walk off along the promenade engaged in an animated discussion on the subject when the old man approaches, smiles and shakes his head.
No, you keep your shoes
.

Leaving East London, we detour inland to Grahamstown, where Neil spent some of his school holidays. Although it's a city it gives the impression of being a country town with leafy, gardened neighbourhoods and low-rise buildings. The streets are lined with quaint old cottages and grand town buildings, all in good nick and lovingly cared for, and right in town is a university which anyone would want to attend just because it's so beautiful. In a backstreet we find the little cottage where Neil stayed with an aunt and it's still exactly as he remembered it. If it was in Australia the whole town would be heritage listed. A shop on High Street has stained-glass trim on the awnings and the original timber counters are tens of metres long, while the polished wooden shelving extends to the ceiling. There's a famous observatory right in the city centre looking more like a neo-Greek theatre, and dapper young Xhosa men walk the streets like characters out of a ‘30s movie. Rhodes University
is
Grahamstown, and its streets and buildings merge with those of the town so effortlessly that we find ourselves trying to check into a college instead of a B&B. We might have had more luck at the college because there is no accommodation to be had anywhere in town.

So it's back down to the coast and Port Alfred, and The Lookout Guest House. It stands on a hill looking out over the town towards the sea, the apartment large and sunny and our hostess, a local girl, good fun. She and Neil engage in long conversations about the South Africa of their youth, the boarding schools, train journeys and childhood holidays. Neil has found someone who can relate to his life here, and I'm happy to sit back and listen to their reminiscing. In the mornings Neil and I take long walks on the beach and visit an Internet café to check the latest movements in the Troopy's Sales Campaign, but then we return to Louise and her cathartic conversations.

Port Alfred is where Neil's grandfather lived, and once or twice when Neil and his brother were very young the family made the long journey down from Northern Rhodesia to pay him a visit and to have a holiday by the sea. Neil thinks that he can just remember playing on the edge of the surf but it's more likely that he's relating to an old black-and-white photo in which the boys can be seen cavorting in nappies in shallow, low-tide ripples. They look thrilled and wary at the same time; all that water must have been overwhelming to toddlers from a dry, landlocked country.

After a couple of days Louise has to kick us out as The Lookout is fully booked, so we cross the river to a cabin in the Medolino Caravan Park. What a gem, not only because the owner's pride and joy is an Australian cockatoo but also because it shows what a caravan park can be with a little love and imagination. The log cabin we're given is comfortable and quiet, and overlooks a little lake where kingfishers, herons and Egyptian geese mill around. To be picky, the master bedroom is a bit on the small side and during the night I hear Neil cursing as he knocks his shin on the bed-end when he tries to move around it, but that's a small price to pay.

The grounds are grassy green and thick hedges between the sites give the sense that we are lodging on the manicured lawns of a swanky estate. Staff constantly tend the gardens, do the washing, and service the cabins and public ablution blocks. The floors of our cabin are mopped daily, the barbecue scoured and clean towels materialise.

I start passing the time of day with other couples who, like us, have the time to holiday at a leisurely pace. Taking a grey gap year, as one clown suggests. I walk past a couple sitting on recliners in front of their van enjoying sundowners and a bag of chips. The husband raises his glass in greeting. ‘This is the life,' he says with great contentment and I find myself thinking, yes, this is the life — and it has nothing to do with nationality or wealth or age, but with your state of mind.

Both Neil and I have been insidiously gaining weight. Our excuse has been that we've been leading a sedentary life, sitting in the Troopy for long stretches and frequenting national parks where we've been restricted to our vehicle and just a small safe area to walk about in. There is truth in that, but deep down we know that the Cadburys Eclairs have been weaving their magic. We started a get fit campaign at The Lookout, and now it's just a short walk over the dunes to the beach so both morning and evening we go down, walking for a good hour. The locals are a friendly lot and we learn many wonderful things on these walks, such as why sea sand is better than river sand for making cement, and where you'd wash up if you got swept away while swimming in the bay. The morning we leave we come upon hundreds of sea urchins washed up at just one spot near the rocks. There are blue ones, large black spiky ones, ones with geometric mauve patterns and baby pincushion ones. Everyone stands around looking at them in wonder, silenced by the gifts nature constantly surprises us with.

On these beach walks and as we drive along in the Troopy we talk about this and that, Neil usually musing over the political situation while I worry about homeless boys or the availability of fresh milk. But something subtle has been happening and Neil has become interested in my chatter, can discuss everyday trivia with the same intensity as me, while I've begun to comment on governments and political personalities. With just each other to talk to, we've gradually become more tolerant of each other's point of view and more involved in the other's interests. We're no longer bickering over insignificant things, like who had the map last before it went missing, but are instead arguing about a country's policies and its future. Without even trying, we've become interested in what each other has to say and more accepting of the other's shortcomings.