Happy Birthday, Dear Hubby!!

My husband's 40th birthday was last Sunday. We celebrated it by going to Sun City for a week, being careful to come home on Good Friday so as to minimize being stuck in crowds--South Africans loooove to travel over the four day Easter holiday and Hubby timed the trip so that we would be leaving as they would be arriving.

We wanted to try the off-road Segway safari, but a big rain before we arrived left the trails too muddy for that, so it is postponed until our next trip. This trip we decided to try a 6am game drive since the later ones seldom turn up a lot of animals. Seems they rise and eat early, then retire to the shade of trees and thickets when the sun starts to heat things up, so the early morning game drives show more promise.

And it worked! Although the leopards remained elusive, I have finally seen my first wild lion (unfortunately a sighting too brief to photograph), and we actually happened on a rhino actually standing in the road! A small herd of elephants were snacking on some trees and I saw kudu for the first time in this park (our third game drive in this park).

We made it down to Waterworld where Hubby learned to jet ski. And while he seemed to enjoy it tremendously, I couldn't convince him to try parasailing or any of the other water activities (save swimming and floating in the heated pool which was, unfortunately, thickly populated with children).

We took a boat ride on the lake, which afforded us some lovely views...

And at the boat dock there was a huge cluster of carp and catfish (and those fish were gigantic!) including this monster of an albino catfish...

We drove back this morning and have been greeted (and kissed to death) by the little doggies, sent the maid (who was house sitting) home, wer  and are blessedly, peacefully, home again. I love our little trips and travel, but the best part has to be getting back to my own cosy environment!!

Keeping the status quo

If you are like most people, sometime around your first birthday you learned to walk. Oh, it took you a year or more to reasonably perfect the skill, but with perseverance and the encouragement of those around you, but the time you reach the age of four, you were fairly fluent. You could get where you wanted to go, both quickly and slowly, depending on your mood and enthusiasm, you could go up and down stairs, stop, start, raise up to a standing position and sit back down, all with relative ease. Over time, you have come to think of walking as second nature, as if you were born to it, and no longer regard the skill as anything requiring your conscious attention, with the exception, of course, of walking on unaccustomed or challenging terrain.

So, what if things suddenly changed and you had to relearn walking every three to five years? And not relearn what you know now, but you had to learn new ways of accomplishing what you do now because the old ways suddenly no longer worked. Suppose, for example, that when you tried to sit in a chair, nothing happened. When you activated all the muscles and nerves you usually used to sit in a chair, you just remained standing,. Or worse, you sat on the floor instead. Suppose that some of your movements worked as normal…say, crossing your legs…but others didn’t work at all any more. And that you suddenly found yourself walking backwards when you wanted to climb the stairs.

And then you discover your next door neighbour is doing the same thing, but he doesn’t seem to be as concerned or upset as you are. “You’ve been upgraded,” he tells you over the back fence. “Some new features added, some old one deleted or their controls changed. You’ll get used to it.” And grumbling that it’s taken you three years to master this last upgrade, you walk backwards into your house (because trying to walk forward the old way doesn’t work at all any more) and click on the TV to the Help channel and being the laborious task of learning how to use the lower half of your body all over again.

This would be a pretty stupid way to live our lives, wouldn’t it? A waste of time, energy, brainpower, effort…all of which could be better spent doing other things, if only taking a leisurely Sunday afternoon nap. Just recently I lost half a day trying to figure out why I couldn’t connect to the internet. Hubby, technical whiz that he is, tracked down the problem after first discerning the problem was not Telkom, our ISP, our modem or our wireless router…his computer was humming along the internet just fine. Mine, however, was dead. At first we thought it was the wireless radio in my laptop, because I could connect to the net if I connected to the router via a phone cable. Had this been the case, it would have been a very costly fix, since my laptop is 2.5 years old and it is unlikely that parts for it exist anymore. It would likely have meant a replacement had Hubby’s wizardly brain not discovered that a bunch of my settings had been altered in such a way that my radio was no longer functioning. Effectively, it was shut off in some part of the software.

Now, nobody uses my computer but me…and I didn’t turn anything off. In fact, I make it a point to stay away from all those internet settings and such because I don’t know what they do and as the old saying goes, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But the settings had been changed and when Hubby discovered that fact and returned them to their previous conditions, I was back on the internet without a hitch.

So what happened? Well, as near as I can figure, one of those automatic upgrades came along and reset some stuff which was incompatible with the settings necessary to connect to my wireless lan. I usually leave my computer on overnight and some mornings I awaken to find that Microsoft has taken my computer over and forced some kind of upgrade upon it, then rebooted the machine. Other times, I find that Symantec has updated my Norton Utilities without asking my permission first (it is only supposed to be able to do that to my anti-virus definitions). Perhaps one of those updates involved resetting something? I don’t know, but I do know that nobody in this household changed them.

I don’t like upgrades, updates, and things like that. Yes, I know that could make me look like a Luddite in some circles, but c’mon, if I don’t want to make MSWord play “Oh Danny Boy” on bagpipes in the background while I type, why should I have to add that ability to my existing installation? And if I’ve memorized 500 shortcuts and keystrokes, do you really think I want to relearn half of them? Just how irritated…and unproductive…do you think I get when a key combination I’ve been using for years now doesn’t work any more or worse, does something entirely different? I’ve been using MSWord since 1986 (before PCs had mouses!!) and I probably have learned 500 keystroke combinations in that time…not that they all work the same way they used to.

This may sound petty, but think about it for a minute. What if you got into your car one morning and the turn signal stalk and the wiper stalk had been switched? Hubby deals with this every time he switches from the S2000 to the Merc, and his annoyance does not diminish with time. He will hit the indicator lever and when water sprays up onto the windscreen and the wipers deploy, he is NOT a happy man. Wouldn’t it be just jolly if one day he trod upon the brake pedal thinking it was the stiff clutch of his sports car?

I am not antiprogress, but I think change for the sake of change is just stupid. In 1975 I bought a TR-6 and I drove it until 1990, giving it up only because my hip was just not managing with that clutch anymore. In 1990 I bought a Mazda B2600i 4x4 and drove it until early 2004 when I moved to South Africa. In both cases I drove the vehicles for years without having a car loan hanging over my head and, with proper maintenance, sold them in excellent condition. In the time that I had only two cars, the average American had ten…and a never-ending debt load, since they were trading in one loan for another with each upgrade. And why? I got rid of the TR for medical reasons, and the 4x4 because it was impractical to export it…both ran well and looked good…why would I want to trade it in?

I’m kinda the same way about my houses. I bought a house in 1977 and lived there for 13 years. A divorce brought that house to sale. My next house I also lived in for 13 years and only sold it to move to South Africa. Now I’ve lived here for four years, three of them in this house…the first house was just too small for all my big American furniture (literally…we had half of it out in the garage!). It will be no surprise if I live here until I die in 20 or 30 years hence.

I’m good at keeping stuff that works. My Maytag washer and dryer set lasted me 28 years, my GE refrigerator 22. Some of my furniture is nearly 100 years old, inherited from relatives who have gone on to the Great Beyond. The stuff I purchased new…well most of it is creeping up on 20 years old, but it’s solid wood and non-trendy in design, so they’ll likely be the heirlooms of the future. Most of my appliances toddled off in the arms of new owners at garage sales because the power is different here in SA, so I can’t use them here. But my dishes are 22 years old and still grace the table as well as they did when they were new.

I believe in changing things for rational reasons. In California, the Maytags fizzled out and were not energy efficient, so I had no qualms about replacing them. They had, after all, served an entire family for more than a quarter of a century. Here, I replaced a nearly new kitchen stove…one of those ceramic top jobs…with a gas range: electricity is a very expensive way to cook your food and now, with the power failures, while everybody else is trying to boil water on a BBQ grill, I have a kerosene lamp on the counter and my burners are merrily dancing with flame.

So, today I drive an eight-year-old car. My husband’s is nearly new, but that was because his previous one was wrecked by the dealer and had to be replaced…otherwise he would be driving a car the same age as mine. I try to add things to my wardrobe that both appeal to me and will stand the test of time, things that, when past the first blush of fashion, will enter the pantheon of enduring style. I have no qualms about spending hundreds on a handbag, but only if it is the kind of bag that is not dated by its trend trappings. No blingy Guess bags for me, I’ll take timeless Ralph Lauren.

So, I’m not a big fan of change for its own sake. Fashion passes me by, trends don’t bother to stop at my doorstep. If I can’t think of a justification beyond “it’s cool!” or “I want one,” it’s not very likely to end up in my life. It’s my opinion that buying a new car every three years or moving house every three or four is just a waste of money, money that could be put to better use elsewhere. Next year my car will be paid off and, knowing that I keep cars for 14 or 15 years, Hubby is already planning what to do with the money that will be freed up. Right now he’s tossing around either the down payment on another piece of rental property or setting the money aside to finance a truly fabulous vacation.

I’ve been looking in jewellery store windows…quality jewellery can be a really good investment…

Have you ever seen anything more spectacular?

This is one of the plants growing at the Goble Palms Guest House in Durban. I've never seen anything like it before, and it took a lot of Googling to finally track it down.

The plant is called "medinilla magnifica" or "rose grape" and this stunning flower is about 10 inches long. A native of the Philippines, it can be an invasive plant since each flower ripens into a berry that, once dropped to earth, will become a new plant. It is, however, a breathtakingly beautiful flower.

See more of my photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/sweetviolet/

...into the fire

11 November 2007

So, we decided to avoid Harrismith on our return journey. We sat down with a map and Hubby, Mr. Precise Engineer, mapped us out a route that would take us around Lesotho on its west side, meeting up with the N1 in Colesberg. We know the road and the scenery and the landmarks from Durban to Colesberg (via Harrismith) already, we reasoned, so why not kill two birds with one stone…see some new countryside and avoid that nightmare of road destruction in Harrismith?

I have to admit I was a bit reluctant. I’m not ordinarily inclined favourably towards long stretches of road that don’t have regular rest stops or petrol stations with ultra-clean bathrooms. Like most women, if I am to drop my drawers and expose my delicate bits to strange porcelain, I have a very strong preference for that porcelain…and its surroundings…to be immaculately clean. But Hubby was keen on taking a new route and after seeing the myriad of little towns…most of them no more than 50 to 75 km apart…I agreed to his plan.

So, we had our breakfast and hit the road. After filling Bertha and making sure our padkos and cool drink keepers were full up, we got out onto the N2 headed towards Port Shepstone. At Sheppy, we turned north towards Kokstad, a town I have never seen and Hubby hasn’t been to in 25 years. The adventure was on.

I must say, it was a learning experience.

The first thing I learned is that making the assumption that all those little towns would have petrol stations was a grievous error. The second thing I learned is that it was also a mistake to assume that a major brand petrol station…like Shell or CalTex…would have clean restrooms. My third lesson was that pay toilets actually exist in South Africa…I have never seen one before in this country and today I saw three! And finally, I learned that, as bad as the road conditions at Harrismith were (and they were really, really bad), those conditions were not as bad as they could have been.

I quickly discovered that on a road trip, I get very thirsty. Probably the drying effects of the air conditioning in the car (it also gives my hair static electricity, to Hubby’s never-ending amusement and my everlasting annoyance). So, we keep a cooler box of iced drinks in the back seat where I can easily reach it. We pack it full of Sprite Zero and Coke Lite and guzzle our way across country.

En route to Durbs we stopped at Ultra Cities and Star Stops and whatever Engen calls their mega petrol stations whenever Bertha started looking thirsty, when it was meal time (diabetics have to eat regular meals, even on the road), or when one of us needed to find a loo. On the N1, N5, and N3, that was just not difficult. On the R56 and R58, it was virtually impossible!

Because we were unsure of petrol availability along the way, we stopped for fuel when the gauge hit the halfway mark or lower (depending on where we could find a station). At Kokstad we filled up the car and emptied both of us out and got on the road to parts unknown…at least to us…confident that we would encounter multiple petrol stations along the way…doesn’t every rural town have at least a one pumper? Those farmers have to fuel up their cars and trucks, too, after all. Every thing was fine until all that Coke Lite I drank decided it needed an exit. Unlike Hubby, who can pull off to the side of the road and make an acquaintance with a local bush or tree, I require technology for such an event, so I said “Pull in at the next station you see, I need a loo.” He nodded while I consulted the map…maybe 20 km to the next town, so not to worry.

Yeah, right. The next town consisted of several hillsides full of rondawels, a bottle store and a tavern. As did the next…and the next…and the next! A hundred kilometres down the road and there’s no petrol, no loo…and no bush big enough to hide my glowing white moons! We did wend our way through one scabrous town…Mt. Fletcher, I think…but the Engen station (the only one in town) was so filthy and dilapidated I was unwilling to risk it. Dirty is one thing…dirty toilets are something else again.

But I’m experienced and I’m stoic. I know if I adjust my posture just right I’ll put a minimum of pressure on my bladder and I can wait it out. “Just take it easy on the bumps,” I told Hubby. “There’s got to be a place ahead with a relatively clean loo.” And Hubby, bless his empathetic little heart, tried to avoid the potholes and go gently over the unintended speed bumps, and on the map I saw another town just a few kilometres away. Hope was born anew.

We came around a bend in the road and saw a flagman waving us off to the left, off the road. Ahead, on the right, stretched a beautiful ribbon of newly tarred highway, inaccessible. Instead, we bumped off onto an unpaved track reminiscent of Harrismith…and it went on forever! The next time some smart-mouth bunny hugger superciliously finds fault with my choice of an SUV for my personal vehicle, I’m going to whip out the pictures of this abomination that passes for a road and ask if she would like to drive a Prius or some other trendy little pseudo-car over it. It damn near killed Bertha, an SUV built on an honest-to-god truck chassis by none other than Mercedes Benz. I’m sorry, but if my ML, sturdy road warrior that she is, can be brought to a shuddering, beeping, squealing halt by this piece of road, exactly what kind of namby-pamby town car would do better?

The ruts and bumps and rocks and holes were so bad that at times we were literally airborne. On one of those leaps, when we came down, Hubby’s left foot (which had also been airborne) came down on the parking brake pedal. This car is engineered such that, when you try to set the parking brake while your foot is on the accelerator and the car is moving forward, it will emits a series of shrieking beeps and, if the offence is sufficiently egregious, it will simply shut itself off. Which is exactly what happened. Except that we didn’t know what happened at the time. All we knew was that the car was dead, we were somewhere in the middle of the Transkei on a road that would have done a 4x4 challenge proud, and I had to pee so bad my eyes were turning yellow. I started scanning for a likely bush, but there was nothing but rocks…too big to drive over easily, but far too small to conceal anything like my overly-generous backside.

Hubby quickly figured out what was causing the lack of forward motion, restarted the car, and put us back on the trail. Fortunately, we were nearly back on the tarred road…I am sure my bladder would not have taken much more abuse, and within a few minutes we were in a small town that actually had two petrol stations! We pulled in to the first station, only to be told they didn’t have a loo, but the gents at the CalTex cheerfully pointed us around the corner.

They neglected to tell us it was a pay toilet…and why was only the women’s toilet fitted with a coin operated lock?? It took Hubby a full two minutes to get the stupid thing to accept the damn R1 coin (I couldn’t figure it out…I’ve never seen a coin op box like it in my life!) and let me in.

OK…it was clean. But there were three stalls, two of which lacked paper, and the third lacked a functioning lock. By this time, I did not care. I grabbed a wad of tissue and took it with me to a stall I could lock and found heavenly relief.

After stopping to get lunch at the hot food counter at the local Spar (not a restaurant, fast food joint or takeaway in town), we hit the road again, headed inexorably towards Colesberg where I sit typing this.

Looking back on today’s experience, I have come to the conclusion that, between Port Shepstone and Colesburg there are a total of three clean public restrooms: one in Kokstad, one in Maclear, and another in Lady Grey. That’s it. So, unless you have an iron bladder, I strongly suggest that if you are driving from Durban to Bloemfontein or points west, brave the construction debacle at Harrismith…the alternate route not only had worse roads, it had no toilets!

Durban, Diwali, and South African spring weather

5 November 2007

One of the reasons we chose to holiday in Durban this year is that our wedding anniversary and Diwali fell at the same time. Since we always make a getaway out of our anniversary, we thought this would be a good way to celebrate both at the same time.

We spent most of Sunday with Hubby’s family. Sadly, the bulk of the Diwali public celebration took place Saturday night, while we were hurtling down the Escarpment in driving rain and blinding fog, and our sojourn to the beachfront found us wandering through a tent city of half-empty booths, the tens of thousands of revellers of the night before doubtless still sleeping off the painful, lingering results of their earlier revels. After a delicious dinner of lamb chop curry, courtesy my dear mother-in-law, we set off back to the air conditioned comfort of our B&B to sleep away the lingering fatigue from our journey.

This morning dawned overcast and humid.typical for Durban at this time of the year. We had breakfast on the verandah, Hubby seated to have a view of the sea, my vista the dense, jungly foliage of the garden. Our morning consisted of a few minor errands then lunch at Govender’s House of Curries, a takeaway place notable for having won a competition for the best bunny chow in Durban. Hubby ordered a mutton bunny and I asked for a boneless chicken roti roll. (For the uninitiated, a "bunny" is a part of a loaf of unsliced bread, the center white scooped out and then filled with curry. The center piece of bread is then placed on top. A bunny in finger food. A roti roll is like a burrito, a filling of curry wrapped up in a roti, which is similar to a tortilla.) Now, I am not a person who quails at the prospect of hot chilli crossing my tongue. In fact, I regularly enjoy hotter curries than my husband; he grew up eating curry, but I grew up eating Mexican food, which is noted for its heat. What I don’t like is when the heat overwhelms the flavour…when that happens, why not just eat a bucket of chillies and be done with it?

Hubby concurs that his bunny was the best one he had ever eaten. I wish I could say the same for my roti roll. First of all, we paid extra for boneless and I picked at least half a dozen chicken vertebra out of the meat. Second, the chicken was so hot that it had no flavour. It wasn’t hot enough to make my nose run or make me break a sweat, but there was no taste other than the chilli powder. A gross waste of money.

After a bit of shopping in the antique shops of Windermere Road, we went back to the room where, still stuffed with his mutton curry, Hubby took his customary afternoon nap. When it was time for dinner we headed out for Florida Road, determined to drop in on one of the trendy eateries. Hubby was hungry for steak so we selected the Butcher Boys and, as luck would have it, were able to get a table after only about half an hour’s wait.

None of the starters appealed to me and, knowing the upcoming meal would be heavy with meat and potato, I ordered a salad for my starter…a Greek salad, to be exact, one that, according to the menu, consisted of greens, onion, tomato, cucumber, black olives, and dressing. ‘Yum!’ I thought to myself. ‘Black olives, not kalamatas!” I tend to shy away from green salads I have not already seen served up due to an unfortunate propensity of many restaurants for chopping up green peppers into little invisible chunks and scattering them generously over the salad as if they were rose petals for a bride to tread upon. But green peppers were not on the list of ingredients, so I ordered with confidence.

I do not understand why people who prepare food for others so often do not recognize that the quantity of a particularly strongly-flavoured ingredient must be balanced against the quantity of milder ingredients. If you were to make a single-serving salad that included a full teaspoon of chopped garlic, the other ingredients would be rather superfluous, wouldn’t they? After all, what would you be able to taste, other than the garlic? Well, for me, green peppers are like that. I can be happily munching along on a wad of sumptuously dressed lettuce and the moment my teeth crush that little fragment of green pepper, that’s all I can taste.

So, my Greek salad came and the olives were kalamata, which instantly found their way to Hubby’s plate, and the top of the salad was strewn with long strips of red and yellow peppers, kissing cousins to the offensive green. Fortunately they were brightly coloured and did not blend in with the lettuce, so I was able to spot them and get them out of the salad before they contaminated the remaining ingredients with their pungent oils. But pepper strips on a Greek salad?? Since when?

I wasn’t so lucky with dinner. If you were to ask me to list my least favourite vegetables in the world, at the top of the list would be boiled, steamed or creamed spinach and any kind of yellow squash prepared in any manner except as a pumpkin custard pie. I loathe and detest creamed vegetables of any kind, preferring my veg steamed until barely done, then served plain or with just a hint of sweet butter. And the smell of cooked yellow squash makes my stomach…well, let’s just say that the smell has so much power to turn my tummy inside out, I couldn’t even stand the smell of it in the little jars of baby food…none of my kids ever had that nasty yellow stuff shoved in their unwilling little rosebud mouths!

Unfortunately, creamed spinach and puréed butternut squash seem to be the national veg dishes of South Africa, so when we go out to eat, I never leave the veg to chance…whenever possible I order an alternative, even if it is just a salad. So I was pleased to note on the menu that roasted fresh vegetables were available and placed an order, figuring that if roasted chunks of butternut showed up in the mix, I’d just shove them to the side…it’s nigh unto impossible to roast creamed spinach!

And so dinner finally arrived. I found myself again a bit disappointed: I should have ordered the baked potato, as the chips were not fresh (made from frozen potatoes and mealy-grainy textured inside), and my ribs, while tasty, had to be cut apart with a knife and then gnawed roughly off the bone…none of that delicious, decadent, falling-off-the-bone tenderness that I associate with really good ribs. But the jewel in the crown of disappointment was the roasted veg I ordered: carrots, broccoli, slices of courgettes, and pieces of onion shared a bowl with huge chunks of roasted red and yellow pepper! Hubby quickly scooped the offending peppers out of the bowl and onto his plate, but the damage was done. Everything in the bowl tasted like peppers, even the broccoli, a strongly-flavoured vegetable in its own right.

The baked blueberry cheesecake was tasty, although the portions were no more than half the size as those served by Dulcé in Cape Town. But it did make a lovely end to the meal and our stroll back to Bertha is the balmy night air was pleasant.

So now we are back at the B&B, comfortably ensconced in the bed, Hubby reading while I sit here clickety clicking away on the keyboard. Tomorrow, if the sun comes out (we are having extended periods of overcast here), we’ll take the camera and go to the Botanical Gardens, a place I’ve wanted to visit since before my first trip to SA. If it stays overcast, we’ll head for the Victoria Street market for some spice shopping. Mum tells me that Jayshrees is having a sale, and I’d love to make a run at the shoe shops in The Pavilion. We’ll just have to see what tomorrow’s weather brings…

Durban Holiday: Out of the frying pan...

In early November, Hubby and I took a holiday to Durban. This is the second in a series of blog entries written on the road.

Sunday, 4 November 2007

I have never liked the town of Harrismith. The first time I was there it struck me as a dirty, dreary, disorganized little hamlet and nothing I have seen since has done anything to disabuse me of that notion. There is just one thing that makes me look forward to entering Harrismith, and that is the certain knowledge that, once we have wended our way through the inexplicable maze of dirty little unkempt streets and placed our tyres firmly on the N3, our journey is near to its end. As a harbinger of better things to come, it is incomparable, but as a destination in its own right, Harrismith is just a boil on the butt of South Africa.

Now, I am not easily intimidated, but Harrismith scares me. When we first entered the town from the northwest, there was a rather confusing confluence of poorly marked streets that gave us pause. Ordinarily when you make a change from one national road to another, you take a turnoff from one highway to the next, an effort generally involving off-ramps and clear signage. Typically the road is in reasonably decent condition and you just follow the sign boards to determine where to exit, which way to turn, and where to enter. It could not be simpler…unless you are attempting to exit the N5 and enter the N3 in Harrismith.

Under the best of circumstances, making that short little trek is fraught with difficulty. On our first attempt, several years ago, we immediately got lost due to signage that ranged from poor to non-existent. We ended up going the wrong way through a rather dodgy part of town…in the dark…and ultimately had to find a petrol station to get directions. I was desperate for a loo, and while Hubby got directions from the station attendant, I approached the loo with great trepidation, loathe to thread my way through the motley collection of loiterers…many of them quite obviously intoxicated…who were hanging about in front of the door. The condition of the place did nothing to inspire confidence in its sanitation, but beggars can’t be choosers, so I accomplished my mission and got out of there double quick.

I jumped into the car and we sped off, only find the directions questionable. We arrived at the spot where we were supposed to find the entrance to the N3 only to find a battered, barely paved track leading off to the left and under a cement freeway bridge…no lights, no signage. Cautiously we approached…it looked like we were driving into a dark alleyway where thugs could be waiting to swarm over us as soon as we were out of sight of the main body of traffic on the road in front of the Spur, but as we made the curve we found, to our great surprise, a familiar green and white signboard indicating we were on the right path to the N3 and Durban.

Our second slog through Harrismith was little different. There was still no clear signage indicating the direction to the N3 and this time the road had been re-routed so that we had to cross a dismal little watercourse over a narrow bridge. But, once we got to the proper end of town, we recognized the on ramp and merrily headed down towards our destination.

Our most recent experience, however, was the absolute worst. First, we got to Harrismith at twilight. Second, on exiting N5 there was a detour sign directing us left and when we followed it, it took us to a Y intersection devoid of directional signage. Knowing that, as the crow flies, the N3 entrance was to our right, we made the counter-intuitive choice, this being Harrismith after all, and took the left fork. We followed the road under an ancient railroad bridge and soon found ourselves in a queue to cross Harrismith’s dismal little joke of a river…on a one lane bridge! It was nearly dark and the only illumination was the glaring headlights of the cars and trucks on the other side of the bridge, awaiting their turn to cross.

Hubby shook his head, clearly annoyed, and muttered a few imprecations about this being an inexcusable way to connect from one national highway to another…no signs, no lights, no lane! Curbing my own tongue, I thought about those highway interchanges I had seen off in the middle of nowhere between Beaufort West and the road to KwaKwa and thought to myself, these people should be ashamed of this mess! Even if they wanted the traffic to wend its way through their town in a bid to collect a few traveller’s rands, they should have taken a lesson from neighbouring Bethlehem, which routes traffic through a clean, well-kept town, using huge signboards and on clean, wide, well-paved streets. As it is, Harrismith is a place you want to get out of as fast as you can, not a place that encourages you to linger a while and leave a little money behind in the bargain.

Finally, we got over the bridge and, taking direction from a small yellow sign (unlit) propped up in a gutter, we made a right turn onto a paved town street. This worked well for about two blocks after which the paving disappeared. Literally. We were suddenly clunked off the pavement onto a rocky, rutted, uneven mishmash of gravel, dirt, holes, and bits of old pavement still clinging to the original roadbed. The gravel road out to my father’s farm is better terrain than this! What little ambient light remained was weakened by the choking cloud of dust that boiled up around us and the oncoming traffic…a few cars interspersed with a lot of really big trucks…and we decided to take a break from the confusion and have dinner. There was a Spur dimly visible to our right as we finally punched through that cloud of dust, and Hubby was starving.

I don’t know what we were thinking...that the traffic would melt away during our break, perhaps...but Hubby and I had a quick meal and returned to the fray. The situation had not improved in our absence, and the ratio of trucks to cars seemed to have increased in favour of the trucks. But we knew where the entrance to the N3 was and, fortified with a hearty meal and the happy knowledge that we were but three hours from our destination, we again braved Harrismith’s incomprehensible traffic plan and set out to hit the Escarpment and wend our way down to the Indian Ocean.

It wasn’t as easy as we expected. Dodging and weaving between the huge commercial trucks, we got across the street and headed to the on-ramp only to discover that the road that lead to it had disappeared! In its place was an unlit rubble-strewn construction yard littered with stacks of cement pipe, piles of gravel and sand, and construction equipment. We could see the freeway overpass and the opening beneath is that used to be the on-ramp to the N3, but it was on the far side of the construction yard and the signage was gone. Where was the entrance to the N3? Had they constructed a new one? Just exactly how in the hell were we to get to Durban?

Hubby followed a truck, hoping it would be en route to the elusive N3, only to find himself piloting Bertha into a truck yard. Bless his heart, Hubby is not one of those guys who refuses to ask directions…he pulled right up to the truck boss and asked him how get onto the N3 to Durban and, to our horror and surprise, the man pointed to the construction yard!

By now it was full dark and that construction yard was unlit. The only light was a feeble spill over from the truck yard’s overhead lights and the intermittent illumination provided by the vehicles that braved the rutted darkness. Hubby saw a truck turn into the gloom and quickly pulled in behind it, using its tail lights as a guide through the plumes of dust churned up by countless wheels rolling through the dirt and gravel. At the last minute our headlights illuminated a sign that directed us under the overhead bridge and Hubby swung Bertha to the right and we plunged into absolutely pitch black hell, the road no more than a series of holes, gravel and a swirling haze of dust. Eventually the road smoothed out, but there was no light save Bertha’s headlights, and so it was with sudden surprise we found ourselves merging into the seething tide of vehicles hurrying their way down the N3 to Durban.

We heaved a sigh of relief at having been safely delivered from Harrismith, and I remarked that I had always disliked the town, that I found it scary. Hubby shook his head slowly and replied that, after navigating this outrageous debacle of disgracefully poor planning and execution, he was afraid of Harrismith, too!

* * *

Our sigh of relief was premature. As we exited the labyrinth of Harrismith and headed towards Van Rienen’s Pass, a bright flash of light off to the right caught my attention. Some kind of beacon, I reasoned, perhaps something to alert aircraft. A few moments later it flashed again but the third flash did not come at the regular interval one would expect of a beacon.

“What’s that?” I asked Hubby, pointing out the window.

“What’s what?” he asked, eyes glued to the dark curving road.

“That flash of light over to the right.”

He rolled his eyes briefly and then fixed them back on the road. “Lightning,” he said, a tinge of exasperation in his voice. How, after all, could I not recognize lightning?

“You’re kidding,” I said. “It had an orangey-red centre…lightning doesn’t have an orangey red centre.”

“It’s lightning, I tell ya,” he said, squinting into the gloom.

“Well, if it is,” I replied, “I hope it doesn’t mean a thunderstorm.”

There is a belief that to name something is to make it real. You do not speak the name of the devil or his minions lest your naming them opens the gates of Hell and releases the little beasties upon you. That belief should be expanded to include weather phenomenon.

The treacherous trip down Van Rienen’s Pass in some serious darkness was accomplished with a minimum of knuckle biting. But when we arrived at the Mooi River toll booth, it was apparent that rain had recently visited the area. Hubby made some comment about the storm being past…a mistake of matchless proportions since it opened those gates a second time. Before we knew it, we were hurtling down a steep winding road in darkness relieved primarily by the blinding high beams of the oncoming traffic…with rain splashing on our windscreen.

“Looks like we are driving into the storm,” I commented innocuously.

Mistake number three…within seconds, the rain was pelting down in sheets and the windscreen wipers, turned up full, could barely handle the downpour. We went on a while, driving through various intensities of rain and I found myself thinking ‘As bad as this is, at least it’s not foggy!’

Yup, you guessed it...within seconds we swopped rain for fog! At first it was ragged little swirly bits that flirted with us, momentarily blanking out the view but then coyly retreating, but it soon tired of the game and attacked us with a vengeance. My lead-footed Hubby actually slowed down after turning on our fog lamps and finding the fog no less impenetrable. At some points we punched through the fog into a mercifully clear patch, but only just long enough to catch our breaths and plunge right back into the all-obscuring wall of thick, opaque mist.

Eventually we got far enough down the mountainside to escape the fog, only to find the sheets of rain had returned. It poured on us all the way into Durban, where it finally let up only minutes before we reached our destination. It was 10:30, we were exhausted, and we were so relieved to have finally arrived that it took a moment to register that the parking area of our B&B was full and there was no place to put Bertha! The night guard came to our rescue and directed us to an alternative, a single garage just a few metres up the hill. It was so narrow that I had to get out of the car before Hubby eased it inside, and he even had to fold up Bertha’s mirrors to make it, but finally we had her ensconced in her snug little berth and we trudged wearily to our room and collapsed into exhausted heaps on the bed. It was morning before I realized that the storm that had dogged us from Harrismith all the way to Durban had spared the Morningside area. Our Bertha, steaming and sodden from her trek through a wet Hell, had deposited us in an area that, despite the humidity that fogged my specs as soon as I exited her air conditioned interior, had received not even a passing nod of acquaintance from the storm that had dogged us for the better part of two hours…Durban was bone dry!

Holiday in Durban...

Saturday, 3 November 2007

We are taking a holiday to Durban…and we are taking Bertha (our Mercedes ML430). Our anniversary and Diwali fall at the same time this year and it was our intent to combine the celebrations. And my dear Hubby’s gift to me was a week of shopping. He’s such a darling!

We managed to get out of town just a few minutes past 3, but seeing as how it was a Friday afternoon, the roads were already busy. Once out of town, however, the traffic thinned and we were left with a gloriously clear afternoon and room for Bertha to stretch herself. We leaned back and hit the road.

Hubby and his little sports car collect a lot of traffic fines. Late last month we received four of them in the mail, two issued on the same day from the same spot, only 20 minutes apart! Duly chastened and R2000 poorer, Hubby undertook to be more circumspect on our road trip and set Betha’s cruise control according to the posted limits. It turns out to have been a good thing: while the municipalities may rely on cameras to catch their speed demons, out in the bundu it’s traffic cops sitting on the side of the road just over the top of a hill or around the side of a blind curve. I saw more traffic cops yesterday afternoon than I see in an entire month in town! (Note to American readers: traffic enforcement is a separate division from law enforcement here and, unlike in America, law enforcement officers will not accost you for making an illegal U-turn or busting a red light. That’s the job of the traffic police.)

I have a theory about this... There are basically two tiers of cities in South Africa: the big ones like Joburg and Cape Town, and the medium ones like Bloemfontein and Pietermaritzburg. Every thing else is smallish by comparison, and some of the towns here are minute little specks of human habitation plunked down in the middle of nowhere…like Leeu Gamka. The biggest problem with these little places, I think, is that they lack any real source of revenue and they are too small and/or uninteresting to draw that stream of tourist bucks which keep other places alive. They languish as poverty pockets, unable to even properly maintain their municipal responsibilities. Then somebody introduced their local gendarmes to the traffic camera and not long after that somebody realized that you could use it to pick the tourist’s pockets without ever having to look in their tired eyes and try to puzzle out their accents.

Laingsburg is a case in point. Famous for no more than having been nearly drowned out by the Buffel River some 25 years ago, Laingsburg has joined the growing cartel of nowhere towns that have lost sight of the real reason for speed zones: reducing traffic speed for safety purposes, which can usually be accomplished by the simple expedient of parking a traffic cop car visibly by the side of the highway. Little more than a wide spot in the road, population less than 6,000, Laingsburg’s entire physical presence is little bigger than a couple of sizeable petrol stations and the obligatory bottle store…but it boasts a huge board at its outskirts bragging of how many thousands of speeders have been cited there in recent months. This may seem laudable at first glance, but when you stop to realize that the place is just one giant speed trap, it becomes obvious that this is likely the town’s main source of income. Why else would you be required to slow to 60kph (from the 120 of the highway) in order to pass a petrol station out in the middle of the desert? No agriculture? No industry? Need money? Put up a speed trap and rake in the bucks!

So, we managed to get through Laingsburg and a few other speed traps (one of them with a mobile courtroom right there to pick your pocket on the spot!) and after a Steer burger in one of the Engen stops (franchised eateries are the way to go when you are on the road…no menu mysteries and uniform standards of hygiene in the kitchens), we finally made it to Beaufort West…another town with a well-established speed fine industry, our destination for the night.

Hubby booked us into the Lemoenfontein (which means “orange fountain” or “orange spring” for you English speakers) Game Lodge just outside Beaufort West. We drove through town…very circumspectly, having left a wad of money at the police station there a couple of years back…just before 9 pm, and at the other side of town found our turn. The sign said it was the road to De Jager Pass but our instructions said to go only 1.6 km and then turn left again. Of course, it was darker than Satan’s heart out and the road turned out to be a dirt track replete with signs indicating water-filled ditches that we would have to drive across. But, I reasoned, it was only 1.6 kms and Bertha is an SUV, after all, so not to worry. High beams on, we rolled over the pebble-strewn surface until we found the sign to Lemoenfontein and duly turned left.

Well, if I had thought the De Jager pass road was a rough patch, it turned out to be a superhighway compared to the rutted track ahead of us. In the kind of pitch darkness that you can only experience out in the wilderness, we bumped and bounced our way for five kilometres up this swath that looked to be little more than a bulldozer’s bumpy track through the countryside. One lane wide and strewn with little boulders and big dips, it meandered through the rough terrain and up to a huge house that glowed like a jewel set on black velvet. We had finally arrived!

Tired from our journey, we didn’t waste any time on unnecessary amenities but went straight to our room. It was decorated in a “country living” kind of way, two wing chairs and a red Persian carpet set in front of the little Victorian fireplace, and the bathroom was a successful marriage of Victorian beadboard walls and footed tub with the modern double shower (two sets of temp control and two rain shower rosettes in a single large enclosure!). We were pleased to find the same brand of air conditioner that we have at home, so no time was wasted figuring out how it worked…it was 9 pm and still 27 degrees outside, and the room had a closed and stuffy feel to it. By ten we had turned off the light and within minutes Hubby was gently snoring beside me and I was drifting off to sleep. The one negative note was the carpet…sisal…a very unpleasant experience on the bottom of bare feet in the middle of the night.

It is now 7:30 am and Hubby continues to snork at my side. Breakfast is at 8:30 and we hit the road again immediately thereafter, but first I’m going to grab the camera and do a little prowling about. We are at a game reserve, after all…maybe I can catch a glimpse of something worth immortalizing!


* * *

Not a creature was stirring. It was already too late…and too hot…to catch anything foraging. On the road again…