Monthly Archives: May 2011

Joy, Work and Home

Ideas, ,

I am reading Le Guin again. The Dispossessed – my favourite of her books. In the strange limbo of relocating to a new city, it seems appropriate. It feels like home. That strange, slippery concept of home, always just beyond my grasping fingers.

In Le Guin’s fictional anarchist world, the language has only one word for work and play. They are the same word, the same thing. Today felt like that for the first time in years. It feels good to come home to the work that I love. After Korea, after so many months of doing work that was not mine. That work was work. It was counting the hours and getting through the days. It was living for the weekends when I could put on my red boots and pack my little backpack and see new places and discover new things. Or spend hours in coffee shops and bars and discover friends and acquaintances. Not that there was anything wrong with the discovering and the travel and the friends. But the work hours felt wasted. Work has always been central to who I am, to how I enter the world. I lost that for a while.

Today I felt like I had found it again. Today I sat for hours, hardly noticing time, and the words and the numbers danced and played and became the thing I wanted them to be. But not just any words and numbers. Words and numbers about the things that I know and love. Things I think about just before I sleep and when I wake up in the middle of the night. The things that engage me, like food security and development and poverty and aid. Words and numbers that are ideas made tangible. The visible parts, the bits that are useful and relevant on the page right now, but that are part of a bigger picture, of a slowly twisting whirlwind of ideas about security and poverty and development and hope.

There is a joy in doing real, hard, relevant work. Thinking work. Work that is bigger than who I am, that is part of a larger moment, part of a giant, swirling atmosphere of ideas. It feels like being connected to that ethereal whirl of ideas. Like spending a day of hard, intense work dancing in and out of that mist of thoughts to catch in your net, just the right concepts and phrases and arguments for now.

This work, the work I love, is not just a part of who I am; it is my home. This whirling unreal reality is where I live. It is where I thrive, where I find the energy to keep going, to keep doing. It is where I meet the people who excite and inspire me. It shouldn’t be called ‘work’. It should have the same name as play. It challenges and energizes and stimulates me as much as the rush and the swirl of debate.

Perhaps tomorrow I’ll feel differently. Perhaps one flurry of thoughts is only the illusion of a whirlwind. Perhaps ‘home’ is as ephemeral as that exquisite moment when all the words dance into place with a gentle sigh of peace. But that is a beautiful place. Home is an idea. It is a difficult, fleeting idea for those who have chosen against the settled comfort of suburbia. Perhaps the compensation is the thrill of an intellectual-emotional home just a wish away from the work that, if you are lucky, you do each day.

Backpackers fail: Banana Backpackers, Durban

Adventures, bus, KZN, ,

South Africa has some excellent backpacker spots, in Cape Town and Joburg and I’m sure in Durban. Banana Backpackers is not one of them.

My bus was nearly 2 hours late leaving East London. The trip was mostly uneventful except for that minor incident when some muppet on the side of the road threw a glass bottle at the bus managing, by some miracle to hit and subsequently shatter the right-side front window. No-one was sitting in those seats (I was a whole row back), so no harm done but seriously, our cricket team should think about drafting in the person somewhere between Kokstad and Port Shepstone who can hit a moving bus at 20 metres with a projectile as unpredictable as a coke bottle!

Other than that, uneventful, if particularly pretty. As a result, it was pushing 11 by the time I arrived at the Backpackers. At this point, things got weirder. The cab dropped me off on a city street, beside a run-down building. The front door was open and the security guard directed me up the creaking stairs. On the first floor, the rickety-looking black gate was opened by two girls at reception. Over the thumping, distorting noise of music in the adjacent bar area, I was told to follow them to the dorm. I dragged my suitcase past the central courtyard area, where people were braai-ing and drinking.

Just off the central courtyard, in a dark hall, the reception person knocked on and then just pushed open an orange door. The 10-bed door looked pretty standard – white linen, pillow and thin duvet on each bed, bunks that look like they’ve seen better days. I was sharing with one other person, who was already asleep. I put down my bags and returned to reception to check and pay. The girls at reception could hardly hear me over the music. I went out onto the balcony – hunching against the wall to avoid the rain – in search of somewhere I could hear myself think. Pretty soon, I gave up and headed to bed.

Which meant braving the bathrooms. They’re not the worst backpacker bathrooms I have ever seen – that honour is reserved for a particular hell-hole in Mozambique – but they’re a good, solid second. And they shared the problematic characteristic of being available for general use by the bar patrons, most of whom were not residents. The place was a mess. The kind of mess where you simply grit your teeth and get through it because you’re not going to find anywhere better tonight.

By this stage I was tired. All I wanted was to fall into bed and sleep. I got to the dorm and turned to close out the noise and the people. The door wouldn’t close. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get the door closed. I went to fetch someone from reception. She said she’d send someone later. I objected until she came herself immediately. She explained that I couldn’t have a key because it was a dorm (for the record, this is absolutely not standard practice at SA backpackers). I explained that I could live with not having a key, if I could only have a door that would close. She shrugged and said it was a difficult door and there was nothing she could do. And that was it.

I lay in bed for hours, fuming, tossing and turning, attempting to find the mosquito that was hunting me and wishing there was a way to block out the thumping music and the screeching people (like a door, perhaps!). Through the un-curtained windows, a street lamp blinded me whenever I turned over. After a couple of hours two girls, clearly a little worse for wear, wandered through our dorm to the balcony to have a chat. The other person in the dorm got fed up, threw them out and found an old, plastic chair to put against the door. That didn’t close it, but at least it was obvious that it was supposed to be closed.

In the morning light, the dusty floors, the dirty bathrooms and the noise were glaringly obvious. The linen on the beds seemed clean, but beyond that there was little to recommend the place. I’d initially picked it because of the location but I’d certainly rather have been a bit further away and had a backpackers that was closer to the usual standard of SA backpackers. The place obviously used to be quite pleasant – walls painted, posters advertising adventures, 24-hour reception. Plus, paddle-pool and braai area. But those days are long gone. And all this for exactly the same price as I recently paid for a classy, clean, comfortable backpackers with excellent service and even better location in Cape Town

For the record, anyone seeking a better SA Backpackers experiences could start with Cape Town Backpackers, iKhaya Stellenbosch Backpackers, Penthouse on Long (Cape Town) or The Backpackers Ritz in Joburg, to name just a few.

Snapshot: Rural Eastern Cape

Eastern Cape, rural areas

Drive out of King, towards Peddie, on the road I know so well. The road I used to travel to and from University every holiday for those years. And so often since. The road to Cape Town. The road to Grahamstown.The road home.

Pass the turn off to the Steve Biko Garden of Remembrance and wonder once again whose idea it was and who is supposed to maintain it. Pass the garage where the bus stops. Under the railway bridge and on, to the open road.

It’s late summer and everything is green. The grass is long, ready for winter. The thorn trees are rich, dark, close to the ground. It’s been a good summer.

Past houses and open veld, a graveyard near the road. Past men working to build a fence around a patch of ground.

Around a bend and there, a small settlement beside the national road. Beside a dam. Behind a fence. I can’t remember it clearly from the early days. I think it was smaller. Just one or two huts visible from the road. Now it is more built up. Houses with gardens. Fields. A sign on the main road – turn-off to a Zimbaba. A real place with a real name on an official name-board. How much of a difference does that make?

We turn off, across the grid, onto the dirt road. A couple of hundred metres on, the road T-junctions at a medium-sized dam. The water is calm and blue on a beautiful, sunny day. Rippling across the day. Gum trees line the other side. They’re invader-trees and are technically no longer welcome in SA but they’re still beautiful beside the dam.

The dirt road is not bad, especially considering the recent rains. We pass some rugby fields. A few soccer posts lie, stricken, overturned, obviously unused, but the rugby field is newly mowed and freshly marked. This part of the world is rugby country.

Turn right after the sports fields and follow a poorly-graded road. Just as we leave the first settlement, three horses are grazing in a paddock not far from the road. They look rich and well-kept after the good season of rain and grass. All the animals look healthy and well.

Along the road, driving slowly on the gravel, we pass sheep and goats. A lamb looks back at me before its mother hurries it over a small rise beside a pool of water. We stop while three donkeys take a leisurely (and reluctant) stroll from the middle of the road. One is a young one, with a shaggy coat in many colours and mournful, watching eyes.

At the village, we pass the high school. It looks well-kept – fresh white paint on the walls, a row of new toilets. Someone must have run a school garden project here once but the garden has gone to grass and weeds. The fence around the school is all intact and shiny and the gates are closed and locked during the school morning. A few younger children watch the car pass from the verandas of their homes.

Brick homes, often with several buildings on each property. And glass windows. Such a contrast to the stark desperation of urban poverty. Poverty here is more subtle, less spoken of, carefully hidden away from the prying eyes of a small community. No less deadly. We pass a house with a 4×4 in the driveway. I wonder who lives there.

Most houses have animals of some sort. A sheep or two grazing in the garden. Some chickens wandering the yard. A goat in the vegetable patch. Cattle. Donkeys. Pigs. There is something so real, so normal about it. My heart sings just a little. This is how the world should look.

Beyond the houses and gardens, the chicken hoks and goat-herds with their animals, past the kraals enclosed with poker-red flowering aloes and the full farm dams, the yellow-green hills of the Eastern Cape roll away into the distance and a thunderstorm begins to gather on the horizon.