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Driving to Joburg

Car, South Africa, Travel,

It occurs to me, the day before we leave, that I’ve never done this before. I’ve never travelled by car from Durban to Johannesburg. All the times I’ve travelled between the two cities – and there have been many visits since I first came this way in 2003 – have been by plane. It’s an odd thought. I love flying and I have a soft-spot for this particular route, especially in the late afternoon when you get to dodge and soar between giant thunderstorm clouds. The most dramatic experience I’ve ever had of flying through a thunderstorm was on this route. But flying has disadvantages. I remember a discussion, perhaps from a TV show or a movie, maybe a book, about seeing the earth from outer space and that it is all beautiful and uniform but there is no detail. From a plane you get to see the gentle rise and fall of the landscape. You get to enjoy the splendour of mountain ranges and the curve of escarpments, but you don’t see the newly build gateposts on a farm named Grootgeluk – grateful in spite of the hardships, perhaps a long-held dream come true. You miss the human detail, the texture of the landscape seen close-up.

Traveling by car (and I find trains the same) gives you a chance to soak up that texture. It’s a way to get a glimpse of what may really be true. Of course, you don’t get all the detail – it’s a painting, not a movie – but it is so rich with possible interpretations and ideas. Also, you get to sit still and watch for a few hours. That’s not something that happens very often. Sitting in a bus or a car or a train for hours and hours with no distractions, just letting your mind wander as you take in a world beyond the window. Some people hate the sitting still. I find it one of the most restorative parts of travel.

That’s how I felt yesterday on the drive up to Johannesburg. Not far into the journey, we began to leave behind the oppressive greenness of the KZN mist belt and to travel through farmland and acacia-dotted veld. The roads are good, the sky was clear and the weather was warm. Further along, clouds began to build up. The beginnings of what should have become a thunderstorm – those same giant, charged clouds that the planes overhead travel between. On the ground, there was little sign of those storms. The Free State is dry. Cattle graze in fields of dried-out, post-harvest stalks. Maize? Some winter crop? Newly ploughed fields lie waiting for the moment the new growing season can begin. Perhaps there is another reason they haven’t been planted yet. Perhaps they’re waiting for the rain. Dust devils lift layers of precious soil and sweep them across the road. The air is hazy with dust. Town after town, hazy with dust. Clouds are now gathering overhead and stray rays of sunshine turn dust devils golden.

Eventually, beyond the dry fields, we cross the Vaal River. Things seem calmer here but the haziness remains. We drive on, through the beginnings of the city, following the white lines. The road opens up and the Joburg skyline is before me. It feels like coming home. The whole trip has felt a little like that. The flat landscape of ploughed fields and open grass stretching to hills in the distance felt like relaxing. The small towns felt warm and familiar. This skyline feels alive. It’s late afternoon and Joburg is dusty and hazy. The clouds have gathered here, too, and they float across the city as stray sunbeams light up buildings and billboards. Through Sandton, along Katherine Street, past the place I used to live, along Rivonia Road towards Rosebank and my home for the night. Still my favourite part of the city. An evening with friends, a good night’s sleep. The drive, the trip, the hours in transit make a difference. I begin to exhale.

 

On Emptiness

Uncategorized, ,

I miss the emptiness.

It’s pretty here. It’s green and lush and all the words that describe pretty places. It rains a lot. There is water. Lots of water. There are monkeys in the trees and so many birds.

But I miss the emptiness.

I never see the sky here. It’s mist and trees and mountains. Sometimes there’s a glimpse of the deep blue in winter or the clear blue in summer, but I never see the whole of the sky. The valley is picturesque. It’s picture-postcard pretty. But postcards are static. They’re the same picture. They stay the same. It’s that kind of pretty.

I miss the drama of empty landscapes. The road that goes on forever between rough, harsh bush, dotted with rocks and windmills and the occasional sheep far in the distance. I miss being able to see the distance.

I miss the rolling, empty grasslands with the thorn trees and the aloes and the dusty, dried-blood soil.

I miss the majesty of the craggy, Cape folded mountains soaring beyond the vineyards.

I miss the sea, the rough, dangerous, cold Atlantic with a million moods, every one more incomprehensible than the last.

My mind keeps drifting back to the summer grasslands and the long-horned acholi cattle silhouetted against the storm sky.

The green and the valley and rivers are pretty. The tree-green covered mountainsides of Korea and the big rivers were pretty, too. The same full green land and dull grey sky. Not steel-grey, blue-grey brooding storms. Just mist-grey. Overcast-grey.

The happiest places of the last nine months – places, not moments, because people can make the other places okay – but the happiest places have been just the places I’ve always loved. The grasslands of eastern Congo. The dryness of Eldoret before the rains. The Eastern Cape. My Eastern Cape. Driving past Cradock and Bedford and the winter-swept Nieu Bethesda. The “arse end of the world”, to quote Marguerite Poland, around Grahamstown. Even Stutt, with its forests, but set like a stone rippling grasslands in all directions. And those forests, like the African rainforests, so much richer and more complex.

I long for the endless, complex loneliness. The lush, green, pretty, cluttered beauty here is, well, pretty. But some days, against the backdrop of incessant soft, green rains, I wish, I just wish I was a million miles away.

The road to Eldoret

Adventures, Kenya, Travelling in Africa,

I woke that morning not even aware that I was in a strange bed. After breakfast and a brief meeting, we set off on our long journey northward. Or possibly west-ward. We were certainly sharing the road with plenty of “Danger Petroleum” trucks and Kampala Coach busses. I watched the landscape, so similar to home, and listened to a random radio station play all the old songs I grew up on. It was a little nostalgic but also very peaceful.

Quite suddenly, on our left, there opened up a wide, sweeping view of the Great Rift Valley. It really is something. I felt, initially, like I was looking out again from the ruined Belgian house near Bunia in the DRC. I suppose this is the other side. The mountains were bigger and more pronounced. We stopped at a lookout point and took pictures and enjoyed the view, in between fending off curio-sellers. I’m actually a little sad I didn’t buy the ‘map’ carving the first person showed me, with the names of the peaks and the lakes. By the time I’d thought again, he was gone and a slightly intoxicated guy was trying to sell me a statue of an elephant. As we looked out, I was struck by a sense of history and awe. This place, from this valley, humans spread to populate the whole earth. Millions of years of human history right there.

We stopped for lunch at the Midlands Hotel in Nakuru. The place predates independence. I didn’t need to know when it was built to know that. Everything about it was the same: it could have been Sunday at the club or the hotel in any small town in the Platteland. Of course, it’s not the same, in fact most of us ordered rotisserie chicken, but the service was the same and the feel of the place. The paint colours, the red tiles, the covered walkway leading to the hall that must have seen so many memories. I can picture tennis club dinners, and small children falling asleep under tables at weddings and 40th birthdays ,and boys and girls, cousins, maybe, or lifelong friends, rushing around the garden together while their parents sit and chat – gin and tonic for the ladies and beer or whiskey for the men.

That sense of the familiar stayed with me for the next few hours and brought me to quiet tears behind my sunglasses often and often. The animals, the dry grass, the windmills, the tractors, the houses, the trees. It was all so much like the Eastern Cape I love. Like Grahamstown and Adelaide and Tarkastad. The rhythm of Swahili on the radio was as familiar as the settler houses we passed. If the world is divided into two, it is those who have sheep and those who don’t, and I am categorically with the sheep people: There were sheep. It made me homesick. It made me wish for a long-gone fantasy of life as a farmer’s wife in the rural Eastern Cape.

It also made me very, very happy. All these months, I’ve been slowly losing hope of finding my Africa. I knew Mozambique would be different because it’s like Durban. But then, after the brief encouragement of Namibia and Botswana, came Zambia. And Uganda. And the DRC. Slowly, I was beginning to believe in a uniform, lush, tropical Africa. But this! This is home. This is my dry, wide-open, beautiful, grassland home. My dry grass and summer thunderstorms, ploughed fields and grazing herds, blood-red earth and skies that go on forever. I found myself thinking about the other places I have convinced myself I could try – Kampala, Lusaka, Maputo, so many more – and suddenly I didn’t believe it. But I could live here. Kenya could make me happy.

Of course Africa is not uniform. There is no single “Africa” but there is a picture in my mind of what my home, my continent – or at least the bits of it I love most – should look like and it looks like central Kenya. Who knows where life will take me? What plans I’ve made in the past few years have certainly not turned out as expected. Wherever it is, I really hope that at least part of it will involve me moving, lock, stock and oversized backpack, to somewhere like Nairobi, Kenya.