In this edition: South African coast (Cintsa, Coffee Bay, Durban, St. Lucia, Swaziland), Johannesburg, Mauritius

Tomorrow morning I leave Africa behind me, and land on the sunny 
isle of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean!  It's a giant step for me. 
 And in four days, The Big One.  India!

When I left Cape Town two weeks ago, I already felt like I was starting 
my trip all over again.  I was leaving my home, my friends...and 
jumping feet-first into that hairy traveler's track.  

And it's been a little hairy, too.  A few countries in the world have gotten their backpacking agenda in order and arranged young people's transport. Scotland has the Haggis Bus, Turkey has its Fez Bus, and SA has the Baz Bus.  For a fairly low fare, you can go from one end of the country to the other along the coast, and stop pretty much at any hostel that exists.  All you have to do is put your backpack in the leaky trailer, climb on board, and prepare to warp-speed as you cram next to some blathering Argentineans. So consigned, I raced immediately (like, in one looong day) to Port 
Elizabeth.  Leaving was, like so many things for me in South Africa, sort of mystical.  At our quick stop in the popular inlet of Knysna (where I went in '97), I looked out the window and who did I see, but Sophie, the Dutch girl who got in all my photos on the Namibian trip!  She and her boyfriend Willem had been running the place ever since our overland trip ended.

"What have you been doing?" she asked, and I told her I'd been in Cape Town.  "Gee, Jason.  It's been two months."

Point taken.

The title of this Dispatch has always been a favorite phrase of mine.  If it use it again, please don't think I'm cribbing from myself.  Now I've warned you.  But it relates to the speed at which a rocket must be moving in order to escape the Earth's gravitational pull.  As I dragged myself, psychically screaming, from my place in Cape Town, my goal was to speed up and change my outlook to the point where I was ready for India.

It was good I saw her; I had some photos of the trip to give her (my desert dog photo, the logo of my trip, has proven very popular), and then plunged onward.  We crossed the Storms River over the tallest bunjee-jumping bridge in the world: six miles high. (Okay, I'll admit I don't know how high.) I crashed the night in Port Elizabeth, where the hostel manager named Bruce confirmed what I'd heard about all those old-clothes donations that Americans make.  They really do end up getting sold to the highest bidder on the wharfs of Durban and Cape Town.  Yowza!  Aside from that sterling bit of information, though, he was an idiot who liked to discuss his love of flying and import/export.  I've encountered so many South Africans who remind me of Americans in their steadfast belief that they're absolutely riveting, despite the fact they could bore mud. I blame limited access to the rest of the world.

Then to the gorgeous coastal town of Cintsa, in the 
former Ciskei Homelands.  It's the site of a cool, slow river meeting 
the sea over a wide swath of pure, fine sand.  I spent a few nights there, sloshing around amongst the 
sea snails and keeping my eye out for the many Great Whites of the 
coast. I also wrestled my camera, which had decided to wink out on me.  I figured it might be the battery, but this part of South Africa is quite remote (and it gets remoter as you head north) so my efforts to get one of those funky b-shaped camera batteries went like this:

"Do you have batteries that look like this?"

Clerk: A slow study of the weird object followed by a woeful head shake.

"Darn."

"Well," says a woman sitting on the stoop out of the heat. "Your only hope is the shop around the corner, but the lady only opens it on Fridays. And even then for only an hour or so."

It was Tuesday.

"I'll pick one up in Durban."

"Cheers," says she.

I swear, if it weren't for the heat, you'd swear you were in Stephen King's Maine.

Talked to Anne, who runs the hostel there (the stunning mountain top Buccaneer's Retreat) and she agreed with many of my views of South Africa (the Americanism, the despondency of the youth, and so on) and she had some stuff to say about running a place like this.  I'm becoming fascinated by this subculture!  She said that more and more, the kids who come through are only interested in drinking. "It's not like it used to be," she said. "They're hedonists."  And some need homes, which they make the hostel.  Even more interesting was her disdainful description of a hostel in Joburg named Brown Sugar. "Those two words have always been synonymous with black whores," she said. "Someone met the guy who ran it and he even said, 'I'm only interested in sex, drugs, and drinking.'"

"But you know," said Anne's husband. "In America, to some of the kids 'Brown Sugar' means heroin."

"Well, this is specifically for black whores," Anne said. "Nothing more than a bordello."

Later on, Anne sniffed that she knew for sure that one of the dorms had been the scene of group sex.

What am I missing??  I just wanna learn about the world.  Compared to the kids of the '90s, I guess I'm a square.  (As for hostel owners, many are aging hippies.  Their attitudes toward today's behavior depends largely on what kind of hippies they were.)

Observation: A lot of times people will sit back in the comfort of the hostel and say, "Now, THIS is really like Africa."  I always wonder what they mean.  I mean, of course it is--we're in Africa!  Even the shopping malls, few as they are, are African.  Do they mean shoeless children?  Dictators?  Corruption and dry water pipes?  Rebels without clear causes?  Of course, it's often white South Africans who'll often be heard to utter this meaningless phrase, and then two breaths later proclaim themselves as African as any black native.

Then on to Coffee Bay, in the unfathomably gorgeous Transkei 
area, one of South Africa's poorest.  It's so green, and so hilly, 
that it makes England look like some withered colonial isle in the 
middle of the North Atlantic or something.  The nearest city, Umtata, 
is birthplace of Nelson Mandela, and it's a model of the new South 
Africa in that it's a pretty healthy and prosperous city made up of mostly blacks. 
 As I said, though, the landscape, which is dotted everywhere with 
traditional round huts, is among the best I've ever seen. These people are dirt poor, but they keep their land clean and holy.

Never have I been someplace where the people like to wave more.  Every time you pass children.  I'll never understand that about Africa.  So much waving.

I even swam a sea water river (yes, this is Jason typing!) to check out 
a cool rock formation called the Hole in the Wall.  No sharks got me, but I had that panicky breathless feeling as I started out. At the actual Hole, huge quantities of sea water punched through, and our guide for the day kept encouraging us to leap into the water as it crested through this tight space.  What a nugget of testosterone he was.  Very Afrikaans, meaning obsessed to a tragic degree with proving his masculinity and nonchalance.  One by one, the boys were cowed into jumping into this hell-pit of turbulent water, and one by one, they emerged scathed by mussel slashes.  At one point, Phil gave me some eye contact, as if to indicate it was now my turn to be initiated.  Maybe it's the American in me ("Lawsuit!"), or maybe a lack of confidence in Phil, or maybe a healthy hatred for macho bullshit.  I declined, citing glandular fever.

Fun thing about Phil: He's had malaria four times. Doesn't take preventative medicines, of course.  The last time, he bragged, he died for a minute.  (Rad, man.)  He also has no spleen.  He put his hands on his hips and announced:

"I also have no spleen!"

I'm telling you, he was boasting about it.  His motorbike collided with a minibus. The minibus won.

If you can understand the ludicrousness of the American south, you can fathom Afrikaans South Africa.

The hostel managers were named James and James (one of them was small, so I called them James and Double James), both from Ealing, London, and neither one wore a shirt.  They'd arrived on Tuesday.  What a freaky industry where you can arrive, hung over and dirty-footed in a tenth-hand Volkswagen and two hours later be appointed the new administrators of a for-profit accommodation service!

Only one phone in Coffee Bay, which is really buried in the mountains that abut the sea.  Sometimes, the river cuts off the town from the road and you have to wade across.  The grocery store is a few cans of peas behind metal grates.  They let the white tourists come behind but the locals have to stay on the other side.

My second night there, Double James told me about a British girl who'd wanted both him and James to have sex with her at the same time.  He showed me the table where they'd taken her, and the chair too.  I asked if Single James had joined in.

"Yeah, but I wasn't too keen on it."

"Careful," I said, only half believing him. (Was this another macho bullshit thing?) "You'll get the clap."

"Nah," he said. "She just loves sex."  As if that answered everything.  Whatever, clearly the combination of shifting work responsibilities and ready sex are understandably appealing to thousands of young men just emerging form the umbrella of parental control.  The backpacking industry is born.

Double James, as I said, is perpetually shirtless.  As a Brit, there must be some novelty in that for him.

As I left Coffee Bay, Double James was planning to knock down a wall in the bar to expand the room.  As with most buildings in that part of South Africa, it was a purely one-story cinder block structure.  I suggested it might be a weight-bearing wall, and his face went blank.  The last I saw of him, he was repainting the kitchen instead.  Under the hostel's previous administration, a lot of Ozzies and Kiwis had used the walls to assert their patriotism.  (They love to do that.)

Maybe it was because I drank a single beer--my first in months--but I got a cold.  I was trying to shrug it off when I went to Durban,  which is a lot like South Florida with Great Whites.

Honestly!  I'm finding that more and more of cities look like Florida under 
varying coats of grime!  Tel Aviv is Miami.  Durban's Fort Liquordale.  The naked fact is most of the people in the world live in dead, square concrete boxes.  "I have seen the world, and it is...Miami."

Then disaster struck.  Me and this British guy, from Britland, ordered 
a pizza.  He wanted the one called The Something Meaty.  I should have known already that things were dubious, despite the fact they came from a well established local chain 
(Debonairs).  Anyway, I got a case of food poisoning.  My first so far! 
 I was sure that my liver had in fact exploded, and spent the night 
puking, pooping, and having sweaty nightmares about airlifts back 
to America.  Then, in the morning, I found out that Mark had it, too, so it wasn't just me.  When I saw him lying there wincing, I was genuinely happy.

I went up to St Lucia, near the Mozambique border, where I went 
on game walks (lotsa monkeys) and a hippo trawl in a big boat.  
We must have seen 40 of those mean suckers; this time, none attacked 
the boat.  But I did get a phone call!  We were hovering by a pod 
of cows (female hippos) when my phone rang; it was my friend Jayson 
from Cape Town.  "I can't talk right now.  I watching hippos."  
That's the first and last time I'll ever be able to use that excuse.

Hippos are scary because they're mean, and because they can vanish under the water without a trace.  How something so big can be so stealthy is yet another wonder of the natural world.

The hostel was run by another macho bullshitter, Richard, who balked when I wouldn't have a drink.  He was bonking a young Dutch girl on two weeks' holiday.  I couldn't figure out who was more pathetic in that arrangement.

One night around 9:00, a skinny small guy wandered over the outdoor table where we were talking.  I recognized him immediately as "Made in Sweden."  I'd seen him a few times in Cape Town.  He, too, was perpetually shirtless (again, a wild time for a Swede), which revealed a tattoo encircling the top of his spine.  It said "MADE IN SWEDEN."  He had no serviceable name that I ever learned.  Even when he advertised to sell his Baz Bus ticket on the notice board, it said "See Made in Sweden."  I had never talked to him because he was either drunk or looked like he was about to break out laughing at something.

Finally!  It was my chance to ask him The Question!

"Are you Made in Sweden?" I asked.

"As a matter of fact, I am!"  he said. I thought he'd caught my drift, but he went on: "I even have this tattoo!"

He took off his shirt to show everyone.  And I asked It.

"I like your tattoo, but tell me.  If you love Sweden so much, why is your tattoo in English?"

He twisted his face and stammered as though this peculiar measure of his patriotism had never occurred to him before.  Probably it hadn't.

"Everyone speaks English," he said. "This way, everyone will know what is says and that I'm Swedish."

My Norwegian friends Howard and Mona, sitting next to me, snarfed a little.  Norwegians and Swedes don't generally get along.

Irony seemed to escape this boy.  I felt bad for him.  Here was a guy who got a tattoo for OTHER people.  What a lousy reason to permanently scar your flesh.  But oh, so typical of the backpacking scene, where kids seem to think creating an image for yourself is the same thing as having an identity.

He was with a chummy blonde British girl. A great gal, good for a good time. I instantly liked her. (I thought of "Brighton Rock," which if you've never read, won't help you.)  Her name was Sooz, and we chatted for a while.  Turns out we'd both been to Coffee Bay.  She asked me if I'd seen her friends James and James.  I said I had, and Double James was telling this scandalous story about this insatiable nympho British chick they'd screwed together in the office.

She laughed and said, "I'll kill them!"

The details were no doubt somewhat less scabrous that Double James had made them out to be, but a high time had apparently transpired nonetheless. She had no hard feelings for me, though after her unmasking I'm not sure the same couldn't be said of me.  She invited me into town with her, but I had to wait for the Baz Bus to take me away.

The characters swirl!

Then quickly through a rainy Swaziland, where I was propositioned 
by a hooker in a sleazy dive between Manzini and Mbabane.  She was in the doorway trying to keep out of the rain (how picturesque) and after a quick chat (the ubiquitous "Where you from?") she asked me to buy her a drink. In my head, the light bulb went on--and it was a red light.

Then to Johannesburg. I took the dip into civilization (Joburg is like L.A.... or Coconut 
Grove with more bullets) to go see a doctor.  I am happy to report, 
as you're also hopefully happy to hear, that my liver is normal! 
 My energy is back!  I'm no longer contagious!  And the doctor said 
she thought I was fully capable of going to India without any stress 
on my body.  Just don't do any three-week bike tours, she said. 
 An odd prescription, I thought, but I'll obey.  And she also gave 
me my Hepatitis A booster, for which I was due.  So all is cozy 
in health-land.  She credits my having rested during the holidays; 
I credit my family for making me.

People sit around the table at the Backpackers' Ritz at night swapping horror tales.  One night, two people (both Americans) confessed with mild annoyance that they'd been mugged that day.  It happens a lot downtown.  One guy was in front of the main post office when a group of thugs surrounded him, showed him their knife, and took what he had.  It's so common that you can't get a cop to care.  In fact, it's hard to find cops at all in South Africa.  At home, they seem to be everywhere.  In a war zone like Joburg, they seem to be hiding. Probably are.  Or accepting bribes somewhere, like cops the world over.

I used my time in Joburg to steep in my civilization.  Ice cream, movies, shopping malls--all the things I must do without until I come out the other side.  I'm quite ashamed of this consumerism.  Let's move on.

And so, with the stamp of the medical community affixed to my inoculations 
card, I went to Mauritius.  Rest assured that if my health starts to fade, 
I'm gunning it for Bangkok.  No one worry.  There'll be no email 
until I come out the other side, in about a month and a half.  Sometime 
before resurfacing, I'll try to phone one or two key people, maybe, if I can, we'll see.

There's not much to say about Mauritius.  People speak English a little (another old colony) and French (they had it, too), and there are tons of Indians.  The food is Indian, mostly, and folks are pretty poor but happy.  It's got one of those tropical-island feelings: Little villages, beat-up old buses full of people who know each other, ringed by luxury resorts.  The main town, Port Louis, has a mildewy, pirate-town feel, with a downtown laced with moats and an extensive bazaar filled with vegetables and slaughtered-while-u-wait animals.  The fishmongers' wares are stridently colored.

I did nothing but relax.  I toured the island on the bus a little, and took advantage of a killer exchange rate.  Got a haircut, too, in the town of Mahebourg.  I asked for it short, and the barber took out his sheep shears.  I didn't complain.  I could do without hair for a while.  At first I thought it made me look mean, but when I said this to fellow travelers, they always laughed at me, so I don't say it anymore.

I snorkeled.  Mauritius is surrounded by reefs.  I chased big fish through coral.  I dodged gardens of sea urchins.  I swam in the hotel pool with all the Frenchies, and I enjoyed the buffet.  And at night, I was amazed to see how many stars were visible.  Even through the lights of the pool patio, you could see the ghostly line of the Milky Way.  It may have been better than Namibia.  I guess that's what comes from being stuck out in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

I never did figure out what continent I was on.  Asia or Africa?  I was substantially east of Madagascar, but close enough to be technically African.  I never asked.

And then, boom.  I was off to India.  I've built it up in my head for a long time.  It's the biggest mountain in my trip.  Coming to Mauritius first was a boon--it readied me for poor sanitation, toxic tap water, ultra-cautious standards in menu selection.  And for people who are poor but friendly. Even roadside Hindu shrines!

The airport was my first taste of India.  It was crowded with Indians!  Somehow, they were ahead and behind me, but at the end of the game, all the Westerners ended up getting through last.  It's a big mystery about Indians.  How can they push and shove with such an eye for mayhem, and still get by? If I didn't know better, I'd say they believed in Zen.

A thought for the day. In Hinduism, dharma is that belief that there is a universal balance, and what you are you should always, essentially, try to be without upsetting the order.  It's directly linked to caste, and although I could get shot for saying it, an excellent method by which to keep the lower classes in line.  Meanwhile, predestination is the Calvinist Christian notion that God has already chosen who's going into heaven, so there's nothing you can do about it.

That means that all Presbyterians are closet Hindus!

My love to everyone!  The travels resume.  Pause while I take a deep breath, and...

Love, 
Jase
---
Written in: Johannesburg, South Africa and Delhi, India