Kickin it Leo Style..
Trip Start
Feb 14, 2006
1
26
104
Trip End
Ongoing
Coffee Bay,
South Africa
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
We started out on our drive through what I would call the "Real Africa". This was very far away from the strip malls and over passes of Jo-Burg. I meant to mention earlier that Jo-Burg looks like Dallas, Texas. We passed entire families walking down the highway with their possessions on their heads. Or, riding in donkey carts while 18 wheelers passed them by. We passed village after village of goat hearders, cattle with these huge humps in the middle of their backs, and sheep that had been spray painted by their owners. All of these animals feel the need to wander into the highway at any given time, so there is no such thing as maintaining a constant speed on the interstate. The traditional house of the Xhosa people is the Rondowal. The "W" is pronounced like a "V" though. It looks like a smurf house. It's round, with a peaked thatch roof, and is usually made out mud bricks that have been subsequently smoothed over with more mud. They seem to be quite practical and hold up well in the varying weather conditions that Africa brings to bear. Most interesting, I found, is that the people love to paint these houses bright teal or pink. In fact, every color of the PAWS Easter Egg Coloring Kit is represented quite well.
After a ride of about six hours, we arrived via a bumpy road into Coffee Bay. Coffee Bay is the end of the earth, and depending on who you talk to, it's either paradise or the epithome of boredom. I found it to be closer to paradise, but I couldn't live there. Upon getting to our campsite at Bomvu Backpackers, we were approached by two cute little girls. "Can we sing for you?" they asked. We needed to get our tent set up so we said, no thanks. Right behind them, was a short, jaundiced, man. "You need something to smoke?" he inquired. I'm not kidding, we just got out of the car. I was a bit taken back by all of these offers of entertainment, so I just handed everyone an Orange. The man walked away, and the girls started singing and dancing.... terribly. As if I could watch his thought process, the man suddenly stood up straight and walked back towards me. "How about some mushrooms?" I kept waiting for a curtain to open up and for Phish to start with their opening riff. This is the kind of place that Coffee Bay is.
Bomvu Backpackers might be the most chilled place in the entire world. It seriously reminded me of The Beach, starring that dreamboat, Leo Dicaprio. Only this place had electricity and a bar. There were beautiful gardens, fantastic level campsites, and you could make your own drum if you wanted to. Come to think of it, someone was always beating on a drum. Didn't matter what time of the day. There were hammocks everywhere and hidden enclaves to have fires or do what ever you wanted. Excellent music was constantly streaming out of the bar too, which is nice, as South Africa has the worst radio stations on the planet. It's as if their DJ's have been locked in a closet with nothing but Brian Adams CD's for the last 20 years. One of the stations, no shit, had an all Roxette weekend the other day. They were pretty fired up about it. I must have heard, "It Must Have Been Love" from Pretty Woman about thirty times. Back to Bomvu, the best part about the place for me was the fact that they had four of the best dogs I've ever met. And they loved their Uncle Nate.
Kelly and I took a hike the next day up to a place called "Hole in the Wall". We heard that it was a fair ways away, but hey we're young right? So, we started off on a trail up the coast. It was one of the most beautiful hikes I've ever done. It's kind of like Big Sur only with much bigger waves beating against the coast and no other people at all. Just goats and the occasional monkey. It was a walk that continued to amaze, but also continued... and continued, and continued. Get my drift? We got kind of lost and eventually ran across a sheperd boy named Tom who took us on a short cut. We thought that we couldn't get lost at the point that Tom left us. So we headed down the appointed trail. I thought that I could save us some time by taking the road less traveled between some tidal pools and a pretty shear cliff. Kelly said, Okay, you check it out and if it's cool, then I'll join you. So, happily and full of myself, I climbed along these rocks convinced that I was going to save us all kinds of time getting to this fabled Hole in the Wall. Suffice it to say that I didn't save us any time. Actually, quite the opposite. I ended up getting stranded on some rocks that hugged the cliff due to the rising tide. So, I had one choice. To climb the cliff or drown. I started climbing.... In Teva's and with one barely usable arm. It took me a while but after about a half hour, I had managed to get all the way up the sixty or so foot cliff. I was a bit scraped up, but otherwise okay. A rock climber would have been able to scale this without any difficulty at all, but I'm no rock climber. I'm also no Jack Kennedy.. at least that's what Lloyd Bensen tells me.
The Hole was a bit anti climactic. Or maybe I'm just getting jaded. It was neat, but if you've seen one rock arch, you've seen them all. We then started back home... after a LONG walk we arrived just in time to see yet another of Africa's magnificent sunsets.
That night as Kelly and I were having a beer at the bar, I noticed that there was some drumming and dancing going on around a camp fire. Upon further inspection, I noticed that the girls weren't wearing any tops. Hmm... I think I'd better check this out. What I found was both awesome and weird at the same time. Yes there were topless dancers, but they were between the ages of 11 and 14. Some local girls had taken it on themselves to show us some tribal dances. They were great dancers... but I couldn't help but feel a bit dirty about watching the whole thing. And I watched the whole thing.. you can't have a little thing like a conscious get in your way of a cultural experience. Right?
Our next day was all about leisure. Not that hiking all day was stressful or anything, we just didn't do anything. Kel and I went to the beach accompanied by those four awesome dogs I was telling you about. We had the entire place to ourselves. Okay, sure, every hour or so, someone would try to sell us grass or crawfish or something. But at least it wasn't a timeshare. Kelly was thrilled to find a South African Cosmo magazine to read and I was very content petting dogs, and whittling, something I haven't done since I was about 10. Later that day, we layed in hammocks and then cooked dinner and drank wine out of our, now ever present box. I played the drums in a circle with some Swedes, Germans, and the local people. I wasn't very good, but I was better than the Europeans. Those nordic people have no rhythm. We had made friends with some hippies from Austria. Somebody please explain the white person dread lock to me.... I don't get it. How do you get them off when you tire of them? Anyway, these guys were cool.. so we played Dominos until the wee hours of the morning. The girl from Austria's name was "Birgit". I couldn't get this right no matter how hard I tried. "Hey Bigot, it's your turn."
The next day, we woke up in our tent to exotic birds making strange and beautiful music, children singing "If You're Happy and You Know It" at the school next door to our camp, and all of this with the faint crashing of the ocean in the background. As if this wasn't enough, I unzipped my tent to find a big brown dog named Amber, wagging here tail and licking my face. It was going to be a good day.
