South Africa: Cape Town, beaches, prisons, absolutely nuts

The Flight Bit

I was fairly excited about the trip. I mean, besides from the usual feeling of doom that someone’s going to die while I’m away, I’m generally excited about travelling. So it’s for the best that I didn’t hear about the Air Asia flight that went missing the day we left. What’s up with 2014, Aviation World? Also, what’s up with duty free selling abalone-flavoured macadamias? Cos you know my mum can’t help but buy that sort of nonsense. Like a kilo of it. But the more pressing matter as far as my mother was concerned was Ebola. So she brought along 300 surgical masks. She hasn’t worn one yet, but I suspect that’s because it’s under that kilo of abalone-nuts (Ab-nuts? Abanuts? Absolutely Nuts?).

The trip did eventually wear out my energy. I’m not the greatest at calculating numbers, so I’d been telling people I’d arrive in 8 hours. But a quick calculation of the military digits told me that I would be spending 25 hours awake before reaching our destination. During which point my fine motor skills gradually deteriorated to that of a four-year-old’s. I wore these khaki/safari pants (with the zips-off-into-shorts option like a Chevy Chase movie from the 90’s, I am SO cool) and during the flight(s) dribbled different things between my legs (water, lotion, balsamic vinegar). Then when I was done feeding my crotch I got all sorts of cramps in my legs (legs day, bro. No, not really, bro). But then we arrived, and it was good. We discovered that our hotel was also a university, and before that, it WAS A PRISON. Sorry, going to prison is on my bucket list. I mean, it’s not as good as going to prison for first degree murder or armed robbery, but I’ll take what I can get. The cars drive on the right (and by right obviously I mean left…) side, and they have roundabouts too. Except the driver kindly said that they’re actually called traffic circles. And it suddenly occurred to me that no one else says roundabout. It’s a yobo word when you think about it. Chuck us a U-ee (Youi? You-ee?) on the rowwwwndabout, mate.

Cape Town Bit

It’s hard to reconcile the grisly past with the majestic landscape. It’s like the south. I love the south. They deep fry everything, they speak like an old western movie, the leaves change colours like a blushing Irishman. But it’s the south. South Africa is like that. In some ways, the two make sense. Because it’s so beautiful, I can see why the Afrikaaners got colonial and possessive. By possessive I mean biblically racist.

Seeing as how apartheid only ended in 94, I was curious to see if it was as diverse as the 2010 World Cup ads had us believe. It would seem that twenty years later, it’s sort-of-kind-of reconciled. There are still large statues of every single oppressor (it was almost refreshing to see the wife of one of them. I mean, there are only so many white dudes on phallic statues you can see before one feels torn about the colour imbalance vs the gender disparity), they haven’t removed the bridges (one that’s nice and one that’s rickety), and out of everyone I looked at who wasn’t a tourist, I saw one interracial couple. If I were a Martian visiting I’d say the whites are Aryan looking and the blacks are poor. They speak separate languages. And there are llama farms. More beaches per capita here than cigarettes in Greece.

It doesn’t help that there are many townships living side by side with affluent areas, though both feel like prisons. A township is rather euphemistic. It’s a shanty town. With shipping containers being used for housing. And affluent homes have high walls, barbed wires, cages over windows, gates, Dobermans, cameras.

Yet there is also a ridiculous amount of beauty. My mother wants to live here. And I do too. Despite how uncomfortable the demographics are, it’s one of those places that seems blessed by nature. There are vineyards, and deer. Baboons and penguins. Beaches and valleys. Crayfish and calamari. The Atlantic and the Pacific. Perpetually 28 degrees and breezy. No mosquitoes.

The Epilepsy-Epiloguey

Speaking of which, we’re taking anti-malaria tablets. We couldn’t take one of the options as they were kind-of-sort-of bad for women, and we couldn’t take another option as they pretty-much-certainly cause seizures in epileptics, and my brother and I had childhood epilepsy. So we’re taking malarone, which is supposedly good. But they have a rare-yet-possible side effect of hallucination. Now I thought that meant woo! Par-TAY in the prison/dorm/hotel! But no, it resulted in me having one of the most frightening nightmares I ever had.

Look, no one likes listening to someone’s dreams (and I forgot most of it), but to sum it up, basically, I was losing my sanity. I don’t mean like I was going crazy in the dream, I mean, the nightmare was so real I was forgetting who I was and names of people. I felt if I couldn’t escape this dream I would go insane (and yes, going to a mental asylum is another thing on my bucket list, but in a Girl, Interrupted way. I only like the idea if it comes with an Angelina Jolie and a Whoopi Goldberg nurse). Then I realised it was a dream. And that made it worse. As soon as I went lucid I realised, scarily, that I couldn’t wake up. I could feel my own eyelids refusing to move, my arms and legs paralysed, my mouth unable to produce a sound. It was bizarre and was not mitigated by the fact that when I finally managed to open my eyelids I was hit with the full power of jet lag and woke up like, “HOLY SHITBALLS ON A GOAT’S TITS, WHERE THE FUCK IS THIS?!” (yeah, I forgot I was in a prison/dorm/hotel in Africa. The place didn’t look like my room). I put the event out of my mind, figured it was the 19^th century dessert wine I had (the winery tried to sell that bottle as Napolean’s favourite wine. Seriously? Why don’t you pull out Stalin’s favourite vodka, or Idi Amin’s favourite scotch?). As it turns out, my mother had a poor time sleeping (she thought it might have been from the Abanuts), and my brother whimpered in his sleep, going through motions similar but not quite the state of a seizure. So I learnt that hallucinations can be bad. Don’t do drugs. And that is my two-day take on South Africa. I was impressed, and sad, and a bit crazy.