Strange friends, friendly strangers

To continue where I left off:

 

Jeffreys Bay is very unique in that the beach is a five minute walk from literally every destination in town that is important to tourists: all the hostels, internet cafés, normal cafés, surfboard shops, ATMs, etc. It's not as kitschy as Hermanus, but it's also clear that the town thrives off of tourists, backpackers, and surfers who come from all over to enjoy the sun and the waves.

 

When Olaf, Kat and I finally got to Jeffreys Bay, it was quite late at night, and the streets were deserted. We pulled up at a tiny surfer hostel, creatively named Jeffreys Bay Backpackers. Inside, we found one woman (who turned out to be the proprietor) sitting alone on the couch, wrapped in a spotted blanket and blinking blearily at a South African sitcom on the TV. Virtually every piece of furniture was luridly painted, not to mention all the walls. In addition, each of the dorm rooms was christened with a name fit for a flower child: “LOVE”, “PEACE”, “FAITH”, “HOPE”, and so on were painted loopily in primrose pink above all the door frames. In the bathroom, we found the tub painted green, the walls bright blue, the door pink, the shower curtain desperately red, and next to the light switch was taped a poster of a surfer boy hanging ten on a killer wave. It wasn’t hard to imagine the place full of love and surfer babes/dudes during high surf season – but August in South Africa is winter and low season, and the place was very quiet and virtually empty.

 

After saying goodbye to Olaf and Kat, who were pushing on to Grahamstown the same night, I moved my things into the “PEACE” room and got ready for bed.

 

Morning found Jeffreys Bay a much more cheerful place, bustling with tourist families and townspeople. I spent the day wandering the shore, which was littered with the most beautiful seashells. Perfectly intact conches, spiraled snail shells, dark red abalones lined with mother-of-pearl, exquisitely tiny sea urchins, and many more kinds I had only ever seen before in picture books or museum exhibits. That evening, for the first time in my life I actually took a long walk on the beach at sunset. It wasn’t very romantic since I didn’t have any company, but at least now I can see what all the fuss is about. Long walks on the beach at sunset might be hopelessly cliché, but they are still very nice indeed.

 

That night, the hostel was suddenly full of people. I met a young Zulu man named Marvelous, who was staying in Jeffreys Bay to do maintenance work at the local FNB bank. I also met two schoolgirls on holiday from Austria, a young couple from Switzerland, two gruff and silent Dutch guys passing through town on uncertain business, and a quiet but gentle man from New Zealand traveling with his South African girlfriend to take care of some family matters. Together with Gabby, the sharp and streetwise woman who runs the hostel, and myself, a Chinese-American student looking for foresters to interview, we made quite an unlikely cast of characters. After dinner, we all sat around in the bar out back, and Gabby gave me the rundown of the J-Bay small town gossip, while Marvelous and his two coworkers watched American wrestling on the TV, and the Dutch guys gave the Swiss couple some tips on good places to go shark-diving.

 

The next morning, I went to the next town to interview one of the head foresters working for SANParks (South African National Parks). A taxi ride from Jeffreys Bay to Humansdorp costs a whopping 60 rand, but I was lucky enough to save the fare by getting a lift from a Xhosa woman I’d met outside an internet café the day before. She told me her name was Patricia. As we clattered along the highway in her tired white pickup truck, I thanked her and told her how rarely people give lifts to strangers back in the States. No one dares to hitchhike, and no one dares to pick up hitchhikers, either. I find it very ironic that most people in South Africa are much warier but also much more welcoming than people back home, despite the fact that South Africa has much bigger problems with crime than virtually anyplace in the U.S.

 

On the way back to Jeffreys Bay, I tried to give Patricia some compensation for the lift, but she refused me adamantly. I was quite surprised, since I knew she didn’t have much money, and I’d assumed she expected some sort of payment.

 

In her slow and deliberate English, she told me kindly but firmly that people in her culture believe in helping strangers who are lost or in need of something.

 

“Do you know the word ubuntu?” she asked me.

I recognized the word because one of the other hostels in Jeffreys Bay is called the Ubuntu Backpackers Lodge. But I didn’t know what it meant.

“Ubuntu is our word for humanity,” she said. “It is what we mean when we feel compassion for other people.” She was quiet for a minute, and I could tell she was struggling a little to explain it to me. Finally she said, “It is what we do for strangers, because we know that someday we will be strangers somewhere else, and we know that is how we would like to be treated.”

 

When she finished, I marveled that something I recognized as a tiresome kindergarten lesson had somehow managed to find me on another continent, in the form of a Xhosa stranger whose life and background could not have been more different from my own. That being said, I know I was very lucky to run into her, because I’m sure that most of the other Xhosa locals in Jeffreys Bay would not have offered me their help and friendship so freely.

 

After we got back to Jeffreys Bay, Patricia showed me the little grocery shop she runs in the informally settled, lower-income part of the town. Then she brought me to her home, a modestly furnished but immaculate tinroofed shanty, and we drank some Fanta and watched a melodramatic Nigerian soap opera together.

 

After she took me back to the main street in Jeffreys Bay, I said goodbye to her, promised to give her a call if I was ever back in J-Bay, and caught a taxi to the Port Elizabeth airport.

 

On the flight back to Cape Town, I sat next to a girl who happened to be on her way home from flight school. She answered all my naïve questions about flight school and how planes work – including whether you can drive them like cars while they’re grounded, and if so, whether they’re stickshift or automatic.

 

(Turns out they ARE stickshift, just as Ryan and I speculated! And the “driver” always sits on the left-hand side. The idea of driving stick in a plane is very funny to me because I’ve been learning stickshift and right-hand driving since coming to Cape Town. With some vindictive pleasure, I thought to myself that stalling a plane in the airport terminal must be much more embarrassing than stalling a car in an intersection - which I still do all too frequently.)

 

ubuntu - n. humanity, compassion, the art of being human

It feels wonderful to be clean and fed on something besides bread and peanut butter. Having spent the last few days alone and figuring things out on the fly, I am unexpectedly happy to be back in Cape Town, which I've begun to think of as the closest thing to a home in this country. Or if not a home, then a home turf - a place where I have some friends and a daily routine, and the names of places are more familiar to me. 

On Sunday, I hitched a ride to Jeffreys Bay with Olaf and Kat, who were heading to the other side of the country. It was very funny to think that the three of us, all friends from Princeton, had somehow ended up together in a car in rural South Africa, in some kind of bizarre rendition of Kerouac's On the Road. I guess people have a way of finding their friends, no matter where they go.

We drove all day along the N2, which hugs the coast of South Africa. This road is nicknamed the Garden Route because it traverses a beautiful, bright rolling countryside as far as the eye can see for hundreds of kilometers. As we sped by sheep and hitchhikers, Kat and I took turns burning CDs on Olaf's laptop, playing each one over and over even after we'd all gotten sick of hearing the same incongruous mix of Bob Marley, Disney, Chopin, and Lord of the Rings on endless repeat. 

We stopped in Hermanus for lunch and whale-watching. Hermanus is a small town right on the shore. It's a tourist trap of the most successful variety: it's crammed with posh cafes and kitschy souvenir shops, and during the day it's absolutely run amok with tourists. Generally, I really don't like places like Hermanus; I think being surrounded by that many tourists makes a place feel superficial, as though it is built completely on self-indulgence and cheap experiences. But on our way back to the car, Olaf said something which made me realize that he sees tourists in such a different way than I do. 

"I like being around tourists," he said. "It's sort of reassuring."

"Why?" I said in some surprise. 'Reassuring' is possibly one of the last words I'd associate with tourists.

"I think it's because they're so clueless," he replied simply. "I think most tourists are looking for something, whether or not they realize it." He paused and thought for a moment. "It's as if they are trying to educate themselves - except they are very clumsy about it. They don't know what they're doing, but they're trying to do it anyway. It's very earnest."

I thought about what he said for a while. It felt strange to reconsider something and end up finding that it wasn't quite as ugly as I'd thought, and that there might even be something endearing about it. 

We didn't make any other stops. By the time we reached Knysna, night had fallen and the sky was filled with stars. So many stars! More than I'd ever seen, except for the few times I've been backpacking out in the middle of nowhere. As Olaf drove, I tilted my head out the window and just drank them in. If we hadn't been going so fast, I could have hung out the window looking at them for hours. 

It was around then that Kat burned the fourth and last CD we had. At our behest, she added "Poor Unfortunate Souls" from the Little Mermaid, and when it finally came on, Olaf and I shouted and screeched and sang along to it, every word. 

"Poor unfortunate souls!" we crooned along with Ursula. "In pain, in need! This one longing to be thinner, that one wants to get the girl, and do I help them? YES INDEED!" we shouted gleefully, as Olaf gunned the engine and the stars and forests of Knysna flew by.

A day in the life

Lately, days here have been getting funnier and funnier. 

Yesterday, Ryan and I woke up late and drove for an hour out of town to a winery. After sampling four kinds of wine, we bought a bottle of cabernet sauvignon and left. After driving a little farther, we filled our packs with sand, left the car behind, hiked for two hours into a secluded valley, and dug a hole. Then we came home.

Today has been just as funny in different ways. Ryan and I just spent four hours making lasagna while blasting music from the Lord of the Rings. 

Traditional, but unexpected

On Sunday, I went trad climbing for the first time. And I discovered that trad, or traditional climbing, is a completely different beast from sport climbing - but not at all in the ways I expected. 

In sport climbing, you clip the rope through bolts that are already drilled into the rock. But in trad, there are no bolts. Instead, you place your own gear in cracks in the rock, and then clip the rope through your gear. The first time someone explained trad to me was about five months ago, when we were on a climbing trip in Kentucky. Perhaps because of the way my friends described it, I always imagined that trad must be a terrifying experience. 

"There are two rules in trad climbing," they used to joke. 

"Rule number one: All gear ALWAYS holds.

Rule number two: Don't fall."

A classic case of doublethink - simultaneously trusting and not trusting your gear placements. Not trusting, because if you're new to trad, you can't assume your gear will hold if you fall on it. But at the same time, you have to force yourself to trust it, because otherwise the fear of falling makes climbing impossible.

With these thoughts in the back of my head, I have to say I felt more than a little apprehensive on Sunday as we were hiking up to Lion's Head. But once we started climbing, I began see that although I had understood before how trad worked from a mechanical perspective, I had completely missed the point. Climbing with Ian and his friends made me realize that learning trad didn't have to involve fear or risk. And in fact, if it did involve fear or risk, it was because you were going about it the wrong way.

With them, trad was all about taking it slow. It was about never putting yourself in a situation where you didn't have all the time in the world - time to find the right piece of gear, time to find the right place to put it, time to do everything exactly the way you meant to. And time to appreciate the mountain and the climb for their own sake, not for the sake of achieving something competitive for yourself. We didn't climb anything that wasn't easily within our comfort zone, in terms of strength or ability. Instead of climbing to get better at climbing, we were climbing... for some other reason. Some reason that is harder to pinpoint. 

When I took a turn leading, I found it surprisingly liberating to have no specific course set before me. No bolts, no leader. It felt strange to be free to choose my own way up the mountain.

When we finally reached the top of Lion's Head, the sun had already set, and the stars had already risen. The city and the ocean were spread out below, all around us. We emerged right next to the highest lookout point, marked by a plaque and a cairn for tourists and hikers. To our surprise, we heard laughter and smelled the unmistakeable smell of beer. A group of college kids had evidently hiked up before us to enjoy the sunset and the view. They stopped talking and stared at us as we emerged one by one, heavy with gear and ropes, from the edge of what looked like a sheer drop-off. 

"Where did you come from?" they asked, almost suspiciously. Evidently the alcohol was making it necessary for them to think a little harder than usual. "Did you climb up here?" one of them said finally.

"Yes," we said. 

And then, for lack of anything better to say, we wished them a good night and began the long hike back down.

Khayelitsha: Our New Home

Yesterday, Zimasa - a friend from the market - brought us to her cousin's circumcision ceremony in Khayelitsha.

Khayelitsha is one of Cape Town's townships - huge, informal settlements of people living on the outskirts of the city. From the N2 freeway, all you can see of Khayelitsha is miles and miles of shacks, all crammed together in what looks like endless heaps of brightly painted, corrugated scrap metal. This is Site C, one of the most destitute parts of Khayelitsha. In the rest of the township, people's homes range from similar metal shacks to small but decent houses with plumbing and electricity.

The celebration was held in one of these better houses, somewhere deep in the maze of Khayelitsha. When we took the exit off the N2 and began winding our way through the endless stretch of shacks, I tried to remember the turns - left, right, straight for many blocks, left again, right again - but even so, it didn't take long before I had completely lost my sense of direction. We drove for a while down what seemed like a main street - on either side, there were many shacks painted to say things like "Beauty Hair Salon" or "Platinum Cafe". It was like a main street in any town, except all of the buildings were small, corrugated metal shacks, most of them enclosing no more than about five square feet of dirt floor. The street itself was paved and beautifully maintained, bustling with cars and minibus taxis. And everywhere there were pedestrians - men in jeans and t-shirts, children in colorful mismatched clothing, women with earrings, handbags, and well-coordinated outfits. 

When we pulled up to the house, the yard was full of men and women - the men in dark, nondescript streetclothes, and the women mostly in colorful traditional dresses, wraps, and headscarves. (Although there was one woman wearing a pink “I heart NY” sweatshirt over her traditional clothing.) They all stopped what they were doing and stared at us in silence. But once we got out of the car and Zimasa began introducing us, they broke into huge smiles and each of them shook hands with us warmly. “Hello baby! Thank you for coming!” many of the women said to me, and hugged us all in turn. It was really touching and completely unexpected to see how happy they were to welcome us to their celebration – they showed us around the little house, introduced us to everybody, explained what was going on at each stage of the celebration, fed us, talked to us, urged us to come back someday. Back in the States, we would hardly have gotten the same reception if we had randomly showed up at, say, someone’s wedding party.

Here in Khayelitsha it was all the more touching to me, because we were not only strangers, but complete outsiders to them in just about every possible way. They didn’t resent us for being rich and white (all of us were white to them, although I’m Chinese and Mikail is Bangladeshi). They don’t have much food, but they were happy to share it with us all the same. It’s hard for me to understand how they could welcome us so openheartedly, in spite of the fact that we come from completely different walks of life.

Some of them offered us a taste of umqombothi - their homebrewed beer - which they were passing around in a paint bucket. 

The beer itself looked and smelled a lot like some sludgy mixture of campfire smoke, paint thinner, and rubbing alcohol. I couldn’t bring myself to try it, although Ryan and Zimasa both had a sip as the others looked on, all of them grinning broadly. “How do you like it?” they asked. “Can’t get enough of it,” said Ryan, wrinkling his nose, and they all laughed.

Later, as I was sitting with Zimasa on the step outside, one of the men wandered over and started talking to me. After discovering that neither Mikail nor Ryan was dating me, he told me, in that very earnest and serious way that only the slightly drunk can manage, that he wanted me to marry him. Too late, I started protesting and making up a story about a boyfriend back in the States, but Zimasa next to me was laughing so hard that pretty soon I was laughing too.

“But I love you!” he implored me tipsily. 

“But you are drunk!” scoffed his friend, who was also drunk, sitting on my other side.

Eventually some of the other men came and pulled him away, laughing and telling me not to worry about him.

The ceremony itself was fascinating to watch, although most of it happened in Xhosa, so Zimasa had to whisper to me what was going on. The circumcision actually took place a month before, and her cousin had just returned from spending that month in isolation, in preparation for his final coming-of-age.

In the first part of the ceremony, he sat in the house on the floor, surrounded with all the women in the family. He was wrapped from head to foot in dark blue blankets, his head bowed in deference as one by one the women got up and lectured him on the responsibilities of becoming a man. They were all extremely severe, as though they were chastising him for doing something very naughty, like stealing the car keys or staying out all night at a party. But once they finished, the mood changed completely – they all stood up and began smiling and singing and dancing, and we could hear the men singing too from outside the house. The women helped Zimasa’s cousin stand up, and he was half led, half carried out of the house to join the rest of the men in a shack in the backyard, where they sang and passed around the homebrewed beer in the paint can, and gave him more advice about being a man.

chutzpah - n. shameless audacity

Cape Town is full of funny things. For instance, car guards: people who watch your car for you while you buy groceries, get a haircut, have a beer, whatever. Essentially, it's not very different from the way people pay for parking in the States - except instead of paying for the usage of a scarce public good, you're paying to not get your car stolen. All kinds of people are car guards, but it can be difficult to tell which ones are employed and which ones are only masquerading to squeeze a few rand out of the unsuspecting driver. Legit or otherwise, all of them wear the same uniform: a bright, reflective, crossing-guard-esque vest that looks like it got pulled out of a dumpster. The real ones are mostly very genial and charmingly overeager to help you park (yes a little farther! little farther! there. sharpsharp!) whether you're inching into a precarious parallel park, or cruising into a space big enough for a truck. 

sepia - n. a blackish fluid secreted by cuttlefish as a defensive screen

Kalk Bay

Kalk Bay

garden behind our cottage

Valeriane getting splashed

Things that Princeton really needs:

1. A mountain.

2. An ocean.

3. A city.

4. Good climbing.

5. Salsa nightclubs. 

6. Avocados everywhere.

margin - n. the edge or periphery of something; the amount by which a thing is won or falls short

For someone who came here to study botany and conservation, it's embarrassing how little my untrained eye can distinguish about the vast array of plants that make the Western Cape world-famous for its biodiversity. 

The Western Cape vegetation is mostly fynbos - Afrikaans for "fine bush", named after the small-leaved shrublike plants that characterize this floral kingdom. The fynbos biome is the smallest and richest in the world in terms of species diversity per square kilometer. From a distance, it looks like the whole of the Western Cape is covered in a uniform carpet of rather diminutive bushes. But if you hike or drive up a little ways into the mountains, it isn't hard to see that these dwarfish, unimpressive plants actually exhibit an extraordinary range of shapes, shades, and structures that is really unparalleled in any of the forests of Europe or North America. Some of the most striking plants are the proteas. The bodies of the proteas mature in all shapes and directions, but most species produce a very distinctive flower: powerful, bowl-shaped, and spiky, with a dusty, rugged shell and a startlingly luminescent interior that ranges from pale lavender to magenta in hue. 

No one understands precisely why this tiny region, and ONLY this region, has evolved to support such a staggering variety of species. Even with my limited background in biology, it's not that hard to see why so many conservationists, both international and South African, are clamoring to preserve this small corner of the earth. For them, the fynbos is a biological mystery, a one-of-a-kind chance to understand our world a little better, and therefore an incredibly precious natural resource. 

At the same time, though, the fynbos doesn't seem to figure at all into the lives of most South Africans. The vast majority of the people here are very poor. What tangible benefits can they reap from mountains' worth of shrubby plants that grow slowly, produce no food, don't make good firewood, and burn down every 15 years or so anyway? Perhaps needless to say, it's a funny situation, characterized by all the quirks, contradictions, and disparities of perspective that seem so emblematic of the way virtually all conservation efforts have unfolded on this continent. 

Spending time here is a pretty awesome way to get my feet wet, considering I've only just declared as an EEB major. But I also feel more than a little disconnected from the hub of culture and activity that is Cape Town. Whenever I'm out wandering the streets or museums, buying groceries, rubbing shoulders with all the people that sell things or hawk at pedestrians or ferry passengers from Mowbray to downtown Cap, it seems that the fynbos couldn't be farther removed from everything that is necessary and relevant to this city.

real life-n. life as it is lived in reality, involving welcome as well as unwelcome experiences, as distinct from a fictional world

A couple of years ago, as we were speeding to catch a train, my friend's mother made a remark about life that has stuck in my memory ever since. 

"When you're young, everything just keeps getting better and better," she said cheerfully as we sped through a red light. "It's as if everybody's hiking up a mountain together." I gripped the seat in front of me as we tore through an intersection. "But after you get to the top, it's not like that anymore. Everyone seems to find their own way down - one of your friends gets in an accident, someone else gets divorced, someone else loses all their money, or gets cancer... THAT'S what it's like when you're middle-aged!" she shouted happily.

A funny lady if I ever met one. Sometimes I agree with her more, sometimes less. It's hard to tell how much my view of things is colored by where I am on that mountain - if life is, indeed, shaped like a mountain. Right now, though, having just heard about the recent death of one of my high school teachers, I can't help thinking that the summit is looking an awful lot closer than it did in high school. 

a tempest in a teapot - slang for great anger or excitement about a trivial matter

The hardest thing to get used to about Cape Town is nightfall. 

At home in New Jersey, the transition from late afternoon to evening is just another one of those vestigial natural phenomena: thanks to headlights, street lamps, and indoor lighting, it's rarely more than a minor inconvenience for those of us who are still out and about. 

Here, depending on where you are in the city, the sunset can be really spectacular since Cape Town is spread out right in front of the ocean, with the picturesque and oft-advertised Table Mountain looming moodily at its back. But sunset also means that it is about to become a lot more dangerous to be out on the street. Finding your way back home suddenly becomes no trivial endeavor - taxis are sketchier, flagging down a minibus is generally not recommendable, and going on foot is just downright stupid under a lot of circumstances. 

It's hard to tell how many of the rumours - especially when they come from upper-middle class white international academics - can be taken seriously. Still, better not to take any chances, right? 

To be sure, it isn't hard to get around safely if you just take some basic precautions. And it certainly isn't hard to find advice, if you just ask. But I can't help wishing that it were easier to know whose advice to take. 

Of note: I went on a long run today, in spite of the pouring rain and the onset of night! A dubious milestone. And an excuse to eat more avocado, brie, bread, chocolate, peanut butter... It is winter here, after all, and therefore necessary to eat more rich, fatty foods to maintain body heat.