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.)
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