Are We There Yet? (22 page)

On the second floor is a meridian room, on whose walls are traced the arc of the sun. It was here that Galpin and his son Walter – one of seven boys who all wore dresses until they were eight – determined the orb's position at noon to maintain the accuracy of the rooftop clock. After all, what kind of watchmaker couldn't keep accurate time?

The inner workings of the rooftop clock occupy the Science Room next door and are a scaled-down replica of those at the Royal Courts of Justice in London. They are hand-wound four times a week.

Up a tight spiral of thirty-six steps is the house's pièce de résistance. A camera obscura is an ingenious contraption which uses an angled mirror and convex lens to project images of the exterior surroundings onto a central table in the darkened chamber. It can be tilted and rotated through 180 and 360 degrees respectively so that the activities on pretty much every street in Grahamstown's CBD could be observed in private by Galpin.

As intriguing a novelty as the camera obscura was and continues to be – there are only five in the world and this one is it for the southern hemisphere – Galpin's finest moment was to be in the ground-floor drawing room in 1867. It was a mild autumn day when Dr William Atherstone, who rented a small surgery space in the Galpins' house, lobbed in and excitedly asked for a moment in private.

Atherstone, who was also instrumental in establishing the world's first mental hospital nearby in 1875, had been dabbling in geology for two decades and, much like the current students of Grahamstown, was always searching out his next stone. From his pocket, he retrieved a pebble and letter which he presented to Galpin. The missive was from the acting civil commissioner in the town of Colesberg who reported that the stone had been found on a local farm and asked if it was perhaps of some value. Galpin tested it for hardness and concluded that 21.25 carats of pure diamond had been sent through the mail. A specific gravity test was then performed at the home of the local Catholic bishop, the Right Reverend James David Richards. It confirmed Galpin's assessment, whereupon the bishop grabbed the diamond, strode over to a nearby window and scratched his initials into the glass. The inscribed pane forms the centrepiece of the exhibition on the ground floor of the Observatory Museum, while the gem which carved it proved to be the first of thousands which altered the course of the nation's history.

The myriad charms of Grahamstown were only heightened by the air of malevolence and decrepitude that blew hot and fetid through my next destination.

Port Elizabeth is known in South Africa as The Windy City, a title I long thought of as not quite doing justice to the laid-back beach town I had been to on holiday as a child. Until I got there as an adult and discovered that the constant breeze was in fact that city's only refreshing attribute. I entered PE through a malodorous stew of silos, factories and saltworks that had turned the sandy lagoons on the city's outskirts to a purple-green never seen in nature.

The air smelled of chemicals and the industrial tangle of streets was flanked by decaying sidewalks from which chunks of concrete were missing. These were presided over by faded Vaseline billboards with smiling black families below which the words “your skin, your pride” appeared. On the side of the road were lines of rusting taxis in which gun-toting drivers slouched asleep in the passenger seat awaiting the peak-hour rush.

The once quaint buildings were stained by the fumes of the thousands of vehicles which crawled by on the way to somewhere more picturesque. Sun-blistered paint, garbage and bitter eyes seemed to be the prevailing motif in this part of town. Cresting a ridge, however, it seemed I had turned into transmogrificationville. Avenues of skinny, triplestorey terrace houses in fuchsia, mustard and burgundy streamed away in both directions. Set against the broad sweep of steel-blue harbour and interspersed with the odd sandstone steeple, it could have been a San Franciscan hideaway.

As I was to discover, PE is somewhat of a schizophrenic city with pockets of startling beauty in a coat of crime, grime and slime.

On the advice of the students I'd met in Grahamstown, I booked a room at the gracious Edward Hotel, which happened to be celebrating its centenary. It was three storeys of pale yellow Edwardian elegance located at the top of a hill which commanded a fine view of the harbour and had a park the size of a city block on its doorstep.

The place had recently been taken over by a national chain. This fact was made apparent through various pieces of marketing that could only have come about as the result of the semi-intoxicated ramblings of a focus group. The first of these was the slogan on the hotel's brochure. Bearing in mind that it was a hundred years old, magnificently stuccoed and dominated by a glass-domed atrium below which cane ceiling fans revolved graciously over flagstone floors, you'd think that they could come up with something more tempting than “probably the best value in the country”. All over the land you could hear potential customers crying, “Fuck Bora-Bora, we're going to the Edward where there's a good chance the rates are reasonable”.

My exasperation may seem a little hysterical but in an era of contrived old-world elegance this was a rare real deal. The plan had been to dump my bags and begin exploring the city, but on the pretext of organising my notes, I spent three blissful hours in the palm court while waiters in red velvet waistcoats ferried a succession of tea, crumpets and Singapore slings down a mahogany staircase and into my gluttonous maw.

I dillydallied the afternoon away exploring the place. The bar was panelled in dark wood, plushly carpeted and decorated with a dozen aging pendulum clocks which didn't so much tick as groan like a group of old men simultaneously vacating their chairs. The Edward was of such elegant decrepitude that it had to have at least one resident ghost. The manager duly informed me that the previous owner and his wife who were murdered on the premises in 1972 by a sommelier – “Who's breathing now, punk?”– have made their presence felt from time to time in the form of footsteps in empty corridors and objects that leap from tables seemingly of their own accord.

I had tarried in the Edward too long and the tourist office was closed. In fading light I wheezed up and almost tumbled down the hilly streets of the central district. Despite its sprinkling of parks, shabby Georgian cottages and church after quaint church, I couldn't shake the feeling that the region was trying to put on a brave face amid increasingly frequent crime. Even the smattering of second-hand book stores had the kind of security systems you only see at jewellers in other countries.

As I trawled the shelves at one for a local history, the proprietor bemoaned the decline of the area and warned me not to leave any of the nearby bars with an attractive woman who might approach me. Many a tourist had apparently fallen for the sting in which he gets back to her place and is confronted by a gun-wielding accomplice who then accompanies him to an ATM, forces him to withdraw the maximum amount, then holds him hostage for as long as it takes to empty the account.

Once the city's bohemian heartbeat, this area was now more “ho” than “bo”. A succession of prostitutes began to filter out of the down-at-heel apartment blocks that bordered the district. Some smiled suggestively as I approached, pimps watching on from parked cars. Others looked at me with dead eyes and asked if I “wanted to party”. One offered me oral sex in exchange for a hamburger.

I got back to the hotel to find a noticeboard welcoming participants to a “Prevention of Crime Against Tourists” conference. The pall that PE had cast over me darkened further when the top story on the news that night revolved around a father of three who had been murdered in front of his wife and children while driving past a nearby beach. He was not the target. Nor was his wife. Or even their car. The attackers wanted his mobile phone and when the man tried to get in between them and his children, they shot him four times from point-blank range. Despite the standard warning given by the newsreader, I was dismayed and sickened by the sight of a man ten years my junior slumped through a car window with his blood spattered along the driver's side door.

Seeking an experience which would remind me of the idiosyncratic vibrancy of this nation where I first drew breath, I asked the concierge to recommend one of the six African jazz bars I could see from my hotel window.

“Listen to me nicely please, sir,” he said, his voice dropping low and earnest. “Please don't go to any of them. Terrible things have happened to some of our guests there.”

I needed no further convincing and took up his recommendation of the Boardwalk, which was essentially a casino and shopping mall arranged on two levels around an oversized pond. “It's the safest place in town,” he said.

The journey required me to vacate the high ground occupied by the Edward and navigate the jumble of overpasses and freeways that blight the city's foreshore like looping concrete scars. Worse still, the marvellous Victorian facade of PE's original docklands and beach strips had been destroyed in the 1960s to make way for these monuments to woeful city planning.

As I was nearing the Boardwalk, screaming sirens and a unnerving orange glow filled the night air. Nearby, a hotel made of logs had gone up in flames. The night smelt acrid, fire trucks sped by in rapid succession and cinders blew across the road. With the image of the murder victim still fresh in my head, the smoke, the inferno and the wailing emergency vehicles added to the impression I had wandered into an urban version of purgatory.

Things began a little more promisingly the next morning, as I tottered down impossibly steep streets – enlivened by intermittent sprays of bougainvillea from behind high walls – towards the city. The hub of the CBD is Market Square, a hectare of paved promenade surrounded by a series of impressive public buildings.

However, it was like putting a fine gilt frame around a pornographic centre-spread. The square smelled of diesel and looked like a demolition derby. It was scattered with overflowing garbage trucks, and loonies screaming Bible verse paraded about the place chastising the vagrants who collected in a brandy-scented pile at the base of the Queen Victoria statue in front of the public library.

Aware that I might be misjudging PE, I decided to head to the city's surf strip. If Durban's beach front was an ageing beauty trying to pass off her mutton as prime lamb, Port Elizabeth was the bloated aftermath of a B-list gigolo beset by erectile dysfunction.

It was a motley jumble of patently neglected attractions such as snake parks and aquariums I couldn't face the prospect of visiting through fear of seeing the animals forced to live out their days there. A wicked wind whipped sand from the beach against my cheeks as I was buffeted along the promenade. The swimming baths where I had stood up on a concrete water slide, slipped over and suffered my first concussion still stood near a pier which must have once had a tinge of Mills & Boon melancholy about it but now appeared clinically depressed. Still, hundreds of happy holidaymakers with suntans and beach towels slung over their shoulders dawdled towards the surf.

Port Elizabeth's coast reminded me of no-frills ice cream – it wasn't unpleasant as such, there was just next to zero chance of me going back for a second helping.

Chapter 12

Pardon Me Boy, is That the Outeniqua Choo Tjoe?

An hour west of Port Elizabeth I turned off the highway towards the home of the perfect wave. Local and international waxheads make pilgrimages to Jeffreys Bay for the freakishly reliable sets of glassy breakers that build offshore then roll towards the cream sand beach offering rides of unparalleled smoothness and duration.

A smattering of guesthouses, weatherboard cottages and boutique hotels pepper a low bushy hillock overlooking a placid lagoon. On the other side of the rise, the beach runs away into the distance where the boundaries between sand, sky and ocean blur. JBay, as it is otherwise known, is everything a surfy village should be. Laid-back, unpretentious and with the commercial enterprises, whose lifeblood is the Super Tubes break, set back a block from the beach.

Surfboards airbrushed with tropical sunsets and buxom bikini babes are displayed in shop windows alongside shots of locals doing time in the green room. Every second store seems to be draped in Billabong and Rip Curl promotional material.

In addition to the ubiquitous surf stores, I noticed the usual procession of agreeably hippyish retail outlets opened by those who flee the city for a sea change. Hand-made pottery in an Aegean colour scheme was precariously stacked in one store while the healing centre next door featured an entire wall given over to an incense display of hundreds of varieties including the intriguingly named Black Love. The proprietors of both were no doubt those soft-spoken types who smell faintly of ylang-ylang, drop the term “ki” at least once every ten minutes and refer to “their former life” as a stockbroker, arms dealer or lawyer, which financed this one.

Also prominent were a handful of bars with broad decks overlooking the sea. Their doors were plastered with flyers offering discount drinks to anyone who showed up in a bikini. Unadorned and honest, they were the kind of place where a request for a Cosmopolitan would not see you loudly ridiculed but politely directed down the road to a newsagent.

It was around seven-thirty in the morning when I rolled into town and Jbay was still rubbing the sleep from its eyes. The only shop that was open was a bakery. With a steaming coffee in one hand and a buttery croissant in the other, I meandered down to the beach for breakfast.

Here I was greeted by salt-tanged air, a crushed-glass sea and the splendid isolation that comes with being up early in a town where the majority of inhabitants go hard every night. I could have been in Byron Bay, Curl Curl or Lennox Head, and for the first time since leaving Australia I felt a pang of homesickness.

Eventually lone surfers and trios in faded boardies drifted onto the sand, took a moment to assess the break, splashed some water on their faces as if anointing themselves and paddled out. Most had dropped their belongings on the beach in piles, barely bothering to conceal the car keys, wallets and mobile phones that protruded from beneath sun-bleached towels. Port Elizabeth, where people were routinely butchered for any one of these items, felt like another planet.

After an hour, most of the surfers emerged as the tide began to recede. Those for whom this daily communion was a private affair were mainly men and women in their thirties, although a couple of decades of sun damage made accurately gauging their ages something of a challenge. Those in trios or foursomes were primarily men of the extensively pierced and tattooed variety for whom this activity offered a competitive outlet. The bigger groups were grommets and grommettes who wriggled out of their rashies and threw their school uniforms over still-wet bathers before tucking boards under their arms to dash off in the direction of a distant bell. With the waves cleared of surfers, a five-strong pod of bottle-nosed dolphins decided to ride the swell. With the waves backlit, they formed a crisply silhouetted quintet surfing in perfect parallel.

By the time I got back to the main street, shops were open and populated by perpetually peeling locals whose skin bore the strap marks that come with swimming every day in the same bathing suit. I could only imagine the daily torment that life held for the lone Goth – there's always one – at Jeffreys Bay High.

I found a coffee shop where a freckled backpacker in a backless dress didn't respond to my request for a short black as if I'd just scraped the bottom of the politically incorrect barrel but presented me with a dark and pungent brew.

One of the questions I am most often asked when people find out I am a migrant is whether I would ever return to South Africa. JBay invalidated my well-rehearsed answer – “Yes, but not to live”. It was the quintessence of coastal idyll. Reluctant to leave, I revived the sulky walk that characterised much of my childhood on my way to the car.

The nearby resort towns of Saint Francis and Cape Saint Francis almost eclipsed JBay for beauty with three kilometres of sparkling beachfront and thatched whitewashed holiday homes perched along dozens of canals dredged from a lagoon on the Kromme River. The marina was occupied by a fleet of yachts that would require the GDP of a Third World nation in annual upkeep, and the local tourist brochures displayed an inordinate fondness for the words “exclusive”, “discerning” and “US currency accepted”. As undeniably picturesque as it was, Cape Saint Francis struck me as the type of ritzy locale into which bloated magnates would roll with their mistresses du jour. Ask a barman for a Cosmopolitan here and he'd most likely sneer that the drink was “soooo twentieth century”.

I tracked west to the Garden Route, a heavily touristed coastal plain whose stunning pulchritude has been only marginally dimmed by decades of ill-conceived development. The coastal scrub which cocooned Jeffreys Bay gave way to dark cool forests. I had reached the Tsitsikama, a beguiling world unto itself bordered by inhospitable blue peaks from whose feet ancient rainforests run to a craggy shale coastline battered by the tempestuous Indian Ocean. The ancient Khoisan people called the area Sietsikama (The Place of Clear Water). It was a particularly apt name as the rainforest traverses seven rivers. On their steep course to the sea, these have produced idiosyncratic erosion patterns resulting in dozens of skinny waterfalls that crash into icy pools and plummeting ravines whose rock faces interlock like teeth on a zip. The Tsitsikama is also home to rivers rendered mahogany by tannins in the surrounding foliage.

Keen to get among it, I pulled into the first signposted car park and within minutes was surrounded by ferns the size of traffic lights. The Tsitsikama works its alchemy on two scales: massive and minute.

Reaching heights in excess of fifty metres and frequently measuring a metre in circumference, the outeniqua yellow-wood trees are just one of numerous gargantuan species that ascend from the forest floor. These lofty characters are matched in height by the scores of stinkwood (named after the odour the cut wood emits), kalander and assegai trees that form the upper reaches of the forest.

Frequently dripping with old man's beard lichens, their scale only becomes apparent up close. After reaching the end of an elevated walkway trail to the imaginatively named Big Tree, I was confronted by an object taller than a five-storey office block. Its girth equated to eight humans huddled in a group.

On a macro level, the Tsitsikama is even more mesmeric. Agog at the dimensions of my surroundings, I took a seat on a bench thoughtfully fashioned from a collapsed stinkwood trunk and swiftly became entranced in the details I had missed. The floor was a blanket of undulating seven week's fern randomly illuminated by the droplets of sunlight that pierced the canopy. Booties of lime-green moss clung to the roots of thousand-year-old trees beneath tangles of witchhazel, milkwood and forest elder. Wild pomegranates and tiny buttery-yellow flowers sprung from overhanging boughs, and traces of native gardenia scented the breeze.

A flicker of movement shattered my meditative calm. Aside from bush buck, bush pigs, porcupine, honey badgers and caracals, leopards still pad their way through the soft undergrowth and would have no trouble sneaking up on a daydreaming tourist. Instead, two metres in front of me was the strangest, most beautiful bird I had ever seen. Of the 220 species found in the Tsitsikama, 35 are endemic and this was one of them. The Knysna Lourie is an opalescent olive green and has a head shaped like a mohawk haircut, the tip of which looks as if it has been dipped in coconut cream.

Human voices soon began to rip through the forest as tourists toting video cameras and children made their way along the boardwalk. Grateful for my ninety minutes of isolation in the forest, I returned to the car. Turning back for a last glimpse, the forests appeared big enough to accommodate the groups now piling out of coaches in the car park. They seemed to be subsumed by the green depths and eventually became shadows trekking along the trail.

Having been unencumbered by the presence of large groups of tourists throughout my journey, it was a rude shock to see the service station beside the graceful arch of the Storms River Bridge clogged with buses, tantrum-chucking toddlers and spouses wearing that unmistakable “I told you we should have gone to Club Med” glare. I couldn't have agreed with them more.

By the time I reached the Tsitsikama National Coastal Park down the road, I begrudgingly acknowledged that as many people as possible should get to experience such natural majesty. The gateway to its eighty-kilometre canvas of seascapes is the park's visitor centre. A modest collection of log cabins set against sloped foothills. It was populated by bronzed holiday-makers still damp from a dip, retirees on deckchairs dozing by the water's edge and groups of excited hikers setting off on one of the dozens of trails that radiate into the bush.

I naturally opted for the least taxing on offer: a concrete pathway that hugged the shore until reaching a suspension bridge over the mouth of the Storms River. Were I condemned man, I would have foregone my last meal for the opportunity to complete this walk.

The path descended to a beach where a lone swimmer was floating on her back in water whose crystalline purity is more often associated with a full-time pool boy and enormous amounts of chlorine. Perhaps twenty metres from her bobbed a Cape clawless otter, equally at home in salt and fresh water.

As the path climbed into the forest again, the embankments to the left of it became a collage of boulders and ferns sparked with filigree flowers of hot-coals red, purple and apricot. Each turn brought with it a postcard of steel-blue sea and salt-misted crags framed by an artfully placed bough. All set to a soundtrack provided by breakers on rock.

Being a rather gangly type, I tend to clip along at a moderate pace and thought nothing of overtaking a middle-aged posse of European tourists. However, by the time I reached the suspension bridge spanning the river mouth, I had only managed to zip by a third of the group.

Halfway across, on some unspoken signal, they simultaneously burst into an oompa song they had all apparently been taught as children. Call me old-fashioned, but crowds of chanting Teutons can still make your average Semite a little edgy. However, with overtaking on a suspension bridge about as realistic a notion as making acid wash elegant, I had no choice but to smile and just keep on walking. Two verses and three choruses later we reached solid ground. All the while I, too, was singing quietly. “Germans to the left of me, Germans to the right. Here I am, stuck in the middle a Jew.”

My overnight destination of Plettenberg Bay was an hour away on one of those cliff-hugging roads out of a film where a glamorous couple in a roadster collapse into cap-toothed giggles as the buxom blonde passenger's Hermes headscarf blows off her peroxided head and into the blue depths. Christened Bahia Formosa (Beautiful Bay) by Portuguese explorers, it is a slab of ocean-lapped temptation sheltered by the natural breakwater of the Robberg, Outeniqua and Tsitsikama mountain ranges. Overlooked by the lush Peak Formosa it's the undisputed playground of South Africa's rich and famous.

Once a well-kept secret, Plett, as it is known, became an alternative destination for Johannesburgers who found Cape Town too crowded and Capetonians who felt the same way. The attraction is understandable. Here, a pair of spurs, bisected by a lagoon, overlook two camel crescents of beach lapped at by an aquamarine surf. Between the beaches lies a rocky outcrop upon which sits the world's most hideous hotel.

My family had holidayed at the Beacon Island when I was eleven and it was still much as I experienced it. Incongruous, ludicrously expensive and devoid of warmth. The speckle of houses I remembered on the ridges were now suburbs.

Even two decades ago, Plett had a Millionaires' Row. Today it's more like Billionairesville. From behind hibiscuses on the hillside, homes bear testament to almost three decades of the architectural whimsy that only the obscenely wealthy can indulge in. Casa de Bad Taste butted up against faux Tuscan, while white-cube minimalism only accentuated the ugliness of the myriad glass and chrome octagons perched here and there like futuristic garbage bins.

On the other side of the hill, however, the locals lived in pastel weatherboard cottages, neat bungalows with blossoming unfenced gardens and surfboards on the lawn. Dads just home from work walked hand in hand with excited kids towards the beach; a woman tossed a Frisbee to a Labrador-cross on a sandy oval, and in the molten light of a late afternoon, I became swiftly, irretrievably and unstintingly enamoured of the place.

I checked into a hotel on the main street which offered “disabled facilities in public areas” and sure enough they were. My infatuation remained undented as I found myself peering into the window of a real-estate agent. It was at this point that depression set in. For the mortgage I was paying on an innercity semi in Sydney, I could pick up an ocean-view double-storey home in Plett and have enough dosh left over to get the hell out of town every December when the tourists arrive.

The downer was, however, fleeting. As it would be when you find a open-decked restaurant set high against a knoll where the waiter's opening line is, “Welcome to happy hour”. A seafood and daiquiri frenzy for one ensued as I watched the sun melt into the horizon in pinks softer than a butterfly kiss.