Avast there, me hearties...

[At around this point, I totally lost the plot with updates. Everything from here on in was written at least months after the event, often working from incomplete or nonexistent notes, So don't be disappointed if it's not always up to my standards. I'd also by now pretty much accepted that my notebook, that container of all my jottings as I went along on this trip, was gone. To mangle a famous quote, to lose one diary is unfortunate, to lose two in a row smacks of carelessness. Anyway, I last left off as I separated from my travelling companions of the previous few days, leaving them behind in J Bay as I rolled on to a late-night arrival in Port Elizabeth, a.k.a. P.E.]

PE is South Africa's 4th largest city (after Jo'burg, Cape Town and Durban), an industrial town in the Eastern Cape and, to come extent, the home base of the African National Congress, known to the world as the ANC. This is largely because the ANC is, once you strip away the apartheid-era Black and White prism, a Socialist party, with its roots in the trade union movement. Though it's currently having what might be called a "New Labour moment" (for those familiar with UK politics of the last few decades) as the government is trying to pass more market-friendly legislation and is involved in very acrimonious disputes with COSATU, the Confederation of South African Trades Unions. Hence, though the ANC is associated by many people with the huge Soweto townships outside Jo'burg, and certainly draws much of its support from there, its foundation points were more heavily laid in the Xhosa homelands of the Eastern Cape, and many of its leadership (including President Thabo Mbeki and ex-President Nelson Mandela) are Xhosa from the Eastern Cape. All this politics aside, it also has some of the best urban beaches in South Africa, which has made it a perennial favourite for seaside holidays with richer families from the interior, and is well-placed to access some good game-spotting opportunities, most notably the Addo Elephant National Park.

So I just skipped straight through town. Why, you might ask? Well, I'd spent a few days in PE when I was in South Africa back in early 2004, and seen much of what I wanted to see there, so I wanted to press on up the coast. For my next stop was an unassuming little town called Cintsa, a beach resort at the mouth of a river flowing into the Indian Ocean. Oh, and home to what is generally considered to be one of the best, if not the best, backpackers in South Africa: Buccaneers.

Again, my determination to spend time at Buccs (as it is frequently called - the South Africans are as addicted to abbreviations as we Brits or the Aussies) was born out of my previous trip to South Africa. More specifically, the incredulity amongst many of my backpacking brethren (and sistren) that I was not, at that time, planning to spend any time there. That can be partly explained by the fact that I've traditionally done much of my planning of trips by the time-honoured procedure of frantically reading the Rough Guide for my intended destination (or, if there isn't one available, resorting to the Lonely Planet, or hitting both if I can get them from the library), working out what things I am likely to want to see and working out how I can shoe-horn it all into the time available. And, to be brutally honest, Cintsa does not attract an awful lot of mentions on the basis of "things to do in...". It's a fairly quiet place.

But, and it's a big but, it has one of the best places for Backpackers to stay in South Africa, and the grapevine, otherwise known as word-of-mouth, is a spectacularly effective PR tool on the backpacker scene, particularly somewhere like South Africa where the majority of travellers are following almost the same route for large sectors of their journey, and where the Baz Bus concentrates a lot of them even closer together. Word gets around. And Buccs is, indeed, a great place to stay. It's not the newest hostel in the country, hasn't got necessarily the best facilities, but it's got an incredibly friendly vibe and set-up (a bit like a Backpackers' holiday village) and a couple more things in its favour: firstly, it is a Baz Bus stop, meaning a lot of people will just use it as one of the first logical places to get off after PE and they are dropped at the door; and secondly, it occupies something of a sweet spot climatically, being at about the point where the climate of the Garden Route, green and fertile due to the fact it does get a fair amount of rain each year, and prone to being a touch chilly for some sun-lizards' tastes, merges into that of the Wild Coast, hotter and steadier and with warmer waters that actually become comfortable to swim in.

So, it's pretty busy, and that's where I'd decided to allow myself the unfamiliar luxury of spending 3 whole days in the same place. Or, at least, that was the plan. It was also where I had temporarily left off travelling with the Baz Bus, as the frequency drops after PE, and so had switched to making this leg of the journey on one of the national coach companies, Intercape. This involved getting up at about 5:30 and taking my life in my hands to walk a few hundred yards downhill from the PE Backpackers (which I'd picked largely on its proximity to the bus company offices) and across the square to pick up my ticket and wait around for the 6:30 bus up the coast, which I was taking as far as East London. The area between PE and East London makes up the Ciskei, one of the two Xhosa "tribal homelands" set up by the apartheid government in the Bantustan era (when they attempted to rid themselves of any blacks they didn't currently need by foisting them on unproductive parts of the country which had been declared as nominally independent homelands for the different "tribes"). Like most of the ex-tribal lands, it's a pretty poor area, with settlement consisting mostly of small farmsteads, interspersed with some villages - a different world from the former White areas.

And it was through this area we were travelling when my plans for the day were cut to pieces, when we came across a car on fire at the edge of the road. Our bus driver stopped to find out what was going on, talking to some of the locals who were already using branches to beat around the outskirts of the fire that had spread from the vehicle. From this, he found out that it apparently had nearly a full tank of petrol, and hence could go off like a bomb at any moment. It was, therefore, not terribly surprising when he ruled that we would not drive past the vehicle until the fire in it had been put out. So, he and various others from onboard the bus got off, joining passengers from other vehicles behind us and the aforementioned locals, and began fighting the outlying fire as best they could. Which mostly meant getting long bush branches and beating the grass-fire out - nobody was going near the car itself, as they waited for the local fire brigade to turn up. Which they eventually did, although I was slightly surprised at the "fire engine" - basically, a bakkie (pick-up truck) with a big tank of water on the back, which was then pumped through a hose to fight the fire. Not the most high-tech, but it worked. I have to say, though, I wouldn't want to be one of the volunteer fire brigade there, as they were attempting to put out a potentially explosive car fire without any kind of protective gear whatsoever.

At any rate, once the fire was out we wended our merry way onwards up to East London. Unfortunately, the fire had delayed us for the best part of an hour. This, it turned out, was more than sufficient for me to have missed my connecting pick-up for Buccaneers'. When I rang them, they weren't terribly apologetic, but agreed to divert someone who was coming into town that afternoon to come and pick me up. So, I ended up spending several hours sitting somewhat disconsolately on a concrete bench by the bus-stop in the northern part of East London, keeping out of the sun as much as possible. I guess it could have been worse.

Eventually, Sal, one of the Price family who own Buccs, rocked up and I got my promised lift up to Cintsa. In fact, I got dropped off in the town itself, where I was lucky enough to be able to catch the second half of the South Africa v New Zealand rugby game in the bar in town, in company with a bunch of other hostel guests (and not a few of the staff). Another scintillating match, which the Boks won pretty narrowly, leaving the locals in fine mood. After the game, I headed back to the hostel, which, it turned out, entailed going down to the beach and across the sandbar at the mouth of the inlet before climbing back up to Buccs. There I was checked in by Unathi, another of the wonderful characters I met on my trip, who was almost never seen without her bonnet-like hat. After settling into my dorm, I popped up to the bar, where I ended up having a couple of beers and playing pool with Adam, the Aussie lad in charge of the bar for that night.

Soon enough, though, it was on up to the family house, at the top of the hill, the venue for dinner that evening. I had signed up, at least in part due to the lack of alternative options, for their Saturday-night Xhosa Dinner Party. And boy, was I glad I did. It gave a fascinating insight into Xhosa food, but in a manner familiar to westerners. So, we got the usual staple of mielie pap (ground corn/maize-flour), and dishes of spinach and squash. But we also got some other dishes, some with meat, some with beans, that would only really have been brought out by the Xhosa at feast times. My later experiences with native African food were to leave me with mostly bland impressions, but the food at Buccs was pretty good. There were a couple of full long tables of backpackers enjoying the evening, which was really rather convivial and grown-up. As so often with me, when someone else is providing the food and seconds are readily available, I ate too much, and spent much of the rest of the night feeling happy but very, very fat. And that night was spent mostly in the bar, getting to know some of my new hostel-mates and watching Adam and Unathi lead various people in African-style dancing to some of the music. It was a fun night.

And that is where I will leave things for now, as this entry is more than long enough already, and my many other adventures in Buccs can wait for another time. Until then, my friends, fare well!

Pat