Transkei Travails

[Note: This entry has the dubious distinction of having been the longest work-in-progress of anything I did on this site. Having settled in Melbourne, a combination of busy-ness, laziness and the sheer realisation of how far behind this had got meant the Blog got stuck on the back-burner. Or indeed, right off the back of the stove and slowly congealing in a corner behind the hub, developing new and exciting cultures of mould...]

Hello again. Yes, I've pulled my lazy behind out of bed and in out of the sunshine once more (and dragged myself away from my addiction to the Guardian's website - it's amazing how hooked I can get on news from home), and it's time to continue my ever-interrupted traveller's tales, picking up where I left off, in Cintsa.

On, it has to be said, a quite beautiful sunny Sunday morning, which gave the lie once again to any "normal" notions I had of what winter should be like. And, Buccs being what it is, Sunday also meant free breakfast up at the house, so I feasted on cereal, fresh bread rolls and fruit. Yes, Mum, I did say fruit. I may not have turned into a paragon of virtue with my diet, but I'm not averse to the odd bit of pineapple or orange. So I spent a pleasant hour or so chatting away with some of those I had met the previous night over dinner and the bar, including Rachel and Olivia (the two Irish girls I had previously encountered at the elephant sanctuary and Monkeyland at Plett) and one of the stranger travelling couples I have met, a Kiwi guy and Frederique, a French lass from the Isle Maurice, better known to we anglophones as Mauritius.

And then, around 11am or so, the Baz Bus arrived from the west, depositing my partners-in-crime Mark and Grant, from Storms River, the latter still in recovery from what by all accounts was a pretty massive night they had on arrival in Jeffreys Bay. After catching up on their stories (largely revolving around the ridiculous antics of Grant and Patrick, who had, as expected, stayed on in J Bay), we ended up going around and mucking about on the beach for a couple of hours, before heading over to town, to the cafe/pub where I had watched the rugby the previous day, where we prevailed upon the management to show the Community Shield.

Those of you out there who follow the round-ball religion with the same zeal I do will already know this, but for the others out there, the Community Shield is the traditional curtain-raiser to the English top-division football league season. Known in earlier years as the Charity Shield, it is contested by the previous year's English Champions and FA Cup Winners (in the relatively uncommon event that one team "does the Double" by winning both, the second-place team from the League takes part). It is officially a "friendly" game, although you would not always know this from the approach taken by some of the players, and also generally acknowledged as being of little use in predicting how things will go for the rest of the season. In this case, the Premiership Champions, Chelsea, took on the FA Cup holders, Arsenal, making it an all-London affair. Except, due to the rebuilding work still going on at Wembley ("The Home Of Football"), it was to be played at the Millenium Stadium in Cardiff. Which is an amazing venue, but it always strikes me as a trifle strange to see two teams from the capital, accompanied by their fans, streaming west to the Welsh capital. Though I guess it's no more anachronistic than getting, say, Liverpool and Manchester United to come down and play the match at Wembley.

The game itself was not too bad, the food was good, the beer perfectly acceptable, and we all three of us engaged in the usual game of trying to predict how our teams would do during the season (particularly poignant as my team, Blackburn Rovers, would take on Grant's, West Ham United, in the first round of matches the following weekend). It was a nice way to spend an afternoon, and we were all in pretty good spirits as we headed back over the sandbar and up to our respective cabins, and thence on to the bar. There, all was going relatively sedately until we got chatting to 3 girls from their cabin: Candace, Marie and another whose name I know began with a 'C' but can't recall (curse my missing diary!), which is surprising, as she utterly monopolised the conversation. For the sake of being able to describe events, I will refer to her as Carrie, which I think is close.

Now, I know a few of you will be thinking "That's a bit rich, coming from Pat!", and I would agree that I can at times be a little overbearing (not to mention just downright loud!), especially when I've had maybe one or two more drinks than is strictly good for me. However, I had nothing on this girl. Mark's comment the following morning was along the lines of "Well, Marie and Candace seemed pretty nice, pity we barely got to hear what they thought about anything...!" This was noticeable when we went through the usual exchanges of travellers' tales, and then even more so once we got started on the drinking games.

And then, as I probably should have known it would, a game of "I Have Never" was begun. And, again, Carrie was at the fore, whether it was in loudly explaining the rules to the 3 Dutch boys who had been suborned into the game, or in loudly proclaiming things she hadn't done. Or, more pertinently, things she had done. As I've probably noted before, there are some people who play this game and delight in dropping their friends and companions into trouble whenever possible. However, there are also some people who just love shouting to the world the things they've done, whether it be to try and shock others or just to grab attention. And Carrie was one of the latter group, hence becoming another of those people along the way about whom (and most especially about whose sex-life) I've found our more than I would ever really have wanted.

Eventually, probably around 2am, the bar closed down for the night, so we adjourned to the cabin the boys and our drinking companions shared. There, we listened to music for a bit, hindered somewhat by the fact that the only speakers available were the tiny little ones used with personal stereos (not the best of things to use when trying to make music heard over the background din of 9 rather noisy drunkards). And then Carrie and Marie decided it was a good time to go for a swim... Which they just announced, before going and changing into their swimwear and heading off down the hill to Buccs' small pool. In the middle of the night, when drunk as skunks. Barking mad, if you ask me, and they did seem less sure it was a good idea when they tottered back up the hill 20 minutes or so later. Still, by this point the rest of us were rapidly crashing out, and everyone kind of drifted off back to their respective rooms.

Bit of a weird night. And wouldn't have been an issue, had we been able to sleep in and just get it out of our system. Unfortunately, Mark, Grant and I had signed up the previous day to do a "1-Day Transkei Experience" trip that day. Meaning we had to be up and about around 6am, catching the tail-end of the sunrise as we breakfasted before heading out into the heart of the Transkei region. And Mark was not happy. To be honest, after about 4 hours' sleep I wasn't exactly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but he was miserable, and making noises about just going back to sleep if possible. We soldiered on, though, meeting up with our guide for the day, Ayanda (or just Aya), and our two fellow travellers, a couple of American girls called Lola and Indira. The former was a tall, red-headed New York bartender and DJ, whose real name I later found out was apparently Susan; the latter, a black Southern girl, also settled in New York.

Of the first part of our journey, I do not remember so much, largely because I dozed against the window of the Land Cruiser as Aya drove us out of Cintsa and along to the new highway being pushed down from the N2 national highway to the coast, nearly paralleling the Great Kei river. It is this river which gives its name to the region: Transkei, the land across the Kei, was the second of the two large Xhosa "bantustans" set up by the Apartheid regime. Indeed, they apparently offered to release Nelson Mandela, known to many of the Xhosa simply as Madiba, when he was on Robben Island, if he would move to the Transkei, where his family was of royal blood, and act as the local president/king/chief. Knowing that this would legitimise the attempted partition of the country, Mandela refused, but he still maintains a family home in the region. At any rate, my snoozing came to a pretty abrupt end when we reached the end of the currently-completed section of the link road, and began dipping alongside the new road-bed on the service tracks, bouncing this way and that.

Hence, I was definitely up and awake when we made the crossing at the mouth of the Kei, by ferry, entering the Transkei proper. Once arrived on the far side, we drove up the hill and Aya proceeded to tell us some of the history of the area and its people. I have covered a certain amount of this in the course of my blogs, but I will repeat a few bits of it here. The Xhosa are not indigenous to Southern Africa, having been part of a grand migration down from East Africa along with their "cousins", the Zulu and the Swati (or Swazi). The Swazi eventually settled in the far east of the region (what is now Swaziland), the Zulus slightly further south and west (in modern day KwaZulu-Natal), the Xhosa further still south and west (in the modern Eastern Cape). The process of splitting along these lines was somewhat acrimonious, which laid some of the foundations of the divisions between the tribes which endure to this day. However, the true tragedy of the region has more of its roots in the 19th Century.

The early 19th Century saw two key series of events that would cause havoc in southern Africa: the first was a gradual intensification of British interest, after they claimed the Cape Colony from the Dutch in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe; the second was the rise of a powerful chieftain amongst the Zulu tribes, by the name of Shaka. The increased interest of the British manifested itself with the attempts to settle further along the coast, and one bastion of this was the area around Grahamstown (another of South Africa's university towns, and in some ways a counterpart to Stellenbosch for anglophone South Africans), north of Port Elizabeth. Unsurprisingly, this resulted in conflicts, sometimes turning into outright war, between the British and the Xhosa. The rise of Shaka, though, caused havoc across southern Africa - the word used most often now is difaqane, but it is hard for this to convey the destruction and mass migrations that were kicked off by the rise of the Zulu Empire. Suffice it to say that the upheavals were significant enough that the Trekboers, those Dutch settlers from the Cape who chafed under British rule and set off into the interior to found their own new states, reckoned some parts of the Veld to be uninhabited when they arrived, not realising that they were hitting the aftermath of several fairly major wars.

Pressed by the Zulus to the north-east, and the British coming up from the south-west, the Xhosa faced challenges that had not bothered them in all the years since they arrived in the region. And matters were made worse by the decision in the 1850s of many, in response to a somewhat apocalyptic prophecy by a local girl, to slaughter their herds. Apparently, these would then be replaced by the Xhosa's grateful ancestors, and then some, giving them the riches and the strength to fight back against the British. The prophecy turned out to be baseless, and accelerated the empoverishment of the Xhosa.

The 20th Century was hardly kinder than the 19th, with open discrimination by successive governments of the Union of South Africa (formed in 1910 by an uneasy pact between the British and the Boers, who had been beaten, albeit at great cost, in the Anglo-Boer Wars of the 1890s) followed, after the election victory of the National Party in 1948, by the construction of "Grand Apartheid". As noted earlier, the Eastern Cape, and the Xhosa, formed much of the bedrock of the African National Congress, which led the fightback against the Apartheid State. It's all a pretty sad tale.

Now, though, despite the handicaps of a century of government-enforced poverty, things are beginning to change. It's not going to happen overnight, but the Transkei is starting to awaken. However, it hasn't lost touch with its roots, as we found when we visited a cultural centre, meeting a sangoma, a traditional healer. Note that there is a world of difference between a Sangoma, who works with herbs and the like, and a Witch Doctor, who makes use of bones. I never met one of the latter, but met Sangomas from the Xhosa, the Zulu and the Sotho people. As well as trying one of the Sangoma's concoctions, we had a go at grinding mielie, or maize-meal, and took part in some dancing. Luckily, I don't think any photos were taken of me prancing around, waving a stick and cheering. I'm sure it is quite impressive as a spectacle when done properly, but I'm equally sure that I just looked like a total berk...

After the visit to the cultural centre and the sangoma, we headed down to the coast, to the wreck of a freighter called the Jacarandah, where we had a late lunch. Then it was time to start heading back west towards Cintsa, racing the twilight. Once we got back to town, we didn't head straight for Buccs but diverted to the township outside of the resort, and to Aya's local shebeen (a township bar, so named by the Irish missionaries who helped set up some of the early ones), where we had a few drinks and met some of the locals, particularly some of the kids, and listened to some eardrum-shattering local music. Your average shebeen may look like a shack and have little in the way of furniture, but it will often also have a TV showing Premier League football and a sound-system near-capable of registering on the Richter scale. And the sound system in this one was no exception - given that my hearing's pretty sensitive at the best of times, I just accepted that I would be deaf to anything other than the music for a bit, and enjoyed the spectacle of the local kids dancing to the music - and some of them were pretty enthusiastic dancers, although the attitude of a couple of the younger lads wouldn't have been out of place at 2am on a Friday night out!

After maybe an hour at the shebeen, though, it was time to head back to Buccs. Having totally failed to plan for what we would do in terms of food, we were lucky that Aya rang ahead and managed to add us on the end of the list for food at the bar that night, which was a rather pleasant Bangers'n'Mash - not exactly fine cuisine I know, but it had been a hell of a long time since I'd had that kind of comfort food. After that, it was a case of a few beers here, a few beers there, a bit of daft-arse dancing with Unathi and Adam, watching in bemusement as various couples did "body-shots" of tequila off each other (those who don't know what this is, do not need me explaining it...), a few more beers, watching Mark and Grant in their seeming quest to play as many games of pool as possible while in South Africa (I reckon they clocked up at least 15 just while we were at Storms River), this time against the Baz Bus driver for the next day (Johnnie), a few more beers, chatting with our friends from the previous night, recognising a very nice Canadian couple whom I had met in Malawi, ending up with an African drum trying to riff along to the music...

It was a quite a long, but rather a fun night. At least, it was for me. One of my room-mates managed to be drunk as a skunk and know almost nothing about it in the morning, while Grant was still complaining days later about how we grazed his forehead when we hoisted him up on the bar to have a body-shot done off him...! Luckily the next morning wasn't an early one, as we were only heading off late morning on the Baz Bus. Yes, after just one sector travelling independently, I had given up on my "No more Baz Bus" resolution - largely because I didn't want to backtrack into frickin' East London, especially given that the hostel wasn't doing a drop-off there as it was a public holiday. When that kind of logistical "aaargh" crops up, I try to just take the hint that somebody wants me to take the damned Baz Bus. Anyways, it gave me the chance to chat with Grant and Mark (still both bound to the Baz), as well as with Joanne and her brother Simon, whom we had met in the bar the previous night.

We were amused at this point by Johnnie (our driver) putting on a comedy clip involving a guy describing your body when drinking as being a bit like a party, with your stomach as a bouncer on the door. Involved numerous silly accents (Scots for whisky, Japanese for sake, Mexican for tequila etc) and many allusions to the perils we put ourselves through when imbibing to excess. And, given that was what many of the passengers had done the previous night, it went down a storm. I was on the verge of an uncontrollable giggling fit.

[NB This is where the interrupted narrative picks up, over a month after I wrote the first bit...]

So, it was a wet Tuesday, and we were heading into the heart of "Black South Africa", getting dropped off at the Shell Service Station outside the town of Umtata. This is a fairly common occurrence in SA, where many of the bus-stops for towns are actually at the big service-stations out on the highways where they pass around the outside of town. And Umtata is, by all accounts, not that great a place to spend much time as a tourist. This is not to say that it fits into the torist stereotype (and, indeed, the stereotype seen by many in the sheltered South African priveleged classes) that the Wild Coast is a deadly dangerous place where you'll get car-jacked at a moment's notice. It's more that it's apparently pretty dull, which is why my stop there was only to join up with the other backpackers off both the east-bound and west-bound Baz buses getting one of the ubiquitous minibus shuttles down to Coffee Bay, and in particular to the Coffee Shack.

The Coffee Shack is another one of those hostels which is kind of impossible not to hear about on the backpacker grapevine. However, unlike Buccs, it gets some mixed reviews, as some people rave about how laid-back and chilled-out it is, and how much more "proper African" it feels, while others call it a self-indulgent backwater stuffed with stoner backpackers. And, as ever, the truth is probably a bit of both. I have to admit that I fell significantly less in love with Coffee Bay than I did with the area around Cintsa, but that may be because I like still having that little bit of a Western feel. And it may be because it rained for a significant portion of the time we were in Coffee Bay.

Not that I minded that much, as the first day, once we had arrived and settled in, we were informed it was their weekly Theme Party Night. So we all got let loose with a supply of cardboard, glue, tinfoil and our best Blue Peter-honed instincts (for those who didn't grow up in the UK, Blue Peter was a childrens' programme that invariably featured the presenters making something improbable out of cardboard and "sticky-backed plastic", which I'm convinced is actually a controlled substance, as I never ever saw the stuff anywhere other than on that programme...) to make ourselves Space-themed costumes.

Despite initial misgivings about it all being a bit silly, most of the current guests got into the theme, with Hannah and Beth (two other English girls we'd met on the minibus) silvering up some of what I think are called "Deely-Boppers" (the headbands with wobbly things on the end of springs), Grant silvering up a cap and making a fake silver medallion to go as a "cyber-Chav", and Joanne coiling up her hair in side-twists a la Princess Leia. And me? I made myself some pointy ears, a phaser gun and a badge, and made like an extra from Star Trek. All remakably daft, but eased along by happy hour at the bar.

Ah yes, the bar at the Coffee Shack. Home to the Buffalo Rules of Drinking. Namely, that any individual putting a beverage on the pool table, or any individual consuming a beverage with their right hand, who is spotted gets "BUFFALOOOOO!" bellowed at them and is forced to down their drink. Gets anarchic. Especially when people are drinking cocktails and the like (I have to admit that I really miss South Africa's lovely cheap cocktails). Made for a bit of a mad night. As did the Killer Pool competitions. And the various drinking games, the most deadly of which was "Roxanne" - it involves putting on the song of that name by Sting (or was it a hit back when he was with The Police? I can never remember), and you have to drink a shot of beer every time he sings the name Roxanne. Really quite heavy going.

And eventually, it was time for us all to turn into pumpkins. Or go to bed. Either would probably have been appropriate at that point. Either could well have been plausible if anyone had been over-indulging in the Transkei's most infamous crop. But I was happy to crash out, heading back to my bunk in a dorm in a rondavel, the traditional Xhosa roundhouse for some much-needed kip.

And here I will abort this tale for now, and try and give a quick update of where I am, before I continue with my tales of life on the road. Adieu, mes amis!

Pat