Durban Poison

by Ben Trovato

  The locals say that feasting on dog meat on the summer solstice provides health benefits that last through the winter. They may be right, given that the average age of a Chinese pensioner is 142. Then again, we don’t know if they have dogs to thank for that or some other tasty tidbit like bear bile or tiger testicles. Or maybe even snorting a gram of rhino horn twice a day.

  Not everyone on that side of the Bamboo Curtain believes dogs are man’s best meal. On one occasion, actress Yang Mi wrote, “Dogs are more loyal to people than I’d imagined – I think of dogs as friends, not meat.” That kind of talk can get you 20 years in a labour camp. Next thing you know, she’ll be thinking of prodemocracy dissidents as people with rights.

  One local resident, Zhang Bing, defended the practice. “Yulin people eat dog meat in all seasons, just like Cantonese eat chicken every day and foreigners eat beef.” Mmmm. Labrador. A dog for all seasons.

  I’d like to hear what Professor Tim Noakes has to say on the subject. My guess is this: “Look, you get good Shih Tzu and bad Shih Tzu. Stay off the fast food, like whippets and greyhounds. And avoid the Yorkshire terrier pudding. It’s a killer. Retriever is dangerous because you’ll keep coming back for more. Dalmatian will make your skin blotchy and husky will affect your voice. Bloodhound is too rich and Boerboel too tough. You can’t really go wrong with a lightly grilled Griffon Bleu de Gascogne, or, if you’re feeling adventurous, a miniature schnauzer mit kartoffels und sauerkraut drizzled with rottweiler jus. Remember – high fat, low carb. Or is it the other way around? I do apologise. I had a bite of bulldog for breakfast and, as you know, they consist almost entirely of carbohydrates. I don’t feel well at all. You will have to excuse me.”

  A SOCIOPATH’S GUIDE TO THE TINY TOP 10

  I was part of the lynch mob that went after American hunter Melissa Bachman. After unleashing a volley of flaming barbs in her general direction, I thought I should perhaps give this hunting lark a bash before condemning it out of hand.

  My problem is that I am not a big fan of wide-open spaces. The bushveld is all very well if you’re a farmer called Wouter or a dog called Jock. I see it as a vast array of creatures hiding under rocks and behind trees waiting to impale, sting or bite me.

  Melissa is way braver than I am. I wouldn’t want to go on a canned lion hunt because those lions are drugged and you don’t know what a lion on drugs is capable of doing. It might launch itself from a tree, thinking it can fly, and land on your head before you have time to pull the trigger. What kind of drugs is it on? What if it has taken a bucket load of methylenedioxymethamphetamine and tries to give you a hug? Or lick you to death? Ecstasy has that effect on people, so why not lions?

  I am not interested in hunting anything capable of fighting back. Right away that rules out the Big Five. When it comes to the infliction of grievous bodily harm, I shall do the inflicting, thank you very much.

  So you can imagine my unbridled joy when I came across John X Safaris in the Eastern Cape and discovered that they cater for people like me. My attention was snared by this line on their blog: “In a world where everything is changing and high standards become the norm, so does the urge of our hunters.” I couldn’t understand it, but it sounded wild and esoteric. It went on. “Hunters from around the world are looking for new opportunities to test their skill and wit against the often forgotten small species of Africa.” Having run out of people to test my wit against, I was delighted to find that animals were up for the challenge.

  The Eastern Cape, according to John X Safaris, gives one the chance to hunt seven of the Tiny 10. The other three presumably moved to the Western Cape in the hope of securing a better quality of life.

  Top of the log is bagging an oribi. I am advised to use “solids” to minimise damage to these “fragile trophies”. Does this mean I have to capture one and feed it solids until it quietly expires from over-eating? I don’t really have the time for that. Besides, I am told that oribi “succumb to predators very easily”. I don’t want to stalk an oribi for days on end only to find the damn thing down on its knees in front of a sleeping leopard, one hoof to its forehead, saying breathlessly, “Take me if you must, you predator, you. Take me now!”

  I couldn’t tell from the picture how big an oribi is because it was lying down. The man who killed it was lying behind it. They seemed to be spooning, which I found rather tender and romantic. Its long horns could easily perform an unwanted vasectomy so I looked for something less threatening on the list.

  The grey duiker is apparently “an opportunistic species”. The Julius Malema of the antelope world is usually hunted in the early morning, later afternoon or at night. That’s no good for me. There is a brief window period when I am fully alert around midday, otherwise I am asleep or drunk.

  The Cape grysbuck is a “personal favourite” of whoever runs John X Safaris. Perhaps his brother, Malcolm. I can see why it might be a favourite. It’s small enough to fit on the braai. They are also very shy animals. When Charles Darwin said the meek shall inherit the earth, he was probably talking about the Cape grysbuck. It will reportedly require “many nights of hard hunting”. I have tried that, mostly in bars, admittedly, and there is a serious imbalance between effort and outcome. Not really my thing.

  The blue duiker is preyed on by caracal and eagles in the coastal forests. Now we’re talking. Any animal that can be carried off by a bird is the kind of animal I want to hunt. Hang on. John X Safaris suggests flushing out the buck with Jack Russell terriers. Now I must get dogs? Jack Russells are roughly the same size as the blue duiker. The carnage would be unimaginable and I’d have the SPCA on my case in no time at all. There’s also this: “A 12-gauge shotgun is best suited for these fleet-footed masters of the forest.” Masters of the forest, eh? We’ll see about that. BLAM! BLAM! Blue duiker, red mist. We are also told it’s known as puti in Xhosa. I wouldn’t feel comfortable shooting something that can speak Xhosa. Well, apart from the motherfucker who burgled my house a couple of weeks ago.

  On to the klipspringer, which means heading into the mountains. This displeases me. I am afraid of heights and clean mountain air makes my head spin. Besides, they are easily spooked. With my stalking skills, klipspringer in Zambia would hear me coming.

  Vaal rhebuck are out of the question because they live halfway to the moon and unless I can shoot one from a helicopter, I’m not interested.

  “The steenbuck is one of the most beautiful of the 10.” Hmm. I like it already. And the hunter in the photo holding up its dead head looks about nine years old. If he can do it, so can I.

  So that’s the Eastern Cape’s seven. For the other three in the Tiny 10, we must visit neighbouring countries. First, to Namibia, for the dangerous Damara dik-dik. Well, dangerous in the sense that you could trip over him and do yourself a mischief.

  Standing 30 centimetres high and weighing in at three kilograms, we are told that she is the “ballerina of the bush”. Any animal that thinks it can get on my good side by performing pirouettes and the pas de chat deserves to die. On the other hand, two mouthfuls and its gone. If I am going to have a braai, I can’t expect everyone to bring their own dik-dik. Besides, theirs horns are so small that my jacket would keep slipping off.

  So to Mozambique for a clear shot at the red duiker. “Often spotted as a glowing ember in the forest” – or perhaps as a red-hot rifle barrel of a Renamo bandit – we are told to “look for an oversized scrotum hanging between the back legs”. Should we then point and laugh until it dies of shame? Should we feel envious? It’s not made clear.

  Number 10 on the Tiny 10 list is something called Livingstone’s suni. The one in the photo looks as if it weighs little more than a hamburger. Suni make weak barking and whistling sounds. “I’m over here,” they seem to be saying. Idiots.

  The blog ends with a heartwarming story of Spanish clients, Jose Recio and his sultry wife, Filo, who were in the Eastern Cape earlier. Their mission? To hunt 15 species and shoot two of each. Like a homicidal version of Noah.


  They killed 28 animals in eight days. Jose got not one, but two Vaal rhebuck. “Two great Vaalies in a morning!” he boasted. If only.

  The last photo of the great white hunters from Spain was of Filo posing with three dead dassies. That’s one brave senorita. A snaggletoothed dassie will tear your throat out if you don’t give it a ham sandwich. That’s when I got the idea.

  I want to hunt the Tiniest 10. Here’s my hit list. Chihuahua. Hamster. Gecko. Tortoise. Etruscan shrew. Pygmy possum. Jerboa. Tree frog. Mole. Mouse.

  I will be looking for a taxidermist with very small hands.

  THE ROAD TO HEAVEN IS PAVED WITH ROADKILL

  My life appears to consist mainly of surfing, drinking beer, getting shouted at, picking up speeding fines and crazy women, writing rubbish for money and drifting between Durban and Cape Town.

  The plan was to spend winters in Durban and summers in Cape Town. However, my sense of timing is only marginally more developed than my sense of direction and I repeatedly find myself in the wrong city at the wrong time of year.

  When I saw that temperatures in Cape Town were predicted to plummet to something like -42°C one weekend, I packed a bag and pointed the car’s snout towards the rising sun. The weather wizards said Durban was expecting around 27 degrees. That’s my kind of language.

  I was planning on driving straight through, from coast to coast, stopping only to get beer into and out of my body. The problem is, my night vision isn’t so good. I see lights and shapes that aren’t there, causing me to scream and throw my arms in front of my face. Sometimes it happens when I’m not even driving.

  I stopped in Knysna after swerving for what looked like three rabbits riding skateboards down the middle of the N2. Funny town, Knysna. It consists almost entirely of B&Bs built on the fossilised ruins of layer upon layer of other B&Bs dating back to the Paleolithic era. Oysters are legal tender in some shops and most bartenders prefer it if strangers from out of town settle their tabs with a bag of unshucked mollusks. If you’re out of mollusks, they’ll take cocaine.

  The owner of my B&B kindly provided me with a free bottle of champagne. Well, I can’t be absolutely certain it was free, but no attempt was made to get money out of me when I left in the morning. Perhaps because nobody else was awake at 4 am.

  It’s the best way to travel. Arrive late, leave early. Take your shoes off and quite often nobody will even know you were there.

  A full day of driving spat me out in the Transkei. Yes, I know it doesn’t go by that name any longer. But I have difficulty seeing it as a proper province. A province suggests laws and infrastructure. It presupposes that someone is vaguely in charge. The Eastern Cape, as far as I’m concerned, ends at East London and the Transkei begins where the roadkill starts. I saw more dead animals than traffic cops. Unless those were traffic cops.

  I also passed several signs displaying a silhouette of a cow accompanied by a cellphone number. Who would answer? A cow? Perhaps you’re meant to call the number if you are looking for a cow. Not necessarily to eat, but to keep as a pet. I thought of ringing the number but there really wasn’t enough room in the car. Maybe for a calf, but I didn’t see any signs with a number for a calf. They’re obviously too young to have their own phones. And rightly so, too.

  The Morgan Bay Hotel struck me as being a suitable place to regroup. A woman with a parrot on her shoulder seemed not to understand what I was looking for. It occurred to me that the parrot was brighter than she was and I tried dealing directly with the bird. He gave me the lazy eye and kept his mouth shut. Smart bird. Unlike the other one, who burbled incessantly about things that had no bearing whatsoever on my attempt to secure lodgings for the night.

  She reluctantly handed me a key and nodded towards the staircase. The hotel was built in 1946 and some of the original guests can still be found in the bar.

  As far as location goes, it couldn’t be better. Perched on a grassy knoll, the hotel overlooks the ocean. From my balcony, the pristine beach and bushy dunes were off to the left and, on the other side, one of those majestic Wild Coast bluffs plunged into the sea. Near its base, a handful of surfers were in the water. I pulled on my wetsuit, grabbed my board, lurched over the rocks and paddled out. A few minutes later, dozens of dolphins came cruising by. I briefly toyed with the idea of never leaving. I’d negotiate a good rate for my room and spend the rest of my life here. I’d live off mussels and marijuana and do nothing but surf and read and write trashy novels for fun.

  Hold on. No free Wi-Fi? Forget it. I’m going to Durban.

  CAPTAIN COLCHICINE TO THE RESCUE

  I really hope there is some kind of predetermined plan here and that it isn’t all just loosely held together by a series of random events, because I cannot figure out why I am writing this in a loud backpacker’s bar at 2am on the Wild Coast when, at my age, I should be in a gated community with a devoted wife, 2.4 adult children and a pair of golden Labradors lying at my feet.

  Heading for Durban, I stopped off at Jeffreys Bay to try out the new surfboard I had bought in Muizenberg. A stiff offshore was blowing and the waves were epic. I jumped out of the car in the parking lot in Pepper Street, overlooking Supertubes, then staggered for a few paces and fell over. A dog wandered up and barked at me. A mother hurried her child away. That parking lot has seen some pretty wild stuff over the years, no doubt about it, but hardly ever at 10am.

  I could barely walk. My right foot felt as if red-hot shrapnel was embedded in it. Other surfers were putting on their wetsuits and waxing their boards. It’s a small town. I didn’t want to be known as that giant unshaven freak who drives around with a surfboard on his roof, then stops and falls down for a bit before driving off, but it seemed inevitable.

  I went looking for drugs. For many years drugs were easily obtainable in J-Bay. Then the troglodytes from the hinterland descended, with their face-brick houses and face-brick churches and face-brick mentalities, and nothing was ever the same again. Now you have to get your drugs from pharmacies instead of hippies. None of the chemists speak English. I tried explaining my symptoms but fell silent when I realised I had forgotten the Afrikaans word for foot. She helped me out by saying, “Jou voet?” Foot. Voet. Hard to tell the difference. Why even bother with another language? Can’t we all just speak English and get along?

  She said from the sound of it, I had gout. They speak funny in J-Bay so I laughed and said, “For a minute there, I thought you said I had gout.” Ja, she said, gout. I was outraged. Gout is something from which fat, old, rich men suffer. I am not rich. What a silly woman. Could she not tell by the way I was dressed?

  “How much did you last have to drink?” she said. An odd question. I was wearing sunglasses and, for all she knew, I was a Mormon. It is, after all, only by the eyes that one can tell someone who is partial to the odd dram, or, in my case, 19 beers and seven tequilas two nights earlier.

  I removed my sunglasses and looked her square in the eye. She flinched, nodded once, turned to her stockpile of snake-oil solutions and rip-off remedies and handed me a canister of colchicine.

  It was vitally important that I cured my foot while I was still in J-Bay, so I began gobbling the little white pills the moment I hobbled out. The more you take, the better you feel. Isn’t that the guiding credo for pharmaceuticals of any kind? Well, apart from acid. I overmedicated on acid once and had two-thirds of my face fall into my lap while I was sitting on a park bench in Barcelona. I had a terrible job fitting it back on. Never again.

  Colchicine works on a different principle. One of the side effects of overdosing is that you swerve violently into someone’s driveway and vomit in their garden. In front of their children. On a Sunday morning. “It’s gout,” I shout. I wouldn’t want them thinking I am spreading blackwater fever through the neighbourhood. But I can see they don’t understand.

  My organs and joints eventually calmed down enough for me to get into the water. Surfing at J-Bay is to surfers what kissing the Pope’s ring is to Catholics, onl
y more hygienic.

  Driving out of town a couple of days later, I pulled up at the N2 T-junction and turned the engine off. Left back to Cape Town, right to Durban. I had done 23 years in Durban, 14 in Cape Town and the rest … well, let’s not talk about the rest.

  I could have gone either way. It didn’t really matter. Nobody was waiting for me on the west coast or the east. I took out a coin and flipped it. Heads. But forgot to call it. Just then, one of those enormous satanic crows flew low overhead and banked sharply to the left. I couldn’t remember if it was black cats, black crows or black people that were bad luck, but either way it struck me as a sign. I swung the wheel to the right, opened a beer with my teeth and headed for the legendary roadworks of the deep Transkei.

  GET SKIRTED AND UNLEASH YOUR INNER BABE

  Men don’t really know how to celebrate Women’s Day without running the risk of being called patronising or sexist. All we can do, really, is dress up as a woman and feel what it’s like to walk in their shoes for a day. Obviously I couldn’t do this on my own for fear of being set upon by hordes of unshaven brutes demanding fellatio and other mouth-watering Italian dishes.

  So I called old friend Ted and said we ought to celebrate our inner women by pretending to be them. He agreed that this was what women would most want from men on Women’s Day.

  An hour later he came stomping up my driveway in a lime green chiffon cocktail dress and a pair of bloodstained army boots. I explained to him that our objective was to resemble real women, not murderous transvestites.

  I picked out one of the ex-wife’s evening gowns. The bottom part swirled agreeably around my knees but the top half clung to me like a Jehovah’s Witness. We needed a boost in the boob department or our cover would be blown. I went to get something to drink, leaving Ted browsing through what used to be the bra drawer. Women always leave bras behind. It’s a way of marking their territory. At the end, though, they leave them as a way of reminding you of what you have lost.