Are We There Yet?

by David Smiedt

  I ended up at a late-night diner decorated in a 50s rock and roll motif where I had the best banana milkshake, toasted cheese sandwich and choc-fudge sundae of my life.

  I woke up the next morning surprisingly clear-headed but accompanied by the flaky remnants of a block of chocolate that judging by the packaging had once been the size of a roof tile. It was a bright warm morning and Grahamstown was mine to explore. Its streets were wide enough to allow for two rows of parking in the middle, separated by a concrete flowerbed awash in yellow and purple pansies. Students with second-hand jeans but top-of-the-line laptops dawdled their way towards the grand archway at the entrance to Rhodes University; townsfolk browsed shop windows to see if anything had changed from yesterday, and shopkeepers swept footpaths in the sunshine. The high street couldn’t be a more different scene for eleven days in July when the Grahams-town Festival transforms the town. Second only to the Edinburgh Arts Festival in scale, it is twenty-nine years old and in 2002 it showcased around 200 plays, cabarets, art exhibi tions, films, concerts, dance performances and lectures. There are also two separate jazz festivals – no one would tell me what caused the ruction – a separate fringe, a literature fair and a thousand craft stalls. From the sound of it, things get awfully bohemian around festival time with some locals apparently offering floor space to weary pilgrims while others embark on a gouge-fest at the dozens of B&Bs.

  The town was established in 1812 by Colonel John Graham as a military outpost on what was the eastern frontier of the Cape. The surrounding region was essentially one enormous battlefield where nine frontier wars were waged over a century. Each had its share of treachery, slaughter, vengeance and provocation, but it says something for the resilience and military ingenuity of the Xhosa that they resisted the mightiest army on earth for almost one hundred years while the proud Zulu fell in a mere handful.

  Like most frontier towns, Grahamstown’s early residents could be neatly divided into two distinct groups: the pious and the bonkers. Grateful for their survival on the edge of civilisation, almost every religious denomination with a congregation in the town set about constructing their own house of worship. It soon became a case of keeping up with the Jehovah’s and today almost forty spires rise from the compact town centre. It’s like someone put Prague in the tumble-dryer.

  The brooding Methodist Commemoration Church with its Gothic revival facade topped by a quintet of spires and ten stained-glass windows is magnificent. Not least for the winged figure of Peace, commemorating the Anglo-Boer War dead, sitting atop a plinth out the front with a plaque written by no less than Rudyard Kipling. It is not a particularly moving piece of prose and reading it I couldn’t shake Groucho Marx’s response to the question, “Do you like Kipling?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said, “I’ve never Kippled.”

  Grahamstown’s most prominent landmark is rather unsurprisingly another church. The Cathedral of St Michael and St George is a jaw-droppingly gorgeous edifice in early English Gothic. Its spire is the tallest in South Africa and peers into backyards like a nosy neighbour on the hunt for scandal. Before the word had all meaning flogged out of it by the extreme-sports crowds – “that wave was awesome!” “your bungee jump was awesome!”, “my socks are awesome!” – it would have been tailor-made for the space.

  Having faithfully visited a handful of the buildings built by the devoted, it was time to explore the doings of some of Grahamstown’s other main players: the eccentrics.

  After the Fifth Frontier war, 4000 Britons were granted land and passage to the area to consolidate the empire’s power base. As military activity continued to push eastwards, Grahamstown blossomed into South Africa’s second largest city after Cape Town. Aspirations to grandeur accompanied its growth. Imposing public buildings, such as the colonnaded sandstone Town Hall with streamlined clocktower, sandstone law courts and stately libraries took their place among the ornate churches and stretches of Victorian shopfronts.

  The civility, climate and picture-book charm drew genteel oddballs by the dozen, but HG Galpin made the rest look like mere dabblers. His home – a cream two-storey Victorian town house with a turreted clocktower – has been preserved as the Observatory Museum. The architect, surveyor, civil engineer and chronometer-, watch- and clockmaker bought the pile in 1859 and over the next twenty years added a basement, three storeys to the back of the structure and a rooftop observatory.

  Picture Henry Higgins’s home in My Fair Lady, up the bizarre Victorian gadget factor by around 30 per cent and you’ll have some idea of the restored Galpin residence. Beside his bed was what appeared to be a mahogany shoe box but my guide Walter Pamca deftly opened a latch in the middle to reveal a porcelain commode. The man of the house’s faded burgundy smoking jacket and fez were arranged on a Chippendale by the window while the polished floorboards were strewn with lion, zebra and, oddly enough, tiger pelts. Heavy velvet curtains decorated with lace framed the windows; photographs (at least one of Queen Victoria in every room) crowded the walls; and the library was dominated by a celestial globe, a terrestrial globe and an exotic insect collection in a mahogany cabinet. On the wall swings the five-metre, 136-kilogram pendulum from the rooftop clock.

  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 salt
works 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 ov
er 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.