Are We There Yet?

by David Smiedt

  His vitriol comes from evidence suggesting the nation’s military encouraged Jonas Savimbi, the leader of Angola’s rebel UNITA army, to fund his civil war effort by slaughtering 100,000 elephants. The ivory was then allegedly carried back into South Africa on the military planes and trucks which had transported weapons into Angola. Vast stockpiles of Angolan ivory are still rumoured to be held in South African military storage depots.

  Van Note’s assertion is supported by an eyewitness account from a South African colonel who recounted, “Elephants were mown down by the tearing rattle of AK47 rifles and machine guns. They shot everything: bulls, cows and calves.”

  The park’s star attractions are four teenage orphans who roam the hundred hectares of open space that features grasslands and a forested section. They sleep under cover in individual pens and visitors can choose to interact with them in one of two ways. You can either spend half an hour or so feeding them vegetables before the next group of half-a-dozen arrives to take their turn. Or, as I did, go on an elephant safari, which entails a walk with them through the forests at sunrise or sunset.

  The slogan emblazoned across the park’s pamphlet is “Be Touched By An Elephant” and I had a phalanx of single entendres to trot out when it came to describing my visit. The unexpected truth of the matter is that the pitch encapsulated the essence of my experience.

  Granted, these were mere three-metre juveniles who only tipped the scales at a couple of tonnes, but up close they radiated a humbling gentleness. Their skin felt like old luggage and was covered in coarse hair; the tips of their trunks worked like opposable digits to almost tenderly grasp food from my palm, and their benign eyes were framed by lashes as long as my hand. They evoked a sense of awe-filled wonder I hadn’t felt since childhood and didn’t believe I was still capable of.

  So as not to defile the experience with any further hyperbole, I’ll turn to the words of Henry Beston who in 1928’s The Outermost House described elephants thus: “They move finished and complete, gifted with extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear”.

  Twenty-two kilometres west is the town of Knysna where I had planned to stay for a single night but was seduced into remaining for two. It was payday and jovial lines trailed from ATMs while nearby groups of kids busked, using plastic washing tubs as drums. Between the de rigueur curio shops selling zebra-print everything were galleries displaying abstract seascapes by local artists, oak-panelled bookstores and a fine public library made from hand-carved sandstone. Pubs and cafes spilled onto the pavement with cane tables shaded by umbrellas and, in one ingenious case, deckchairs with milk crates as tables.

  Also in evidence were the day-to-day shops that facilitate small-town life: a discount mattress outlet, a video store, a post office and so on. It was this final element that gave the place not so much a resort feel but one of real life, albeit a charmed one.

  By 6pm the pubs were filled with locals enjoying the first of many, weekenders from Cape Town and backpackers living high on the Euro’s back. Pushbikes, which seemed to be the transport of choice for many residents, were littered outside. Lured by the golden light pouring out of its windows and the sounds of a precociously talented acid jazz ensemble, I squeezed into a crowded bar which emptied into a courtyard where clusters of bobbing groovers warmed their hands on fires in tin drums.

  Although the crowd had its fair share of hemp accoutrements in the textile and toke varieties, it was distinctly designer hippie. In South Africa these often well-to-do new-age types are marvellously known as Trustafarians. Yet along with their distressed cargos and ironic soft-drink T-shirts, they also wore welcoming smiles. Many were curious about Australia in terms of lifestyle, culture and how the general public felt about the Howard government’s refusal to formally apologise to the stolen generation. Some levelled allegations of racism at my homeland whose attitude to Aborigines they said was on a par with apartheid, and my inclination to agree saw the conversations meander from sport to politics to recommendations for the rest of my journey.

  Politely declining an invitation to the next bar, I struck out in search of food and ended up in a dimly lit cafe strewn with tea lights where a chanteuse was running through a Joni Mitchell/Tracy Chapman repertoire. Knysna is home to a large gay population who absconded from the larger South African cities in search of a quiet life and now run many of the town’s most attractive establishments, outside which the pride flag snaps, crackles and pops.

  This one was presided over a by a square-jawed maitre d’ of indeterminate vintage named Jacques, whose aplomb at working the room was interrupted only by the odd visit to the microphone to out-Ronan Ronan Keating. My waitron – as they are known in this gender-phobic nation – was from Cairns and when she alerted Jacques to the fact that another Australian was in the house, he promptly told her to take the next half-hour off and sent a bottle of wine over to the table. Charmaine had come to Knysna for a two-week stay. Three years on, she wasn’t going anywhere. “I adore this area,” she said. “It draws writers, potters, artists and loonies. The region is home to hundreds of forest fairies – people who disappear into the bush and don’t come out for years. Plus, the South African equivalent to [Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian] Mardi Gras is held here. It’s called the Pink Lourie.”

  “What do the local make of it?” I asked.

  “We are the locals,” she replied. “Unless you mean the Poppies.” This, I was told, was a term used to describe a certain type of Afrikaans woman in her twenties or thirties who lived in the area. Her defining features were, according to Charmaine: “Auburn hair that should have her colourist banned from going near a human head again, red lipstick worn with orange lipliner, eighteen-carat-gold nails and fondness for brandy and soda with a specified number of ice-cubes – fail to provide that exact figure and the drink is sent back to the bar.”

  Unbeknownst to us, Jacques had been hovering and swooped in on Charmaine’s shtick with, “My dear, you cannot believe the hair colour. There’s just no way those drapes match the rug.”

  After many Dom Pedros – a local concoction made from vanilla ice cream, whiskey, Drambuie or both — I made it back to the hotel somewhere in the am and set my alarm for what felt like the ungodly hour of seven as I had a train to catch.

  Belching smoke at the station by the lagoon around which Knysna sits was the Outeniqua Choo Tjoe. Its name is derived from two sources. The Outeniqua element – Khoisan for “they who bear honey” – relates to the mountain range which forms the backdrop to the sixty-seven-kilometre journey to the town of George. The Choo Tjoe refers to the sound made by the hulking black 1924 steam locomotive which hauls a dozen suburban side-door carriages along what must surely be one of the most spectacular stretches of track in the world.

  Groaning and creaking out of the station, the Choe Tjoe trudged along the perimeter of the olive wind-whipped lagoon at the centre of which floated dozens of oyster beds. As it picked up speed and the carriage became scented by coal smoke and brine, the track leaned hard into a conifered embankment that ran at an angle of seventy degrees to an achingly gorgeous settlement of white wooden houses topped by green tin roofs.

  Surrounded by the pale fragrant shrubbery known as fynbos and sporadic fern outbursts, the track crested the incline and dropped into a basil-coloured mosaic of paddocks separated by ageing timber pole fences, wooded hillocks and slow shallow streams. It then crossed a succession of rippled saltwater lakes before running parallel to a beach for a few kilometres. Next, it climbed to cling against cliff faces so close to the ocean that mists of spray drifted through the carriage windows from waves crashing into the boulders below. Through Sedgefield, Wilderness and the riverside camping grounds of Fairy Knowe we chuffed, across arched bridges, tidal beds and fields where chestnut mares grazed. It couldn’t have been more romantic had Lauren Bacall stepped silhouetted out of the smoke at George Station wearing nothing more than unconscionable amounts of chinchilla and a welcome-home smi
le.

  Part of the Choo Tjoe deal was a shuttle bus back to Knysna on an uninspiring stretch of highway. Our driver was a retired Afrikaans teacher by the name of Corne. Not what you’d call the talkative type – something one might imagine would be an obstacle for a career in tourism – he responded to my enquiries about the area with a string of “I’m not sure’s”, “that’s a good question’s” and “I’d be interested in knowing the answer to that myself”. He was, however, certain of one thing. When I asked what he thought about a story in that morning’s paper which reported that a local farmer had transported the wreck of the late, disgraced South African cricketer Hansie Cronje’s aircraft from the foreboding Outeniqua mountains to a shed on his property where he was charging an ogling fee, Corne shot me a withering look and spat the word “bullshit” in my direction. The elderly Welsh woman in the seat behind me gasped. I had clearly struck a nerve as raw as steak tartare. In many quarters the charismatic and devout Springbok is still viewed as a man who had the rare courage to admit to his mistakes and as a result became the whipping boy for the international cricket community. “If Shane Warne and Mark Waugh had been honest about those pitch reports,” Corne said, before leaping headlong into a non sequitur that pushed the very definition into slightly intimidating new ground, “Hansie might still be alive today. But that’s journalists,” he hissed in what he believed was a subtle dig.

  It was lunchtime when we arrived back in Knysna, so I headed to a pub by the heads where the lagoon empties into the open sea. The gap between the two rocky outcrops is no more than eighty metres with a frothing fury between them. Compressed into this narrow avenue, the tide surges and recedes into the estuary with such unpredictable fury that it was only thirteen years after the area was settled that the first ship attempted to navigate the passage. Cruise boats now ferry bilious tourists back and forth but I was thoroughly content to watch the spectacle from a table by the water’s edge with two dozen local oysters and a chilled bottle of beer sweating droplets in the afternoon sun.

  It was where I spent most of the afternoon in a state of mildly intoxicated bliss which manifested itself in a pounding headache by the evening. As much as the idea of another night of high camp with Charmaine and Jacques appealed to me, I had an early start the next morning and four hundred kilometres to cover before reaching a city where unfathomable beauty and brutality are separated by a mountain shaped like a table.

  Chapter 13

  Oceans Apart

  Before reaching Cape Town – where I was due to meet Jennie and suggest we spend the rest of our lives together – I detoured off the main highway for lunch in Swellendam, which bills itself as the third oldest city in the country. One out of two ain’t bad but it’s no city. Instead, it is a town of utter loveliness amid plush fields watched over by the mauve Langerberg mountains. It was a Sunday morning and the main street was lined with the cars of the faithful who were singing up a reverential storm in the local Dutch Reformed Church. Dating from 1911, it’s a snow-white cocktail of neo-Gothic, Neo-Renaissance and Neo-Baroque that is near perfect. Not least for the fact that it harmoniously incorporates elements of the Cape Dutch style of architecture.

  Regarded as a national treasure, it is essentially the evolution of a seventeenth-century Dutch template which was adapted to meet the demands of a new geography. Whitewashed, thatched, single-storeyed and taking either the shape of an inverted “T” or recumbent “H”, the most obvious and striking features of these buildings are their fluid gables set above a symmetrical facade punctuated by shuttered picture windows.

  Between 1690 and 1850 these gables took a wide array of forms influenced by everything from the home-owner’s pretensions to the neoclassical revival sweeping Europe. And so they appear, liberally sprinkled around Cape Town, the mountainous vineyard districts on the city’s fringes and outlying districts such as Swellendam.

  Guesthouses, upmarket gift stores and tearooms in this style stand shoulder to shoulder on the main street of Swellendam like pale soldiers on parade, and in the cool morning air the place looked freshly scrubbed in preparation for the weekend rush of day-trippers from Cape Town. Stiflingly picturesque, it is one of those towns in which you grew up feeling only one of two ways: either you can’t bear to leave or you can hardly wait to get out.

  Those who opted for the latter most often turned right at the highway and crested the precipitous Sir Lowry’s Pass to Cape Town, where some lived like tanned royalty but most died before their time.

  The sandy Cape Flats are a sea of corrugated-iron shacks, dilapidated concrete council flats and burnt-out cars that either function as single-occupant brothels or family dwellings. These badlands stretch relentlessly in every direction off the main road which heads into Cape Town from the east.

  If you happen to be of the reincarnation persuasion, being born into a life on the Cape Flats would imply a serious fuck-up last time around. On the bright side, though, you won’t have to hang around long. A 2003 report into living standards in Khayelitsha, one of Cape Town’s biggest townships, found that 70 per cent of households had insufficient food the previous year, three-quarters of residents live below the poverty line and in over a third of all homes the main breadwinner had lost their job in 2002.

  As they do around the world, poverty and squalor go hand in hand as refugees – one-third of South Africa’s population are estimated to be illegal aliens – crowd into areas such as the Cape Flats, straining already meagre sanitationinfra structure. If it exists at all. As a result, the now-curable diseases that decimated the slums of Jack the Ripper’s London run rampant. As do the rats.

  As lung cancer victim Agmat Fischer, forty-one, lay dying in his corrugated-iron room on Sugarloaf Street in the Manenberg township, rodents reported to be the size of full-grown cats nibbled at his toes and feet. Too weak to shout for help, he was discovered by a relative who rushed him to hospital. He died the next day. A paraplegic named Billy Fisher who also lived in Sugarloaf Street was attacked by rats which gnawed their way into his room and didn’t stop until his shins were gone. He, too, died the day after the assault.

  Rats, polio and TB aside, the most prolific killer in these shanty cities is AIDS. For the poor, sex is probably the only form of free entertainment available, a few glorious minutes of escapism, and more than a third of South African nineteen-year-olds have fallen pregnant at least once.

  That’s just the consensual figures. The Minister of Safety and Security – who apparently admits to this title – reported that 181 crimes against children are logged daily in South Africa. Rape tops the list. That’s 66,065 a year, for which the average conviction rate is less than 10 per cent. (So under-resourced are the child protection units that, for example, in the Northern Cape town of Springbok, there are no facilities for cases to be heard so the process has to take place in Cape Town. But wait, not only is there a dearth of facilities, there is also an acute shortage of police vehicles, resulting in the accuser and the accused often having to travel over 400 kilometres in the same vehicle.)

  So horrific is the toll taken by AIDS that one million South Africans live in households headed by children under eighteen – with some as young as eight.

  If the present rate of infection continues, by 2009 the average black resident in Cape Town will clock off at forty, a drop of fifteen years from the current life expectancy. Coloured people will see a decade shaved off their average lifespan. In the country’s prisons AIDS has turned practically any incarceration into a death sentence. Not only are 90 per cent of deaths in custody attributed to the disease, but prison gangs are now using the virus as a weapon of coercion. Known as a “slow puncture” those who refuse to pay protection money are raped by a series of HIV-positive men, with the assault being named after the rate at which death presents itself.

  The government’s response has ranged from the ludicrous to the inhumane with President Thabo Mbeki stalling on the roll-out of antiretrovirals because he was not convinced of the link between HI
V and AIDS.

  Citing the not inconsequential challenges faced in trying to promote condom use in traditional tribal cultures and the utterly ridiculous notion that medication alone is not the answer – a claim critics counter with “it’s a bloody good start” – the government’s approach to AIDS has infuriated South Africans from every social strata. “Once upon a time, not so long ago, we had an apartheid regime in South Africa that killed people,” wrote AIDS activist and satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys in his autobiography Elections and Erections. “Now we have a democratic government that just lets them die.”

  The South African government’s AIDS prevention campaign has been only marginally more effective than its response to citizens who have contracted the disease. For example, to combat unsafe sex practices it commissioned … a musical. Which died in the arse after a handful of performances and took R14 million out of the health budget.

  In another case, a well-meaning but spectacularly misguided local safe sex organisation decided to distribute 44 million free condoms with instructions on how to use them plus a blurb on the importance of safe sex. Which they stapled to the prophylactic packaging.

  In his show For Facts Sake, Uys recommends that the schoolgirls in his audience carry a condom at all times in case of the deplorably high chance that they will become a rape victim. “At least hopefully you’ll be able to say: ‘If you’re going to rape me, use a condom’. If he says, ‘I don’t use condoms’, then lie. Say: ‘I have AIDS, you’d better use a condom’.”