into Africa

Another from the occasional travel archives. Ditty about my journey into Africa around ten months ago…
----------------------------

Approaching my seat on the full-to-capacity first flight from Heathrow to Dubai, I was presented with  shrivelled up ancient old lady who appeared the living embodiment of Meerha Syal’s pastiche ‘Mummy’ character in the comedy chat show, the Kumars. Collapsed in on herself and wheezing in a serious sounding way, I instantly feared for her health.  My designated seat was between her and her companion steward: one boy of no more than thirteen or fourteen.  I didn’t want her dying on my shoulder during the flight.  I said they could sit together and I’d take the aisle seat.  On one toilet excursion I had to help the old lady find her way back to her grandson, maybe even great grandson, after she lost her bearings.  She looked peculiar wearing the new fangled headphones which connected her to a confusing entertainment console.  Her young steward had hushed her at one point for speaking loudly while she wore them.

The affiliation of Emirates airline with Arsenal football club nauseated me throughout, featuring highly in both the printed magazines and the entertainment console.  On the latter, a customised BBC Sport website gave menu options of Football, Rugby, Cricket, Athletics and Arsenal.

It was disgusting.

Also distasteful was the seating décor on both aircraft.  It put me in mind of a particularly bad party at a scary aunt’s: faded pink and flowery, not replaced since the early 80s.

With little more than half an hour between landing in Dubai and boarding again for Johannesburg, I was struck only by the airport’s shineyness.  Its architecture gleamed with twisty points, spires and sparkly newness.  The order of the region was reflected as we soared skywards.  Lights illuminated the city’s organisation more than simply the grids embedded in most American cities.  Here there were numerous tall sharp points and a flourish to the planning.  Not endless banks of noughts and crosses, but pentagons and circles of light, conjoined by sweeping florescent beams of motorway arteries, tiny plinking cells of vehicles.

I drew glib parallels with my outbound journey of 2005 when I headed to Saigon, similarly floundering.  Without a job then, having suffered serial interview rejection, I returned ultimately after a Northern European jaunt to work filing documents in the basement of a financial services company.  Now my independent venture wasn’t yet dead on its feet, although that wasn’t an inconceivable prospect.

During the evermore tedious flight, I drew glib comparisons between air travel and my day-to-day life: watching films, reading books, eating rubbish instant food, tolerating sporadic company, enjoying none, only a vague sense of direction and purpose.  Being ‘up in the air’. Ho ho.

Eventually we touched down in a bright, sunny but blustery-as-warned Johannesburg.  I walked down the long connecting hallways towards the terminal, enjoying three songs from the soundtrack of the African film, Tsotsi, which I played on my iPod.

Phat, arresting, possessing beats.

Despite the heavy shoulder bag skewering my shoulder, I felt the lightness of being somewhere entirely new and different, sucking it in, although there was little to suck in a standard airport.  The music ended I joined queues, shuffled forwards and walked through booths, collected my luggage, found a luggage trolley and located the open bus station.  I retraced my steps to sit in an empty car rental hall and wait there, rather than risk attracting unwanted attention in the bus station.
*

I sat there for an hour, writing everything up until this sentence, before wheeling my bag through to the bus depot again.  Soon I spotted my fellow compatriot and fellow volunteer / tourist.

Margaret was a feisty International School Teacher who lived and worked a comparatively short distance away in Botswana.  Mid 50s, diminutive, spiky haired, bright and eager; we swapped basic details – where are you from?  What do you do?  Have you done much like this before now?  Then she purposefully hunted out our minibus.

As a sullen driver helped us pack our bags into the minibus trailer, a confident young local boy joined us.  Having met and greeted each other, we climbed inside the vehicle for the 300km ride north east of Johannesburg.  We quickly passed through Pretoria, then nondescript, flat farmland for a considerable distance.

In the back of the minibus we chatted openly, Helen, the local boy and I.  He was on the opening leg of an unplanned stint travelling, looking to do the sort of animal conservation work Helen and I were about to, but less willing to pay.  We spoke of Helen and teaching and education and football and The World Cup and Africa and Africans and slowly, slowly, our chatter petered out.

After a couple of hours the topography around us changed.  Road signs for northern England placenames: Balmoral, Kendall, were matched by sweeping hillsides of escalating scale; peaks and valleys not unlike parts of the Scottish Highlands.  A field ablaze, either side of the road, four foot high flames and dark grey smoke.  Our vehicle nonchalantly rumbled through, sending waves of searing heat and strong fumes of smoke through the vehicle interior; like passing through hell, the ungodly reverse of a sudden icy shiver.

One ten minute service station pitstop half way through our journey led to confusion with coffee, cash and change, and my appearance of being a clueless tourist.  I slunk back to the vehicle, defeated and tired.

The next leg saw lethargy fully kick in, my head soon lolloping, impossible to keep upright as the vehicle droned forward and a podcast played in my ears.
The podcast spoke of books, new media and culture.

From the involuntary fixation with humans: 21^st Century news, technology, current affairs, popular consumer culture and art through television, books and music; I had chosen to immerse myself in a wild, faraway, remote habitat and a rich diversity of new species which make you feel altogether ignorant.  It was a transition.

At dusk we alighted in the car park of a modest shopping centre in a small flat town which was overlooked by high peaks.  Here we were met by the project’s mastermind and his young researcher of the season, a 21-year old rugby playing Welshman.  Beer and wine were purchased in the partitioned section of a sizeable Spar supermarket, before the final stage – a truck ride through the town and up, into the darkness of the mountain range, off the beaten track, away from all civilisation.  We lurched and swayed in the back of the Land Rover, its headlights illuminating the violently bumpy dirt tracks ahead.

Forty minutes later we climbed out at a modest looking bungalow on the mountainside, set back fifty yards from the main orange gravel track – not that it was possible to tell it was orange.  I rubbed my eyes and looked up. Vividly clustered stars mesmerised, sharply studding the blackest of skies.  Stillness and quiet felt like someone had pulled the cork out.

Or put it in.  Maybe.

I wasn’t sure.  I was extremely tired.

The amiable Welshman was staying in this basic house, together with the irrepressible Margaret and I.  We made ourselves at home, grew better acquainted with the gas heated water system, basic bedrooms – mine had two single beds, each with a thin mattress, and a wardrobe.  Nothing else.  I discovered that there were no towels of any kind.  Showering could wait a little longer.

Several decades our senior, surrogate mother Margaret set about making chicken and salad while we all chatted in the kitchen.  I ate, helped wash up, but passed on the drinks and further chatting in the open fire-warmed living room, opting instead for my new sleeping bag, bed and sleep.