Postcard From Africa
A Love Letter to Discomfort and Beauty
I woke up the other morning and I couldn’t figure out where I was. It was very early morning and the sun hadn’t risen yet. Street lights filtered through drawn curtains and I could hardly make out the shape of the room. Vaulted ceilings, honking horns, men walked by the door speaking in a language I struggled to place in my sleep-slowed mind. For the life of me I couldn’t place what house I was in, what city, what country, what continent. My brain slowly stretched through the sleep fog and started to piece it together. The language is arabic. I’m in Northern Africa. I’m in Egypt, hotel room, the Fairmont.
Travel has a way of stretching and slowing time so that each day becomes the weight of a week and I can hardly remember being at the airport in Las Vegas just over a month ago. I showed up to South Africa with the flu and don’t remember a ton from the first week. A fever, sore throat, and fumbling around a new country in an apartment with a killer view of the ocean. A new continent, and Africa in particular, is a lot to absorb on a good day - with the flu? I was completely overwhelmed. Even the steering wheel is on the other side of the car, never mind the driving on opposite sides! As I came back from the flu, we were in full swing for Z to launch into the Cape Epic - an 8 day mountain bike race that’s known as one of the toughest in the world.
We spent a long weekend in Plettenburg Bay with friends and kept adding days to our house there. It’s a quiet and quaint little beach town reminiscent of Laguna Beach a very long time ago. The people are friendly and the coastline is simply stunning. Long winding paths lead down to endless shores - dunes studded with flowers, seaside grasses and succulents give way to waves that roll in like corduroy flanked by mountains and cliffs. A sign said at the end of the boardwalk says that the seals have rabies and to keep your dogs on a leash. The sign at the house said to keep the windows closed when you leave so the baboons don’t break in and destroy the house. These are problems I’ve never even considered. The area here is truly beautiful and I find myself not wanting to leave, despite the rabid seals and rowdy baboons.
People tell you of the beauty there, but most travelers neglect to mention the racism and the poverty. The divide between black and white and rich and poor is stark and wide. The more I travel the more I realize that America thinks she has problems, but boy - it’s like a teenager complaining about what to wear versus an adult getting laid off and their home foreclosed on - America is so young, her problems are small echoes of so many other places where they loom at a grander scale. The first night we drove from the airport to the apartment in the dark of night. Townships glittered under rickety streetlights, unshaded bulbs casting harsh light on their corrugated aluminum siding. Trash blankets the small gap between barbed wire fencing and the highway. Human beings are walking on the freeway in the dark as if it’s a sidewalk. A few days later we drive past what you could call an accident but it was a human in a billion pieces on the highway. A few hours later I drive back down the same road and more kids are playing soccer in a makeshift field a few feet from cars roaring past. People coming home from work pull over to the side of the freeway and let folks hop in and out of the back of trucks and run across the freeway to get back to their townships. An audi SUV rips past at full speed, the driver busy on their phone.
While the divide between race and class and economic status is massive the issue is not simple. The more I travel, the more I understand that simply ending poverty or racism or economic inequality or war isn’t a two-step process (decide and do). Someone always loses. Even if we save everyone from life threatening diseases, we create new problems - Where will they go? Where will they work? How will they be fed? We optimize so much through technology and people lose their jobs, then we cut social care programs and we wonder why crime spikes. People want one country to win over another in a war or war to stop, but wars have been raging for centuries. If the war ends, what about the things people do to their own citizens that are horrendous? We depose one leader and the next comes in even more horrendous and heinous. Even with the animals - the tourists get upset if locals and tour guides throw things at the baboons to get them away from their property. If not the baboons will destroy things, bite people, and be a nuisance. You can’t have it both ways - pick one. Someone loses. Someone wins. Nothing is simple. Nothing is easy. Africa is a harsh teacher.
I was avoiding driving in South Africa as long as I could until Z made me drive to the monkey and bird sanctuary. I nervously got in the driver’s seat and took off on the left side of the road. After decades of driving on the other side it felt like I was completely blind to the entire left side of the car. Was I over the line? Why was the blinker on the other side of the wheel too? I signaled by putting my windshield wipers on and laughed, wishing everyone on the road good luck. We zipped along the road and everything was fine until a troop of baboons decided to continue their ruckus into the road. My brain spiked with adrenaline at facing a situation I’ve never been in before. I swerved and slowed and my body flushed with panic. It would be like hitting a bunch of small people. Completely horrendous. I take the baboon signs much more seriously now as I cannot even fathom what that would have done to the day, the car, or my mental health.
The day we saw the human in parts on the highway I had the great task of driving back alone from an hour away back to Strand and then to Somerset West. I was rightly scared. But growth happens often in discomfort and doing things outside of the comfort zone almost always yields good results. I buckled in and went for it. And you know what? It went just fine and by the end of the trip I was completely comfortable at making wide sweeping right hand turns to the far lane and managing awkward high speed merges with little warning and usually no adherence to the rules.
Egypt pushes me too. In certain countries, particularly deeply conservative ones rooted in patriarchal religious traditions, I feel the full weight of what it means to be a woman with opinions and used to independence. That, however, is a conversation for another time. Today we head to Khan Khalili, the old Egyptian museum and the twin to the Blue Mosque. Yesterday was mind-blowing in Giza, Saqqara, Dahshur and Memphis. Beyond this we have Luxor, sailing up the Nile to Aswan and Abu Simbel. Thank you for joining me and reading along. The world is vast and wide - and people are often more like us than we think. Travel enables us to open our minds in places we didn’t know were closed tight and allows us to live more fully, more authentically and more full of love.
Note:
Much, much more coming on this trip including where we’ve stayed, what we’ve done, and YES we are looking at coming back and spending more time in Africa (primarily South Africa).
