The Eastern Cape, Part I

Buffalo City

So after leaving Joburg behind without a whiff of regret, what we find is this.

It seems a bit odd to say that my first impression upon setting foot on the tarmac of the East London airport was that the weather finally seemed to be warming up.  It wasn’t cold up on the plateau in the north, but the warm, moist coastal air with just a hint of a sea breeze was a welcome feeling.  After leaving the terminal building, it really started to steam.  Much as it had in Toronto, London, and Joburg, our arrival had been preceded by cold, damp, and other symptoms of meteorological misery.  Each place has hitherto rebounded from such unhappiness, but none with quite as much zest as East London.  The searing sun punched through a cloudless powder sky, blasting the temperature into the +30°C range.

It was also a refreshing change to see my Uncle Reuben again.  His sense of humour is a whole different tangent apart from the rest of my father’s side of the family, and it’s nice to hear some irony, sarcasm, and litotes once in a while.  Keeps the metaphorical literary juices flowing.

Of course, this is the part of the journey where a lot of the pieces are intended to fall into place.  Thus far, there have been rumours, hints, subtexts, and clues about a series of familial condundra that underpin the actual reason for this whirlwind tour of South Africa.  There have been deaths in the family, wills, title deeds, and murmurs of dread legal battles.  Joburg only entailed meeting Uncle Sid, my grandfather’s younger brother, who through an overlap of generations common in societies where families strove for double-digits of children to have a solid household workforce, is actually younger than my uncle Melvin, despite being my great-uncle.

Sid talks like Mathazar.  It’s not really a factor until your mind makes the connection.  It’s like reading Emily Dickinson’s poetry.  Until you sing one of her poems to “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” it all sounds quite deep and meaningful.  As soon as you hear that tune and read her words, every single poem that she’s ever written becomes trivialized.  Subject to floccinaucinihilipilification, one might say.  Hey.  I finally used that word appropriately in a sentence.   I give myself bonus points.

In any event, Sid is a bit of an eccentric fellow, but given the context of my family, that’s eminently forgivable.  His driving skills are a bit terrifyingly unorthodox, and his analyses of South Africa’s socio-political landscape should probably not be mentioned in polite company.  They should certainly not be mentioned in impolite and unruly company.

Now that we’re in East London, we get to hear all of the various other sides of the stories that Sid spun over many long hours of coffee shop refills.  Joy.  This just seems like a preamble to a frenzied series of diplomatic negotiations and mediations.  Having an inordinate number of far-flung relatives that spin stories and bandy them about like some kind of transatlantic gossip telephone game just lends itself to artificially-created crises and conflicts.

In the meantime, East London meant one specifically important thing to me:  laundry.  Considering that I’ve only got my computer bag and a single carry on for luggage, the continually diminishing amount of clean socks and/or underwear acts like a countdown doomsday clock.  And we were pretty nigh close on midnight, dear readers.  Damn nigh.

But before we could reach the shelter and clothing-purifying sanctity of Villa Radloff on Browning Street, we first had to take my father and uncle on a tour of old memory lane.  Considering that my uncle Mel hasn’t set foot in South Africa since 1963, a few things may have changed from his perspective.

The first thing that I noticed is that every block had some sort of family name associated with it.  Every time the car hit an intersection, my aunt Jenny or uncle Reub would gesticulate toward some structure or other and indicate that it used to belong to, house, or was frequented by some family or other.  That family would invariably have moved away, sold the place, left it to some ungrateful children that wrecked it, or cursed the place from the afterlife after the entire family line was extinguished by a particularly virulent strain of tooth decay.

But a stranger pattern began to emerge.  These were shops.  On every corner.  Every family owned a shop.  Or two.  Or three.  It was like Napoleon’s “nation of shopkeepers” remark come to fruition.  With this sort of density, the only way that all of these shops could have been profitable would have been for a swarm of consumers desperate for tomato sauce, pilchards, and mangos to descend on these sleepy areas on a regular basis.  The only other economic model would involve some an odd ouroboros-like series of transactions in which all of the shopkeepers bought one another’s stock in turn.  Surely you can’t have a community in which everyone owns a cornershop.   Or perhaps you can.  And I’m looking at it.

In any event, it’s great to be back by the sea.  The salty hint in the air is refreshing, and the powder-silt-fine sand feels almost like a liquid between one’s toes.  There are also animals frolicking about in these environs that I don’t recall from my last visit here.  For example, there’s this little fellow that I spotted from one of the beach boardwalks:

I wondered what this sort of sand rat might be until I realized that I was taking a zoomed-in photo.  Zooming out, it is readily apparent that there is an explanation of exactly what this little duffer is, and all of its various characteristics. 

Interesting point:  phylogenetically, these little beach bunnies are closer relatives of elephants than they are of any fuzzy rodents.

Aside from driving around and looking at the shops that everyone used to own, monkeying around at the beach, and dropping into Hemingway’s to do some shopping and casino-dwelling (thanks to Platinum VIP Ted Radloff), the other port of call to note near East London is the old farm, which my great-grandfather owned, and was the seat of the family in this part of South Africa for a while.  This means that my grandfather, two of his brothers (including uncle Sid), and three of his sisters grew up there.

The place was a bit more desolate back in the 1920s, with more dirt and scrub than trees and grass, but time and care have made the place a lot more habitable since great-grandfather first started to scratch out a living on dry and poorly moisturized soil.  There is one thing that tips me off that this dirt farm undoubtedly belonged to my family or some of their friends.

Unsurprisingly, my great-grandfather built a shop on the corner.

Until next time, good night, England and the colonies.

Cheers,

—mARKUS

Where are those Meerkat Things?

Greetings, gentle readers.

After a couple of journeys into the bush, what we find is this:

Apparently, there is some sort of numerical preoccupation within African zoological circles involving the number five.  The elephant, rhino, hippo, lion, and leopard apparently make up “The Big Five.”  Apparently, some sort of Musk Ox can be substituted for the rhino in some circles, but I find myself diametrically opposed to those circles.  Leaving that tangent, there are “The Feline Five,” numbering the lion, panther, leopard, cheetah, and ocelot.  According to bush guide Lizzy, there are also “The Ugly Five.”  She didn’t list them, but she did say that the blue wildebeest was a prime example.

In keeping with that spirit, I’ll nominate my “Fascinating Five,” which would be my list of African creatures with cool back stories.  Anyone who heard me babble about this sort of thing before can attest that I dig on zebra mussels, stone martens, tarantula hawks, etc.  This lot may not be quite as super-dynamic as others, but I’ve got pictures of these ones and they’ve got charming back stories.

The European Bee-eater

Like Homer Simpson, this organism loves doughnuts.

I don’t know if this wee fella is a European bird that eats bees or an African bird that feeds exclusively on European bees.  I have the same problem with Dutch Elm disease.  Apparently, this brightly-plumed bird knows no fear of humans and eats ravenously.  This is an obnoxious and extroverted animal with a cry that resembles fingernails on the chalkboard of your soul.

The Maribou Stork

No one likes him, and he doesn't care.

Described by guide Godfrey as a species that “does some cleaning-up,” this is a good example of nature’s loathing of a vacuum.  Apparently the trees in this particular valley are too low-slung to make vultures comfortable, so some other avian needed to fill that niche.  Niches love avians.  When there is no other scavenger about to pick bones clean as they bleach in the sun, the Maribou will step up to the plate.  They also do an Easter impression every morning and evening, spreading their wings to perform some thermal solar collection.  They also find safety in branches poking out of shallow lakes.  They also don’t know that they’re Jersey-ugly and that’s the real reason no-one likes them.  Poor things.

The Baboon

Those dam-dirty apes.

The troop that I saw was composed of rather ingenious little bounders.  To protect the troop, the females, the weak, the sick, and the young spend each night on top of the concrete dam near the middle of the reserve.   The bigger males stand guard at each end of the dam, preventing any sort of threat from reaching the troop by land.  Besides that, they are apparently prime pickings for leopards, and their continued existence in the land of stealth ghost cats bespeaks enormous improvisational skills.

The Giraffe

As I alluded in a previous blog, giraffes have exactly the same number of neck vertebra as humans.  Or dogs.  Or platypi.  Or any mammal, regardless of venomousness or egg-laying predilections.  It’s another piece of that wondrous and fabulous tapestry of evolutionary biology that furnishes the exotic palace of scientific and rational endeavour.

The Hippo

OK, so the hippo is a part of the big Five, but then, two of the Big Five are also members of the Feline Five, so cross-pollination is permitted.  The most homicidally murderous creature in Africa (with the exception of insects like the mosquito, tse-tse fly, or other vectors for fatal bacteria and parasites), the hippo has been dodging attention for generations while racking up huge kill numbers of people.  Great White Sharks?  Minnows compared to these behemoths.  Snakes?  Kill a remarkably small number of people.  

Hippos trample people, smash their canoes, absent-mindedly amputate limbs, and are generally unrepentant about the whole deal.

Off to East London now.  More thoughts on things on the Eastern Cape when I land.

Good night England and the Colonies.

—mARKUS

Jet-Lag and Sleep-Dep

Greetings, gentle readers.
After a fitful night's rest at what was until recently a Holiday Inn in Johannesburg and a pursuant two and a half hour's trek northward toward desert, wilderness, and general bush territory, what we find is this:
Apparently, following up a marathon series of flights and activities across the globe with a series of early mornings and late nights is a poor idea.  When the driver arrived to convey the three of us north to Pilanesberg, I was muddled enough to think that we were going to do some kind of trendy yoga somewhere, and that the driver had introduced himself as "End-Row."  I thought it was some sort of cute sports nickname.
Well, the driver's name is actually Andrew, and the most famous yoga performed in Pilanesberg was probably some sort of breath-control and wriggling contortion exercise performed by the many miners lost in countless cave-ins in the subterranean platinum mines that dot the landscape.

The less-glamourous side of Sun City.

Pilanesberg and Rustenburg are smack in the middle of some of the richest platinum deposits on Earth.  Historically, whenever there is valuable stuff in an inherently dangerous place, a vast economic discrepancy manifests.  Poor, hungry folk end up scampering around in perilous danger, and slobberingly rich owners earn fantastic profits on their investments.
Pilanesberg is the fourth-largest national park in South Africa, and Rustenberg is the home of the only private venue of the 2010 World Cup.  It's therefore appropriate that, immediately adjacent to this conflict between ecological conservation and resource exploitation on a Norilsk-scale is Sun City, the Las Vegas of the southern hemisphere, and a poster city for decadent excess.  But I can save my rants about unionization, xenophobia, and the Royal Bafokeng for a later time.
Anyone who has worked with me at Castle Rock should recognize the name Hartbeespoort.  I wrote a series of science and biology items on hypereutrophication.  I expounded upon the causes, symptoms, and stages of eutrophication.  Now I've actually seen the bright green scum that fills the lake.  My pictures thus far don't do it justice, so I'll revisit this topic after I've got better photographic evidence.
Anyway, made it to Bakubung Bush Lodge along a number of roads that have been equipped with toll-collecting equipment that hasn't yet been activated (and won't be if people will heed the example of southern Ontario and avoid privatizing roads) and past motorists that were very courteous and communicative.
In South Africa, if you're driving a slower vehicle, or are uncomfortable travelling as quickly as the speed limit suggests, you pull to the left margin of the road and activate your hazard lights to let people behind you know that they can pass you.  Those that pass blink their four-way lights in return to thank you for your magnanimity.  And in this simple way, road rage is made a distant and alien concept.  Everyone expresses respect and acknowledges the graciousness of their fellow motorists, rather than gunning them down.
Finally, I spent the waning hours of the day in a bush vehicle, chasing the "Big 5" animals of South Africa and trying to capture them photographically.  I'll probably publish a full album of this stuff, but I'll try and hit you with a couple of tasters.

The original source of the Vuvuzela, the B-flat kudu.

If you look really closely, you can see a rising full moon.

Like all mammals, these things have seven vertebrae.  Yes, evolution is a cute thing.

Our accommodations here are spartan, but tolerable.  The weather is quite agreeable from a Canadian point of view, but chilly and inhospitable according to the native population.  As I head off to bed, daunted by the 0430h early morning alarm that is to rouse me and send me back into the bush for some more safari fun, I'll let you have a look at the meagre surroundings that cushion me to sleep.

Until next time, good night England and the colonies.
—mARKUS

Back to Africa... Again

Greetings, Gentle Readers.

What we find is this:  cruising eleven kilometres above the jungles of sub-Saharan Africa in the dead of night, our tired and weary travellers snatch fitfully at hints of sleep.  It’s been almost 48 hours of travel with only a six-hour nap in Mississauga to interrupt the cascade of customs checks and the uncomfortable cattle-car confines of coach class.

Right.  Well, apart from the fact that I was unaware of the limitations of Microsoft Office Starter, and their subsequent impact on the functionality of Microsoft Word, the trip thus far has been relatively uneventful and mercifully free of international incident.

The plane that carried us away from Edmonton on the morning of Saturday 20 April fled an oncoming snow front, and thus we surfed on the crest of a prodigious tailwind that dropped us at Lester B. Pearson International airport a full half-hour earlier than expected.  In a cascade of meteorological dominoes, our arrival had also displaced an unseasonal snowstorm from the Greater Toronto Area.  Good news all around on the weather front.

Saturday night came about rather quickly, since we’d zipped three time zones away from the setting sun.  After an odd dinner of rice and something that resembled meat from T & T Supermarket, we settled into some hard family anecdotes, rumours, gossip, and general familial catching-up.  Much to my dismay, “T & T” does not stand for “Trinidad and Tobago” in this instance.  Not sure what it stands for, but if it must have something to do with the permeating smell of slightly-gone-off-fish and the oddly gelatinous rubbery pink substance that they supplied instead of beef.

Sunday morning, I managed to finally meet up with Richard Barter after four-plus years of cyber-correspondence.  His Man City team contrived to lose to Tottenham in a cross-London derby that essentially handed the Premier League throne to Manchester United.  Not to be outdone, Liverpool then managed to draw a game in an amazing amount of injury-time whilst our star striker decided to do his best re-enactment of a Donner Party dinner service, to the dismay of hapless but tasty defender Branislav Ivanovic.  Luis Suarez is probably headed for a lengthy suspension and some bath salts rehab, both of which will significantly diminish Liverpool’s dwindling odds of qualifying for… pretty much anything.  So much for a shot at the LDV Vans Intertoto Continental Breakfast Championships.

Then there was the newest member of the fellowship.  My father and I are old veterans at dealing with the sort of neurotic paranoia that has characterized international airport security checks and customs inspections since some jackanapes stuffed some fertilizer in his sneakers in a pre-boarding lounge.  Bringing in a n00b is an awkward proposition.  Personally, I try to avoid packing anything that involves liquids, gels, pastes, colloids, solutions, precipitates, isotopes, compounds, elements, or anything with mass, momentum, density, or charge.

Quick summary:  while my father and I breeze effortlessly through every X-ray monitor, Geiger counter, metal detector, 3D MRI scan, and full-body cavity search, dear Uncle Mel got more scrutiny than a frog at a snake symposium.  My father attributes it to the fact that Mel is toting around an odd-coloured backpack, and that backpackers are routinely profiled as homicidal lunatics by the authorities.  I reckon that Mel just packed the wrong stuff – prescription medication, a nail-clipper, clothing, etc.

The answer is probably somewhere in-between.  I reckon that Mel hasn’t used his luggage in 20 years, and stored the bags in some sort of asbestos-ridden phosphate plant owned and operated by the IRA in direct contravention of the nuclear microproliferation treaty.  The team at Heathrow swabbed that backpack more than the deck of the HMS Beagle.  My father and I have learned to stand patiently after the security areas and make bland conversations that absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Al-Qaeda.

We paid some extortionate amount for a couple of lads to hold our bags at Heathrow and ran into the City to spend some of the 11 hour layover.  As we toured around the old stomping grounds, we checked out parts of Hyde Park, Mayfair, and the Kendal part of Marble Arch W2.

Even after death, these animals march into peril.

I’m inserting photos of the latest iteration of the Duke of Kendal, as well as what my camera says is a 3D image of the Animals in War memorial,

and the gilded American Eagle of Freedom squatting obnoxiously atop the anachronistically-designed and heavily-fortified American Embassy.

The American Spread-Eagle, eager to deposit steaming piles of justice and virtue all over Grosvenor Square.

And thus our story takes us high above the dark continent at its darkest.  The 11-hour flight to Joburg has at least let me catch up on my movie-watching.  Here are my quick and dirty reviews of all of the inflight films that I’ve seen thus far.

Hotel Transylvania:  Better than expected family fare with an all-star voice cast, and just enough intelligent jokes to carry it past the usual kiddie-potty-humour (e.g., witches hoovering farts with bellows, Bigfoot clogging the toilets, etc.).  Predictable with few challenges, there are enough charming bits to make it tolerable.  2 Jellybeans.

Wreck-It Ralph:  Another family-style animation film.  Again, some extraordinary voice talents without which the film would fail entirely as an artistic endeavour.  The plot is nothing fabulous, but as an old video game aficionado, I enjoyed many of the in-jokes.  The music (based on MIDI algorithms, for the most part) is amusing, and the visuals are a fabulous span between 8-bit Nintendo and hyper-realistic “Gears of War”-esque graphics.  Check out the song "Sugar Rush" to get an idea of the retro-caché value of this film.  Found the sugary-sweet “don’t dislike people because they are different” thematic message to be particularly cliché and trite, and that’s what left the worst taste in my figurative mouth.  2.5 Jellybeans.

Django Unchained:  Obviously Quentin Tarantino is well-versed in his Douglas Sirk, since he appears hell-bent on exaggerating everything in his films beyond melodrama to thoroughly muddy the waters between intent and content.  For example, the sociopathic and linguistically talented German character (and the actor who portrays him) return from “Inglourious Basterds,” but this time, he is mercilessly hunting and executing slave-folk instead of Jews, so he’s a good guy.  Samuel L. Jackson is possibly the best bit of the film as a cross between a classic Uncle Tom and Salacious Crumb.  Silly film, but most likely adored by fans of torture porn and Blaxploitation.  2 Jellybeans.

Cloud Atlas:  Self-indulgent rubbish that exists to provide a bit of fun and variety for some jaded Hollywood falling stars.  Good thing that there was some preachy and paternalist content, or else luminaries like Susan Sarandon would never have graced the thing.  1 Jellybean.

Life of Pi:  If a film’s measure of success is how much you wish to slap the lead character, or the amount that the film can beat the audience with faux spiritualist, regurgitated Kahlil Gibran platitudes, then this effort is a home run.  My criteria are different.  I think that watching this film on a plane gives it a single Jellybean, because the strength of this film lies in the colour, imagery, and depth of the graphics, and a dinky wee 9” screen does no justice to these assets.  The “I ripped off Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children” scriptwriting and wafer-thin plot do nothing to further the bland, polemic agenda of basically saying that all religions are one and that all God’s children are equally fluffy and cute.

SkyFall:  OK.  So some people wanted to go back to the purist days of 007 as written by Ian Fleming.  No underwater Lotus Esprits or laser-equipped space shuttles.  Just spy stuff.  I get it.  So does everyone else, after the film abandons any attempt to conceal its self-consciousness.  From Q’s “Were you expecting an exploding pen?  We don’t do that anymore,” to three different characters commenting on a spy’s equipment of consisting of nothing more than a gun and a radio, to the Crocodile Dundee-emulating declaration that the protagonists must go to where they are on familiar territory.  I was waiting for Ralph Fiennes to suddenly declare that the future of espionage lies in the past, and that Bond should pick up a hoe and begin subsistence farming to get into the mind of an anthrax attack from the point of view of the bacterium.  Nice action sequences and some very gruff and grumbly delivery from a bleak and unkempt Daniel Craig.  Shoehorning a new Moneypenny into the film to replace Samantha Bond was particularly unnecessary.  A very generous 3 Jellybeans.

Must run.  Have a safari in the morning.  Will try and keep people informed with all of the news as it happens, relevant or not.

Cheers and good night, England and the Colonies.

—mARKUS