It all begins (or continues) in the waters of Jeffrey's bay. Us, being turned upside down and inside out by a wave. It feels like taking a ride in a washing machine. We're your dirty clothes, Indian Ocean. Right then we even forget about who or what may be lurking in the deep waters and the chances of being served on our boards as lunch for a hungry great white. All I can think of is that I have to keep my head above the water. Of course I fail. So we stand back and watch the guys who know what they're doing in those Supertubes of theirs.
Hansi moves quickly down the coast. Soon we're in a place called Wilderness, and there we meet our dear Dar-Mbeya train mate Alice again. We hadn't seen her since Malawi. It's such an amazing coincidence that our celebration explodes in climbing trees, red wine, dancing madly and laughing wildly. When I wake up the next morning, still a little dizzy, the words that buzz and echo around in my head are "cockroll" and "North Umberland". From the look on Jesper's face, his echo is more like 'please make it stop, oh stop, don't puke, oh no oh no oh no'. In Wilderness we watch whales a hundred meters from the beach, lurking inside surfer's waves and find ourselves canoeing our way up a river in total silence and peace. Maybe that is what wilderness really is, the crazy jumps your heart can make.
We leave Fairy Knowe behind us and start making our way towards South Africa's blossoming heart, the little Karoo. First stop, Oudshoorn. In one day we get to have a look inside Mother Earth's guts, breathe in antique madness and make childhood dreams come true. The entree are Oudshoorn's beautifully decorated 'feather palaces', once a property of the 'feather barons' who made their fortune by stripping ostriches and making the hats of Europe's grand madames and gentle ladies ridiculous. Next came the Cango Caves, colossal inside-out domes first explored in the eighteen hundreds by a farmer with a candle. Past the gigantic chambers we find tiny passages through rocks with names such as 'the devil's pipe' or 'the letterbox'. The guide's accounts of those who got stuck in there aren't the most reassuring for a half-claustrophobic mind. But it's fun and the ever-living Indiana Jones inside us has never felt so good. Than comes the grand finale. Since I was a kid and read Don Rosa's biography of Uncle Scrooge, one of my goals in life has been riding an ostrich, laugh as much as you want. The dream come true didn't last more than a minute, but feeling like a grumpy comic hero is worth it all. Watching Jesper at it was even better.
Somewhere in the middle of the Little Karoo winter suddenly ends. Just outside Oudshoorn I guess. When we get to Calitzdorp the blossoming world explodes. We pitch our tent by the rails of an old train station. It smells of rusted iron, trains that'll never come again and the fresh paint and fresh garden salad of Cheryl, our lovely host. Two days spread around us like seeds in the wind. The evenings with Cheryl, the old houses falling apart in a valley which name we've forgotten, the afternoons that tastes like port but smells like white, soft and infinite apricot blossoms.
We cross yellow mountains and somehow leave spring behind us. It slips through fingers and thoughts and suddenly the flowers are gone. The landscape slowly gives up the colors, one by one. First red, than orange and at last the green of the fields, as if sea and sky has swallowed everything else. Maybe that's how the world is going to end. In any case we're sort of at the end of the world. Of Africa, at least. Cape Argulhas, of whitewashed houses, stones, water, clouds. Then again, an explosion of color. Someone has hidden the yellow away in his pocket only to make the end of Africa pretty. Seeds from beyond the ocean, a sea of flowers. We are hit in the face by the wind on top of the lighthouse. We can se for miles and miles and miles.
In the morning we step into a world of mist. Ghost mountains and fog in the distance, the Overberg route to Hermanus is the breath of a whale. We can see them in the distance, graceful giants in a world of their own. Silent down there. We walk between rocks, the foam of the sea and bunkbeds for chipmunks. The whales keep quiet in their endless bubble. They might be suggesting the show's about to end.
Cape Town is getting closer and we're carefully circling around it the same way you save the most gorgeous looking chocolate or the biggest present for last. We slide through Franschoek and settle in Stellenbosch, the heart of the winelands. It's a day of Cabernet Sauvignon and cheese and a thousand different tastes that in the end melt together and stick to our tongues like heavy metal. We sip and sniff and observe chameleons on bushes and try to do it all with grace. If there is any left.
Souh Africa ends, once again. All we can see in front of us is endless sea and the storm coming. As for being an end, Cape of Good Hope looks appropriately dramatic. Waves crash against towers of rock, crazy birds float on the wind above pools of foam. What we've left behind seems more and more ghostly. We're guided around by the wind, the sun warming up our path only to disappear the next second. Hansi's got to run, the storm will chase us all the way to Table View.
We walk along an endless white beach and watch the sun set a few waves to the right of Table Mountain. Hansi smiles lazily, he knows it's his last day of work. Than we'll pack the speed and the wind and the miles past in a duffel bag of memories. No more road, only a week in Cape Town and a plane home. The time has come for forgetting about days gone and days to come. It's time to take each second and feel it, as if nothing else was ever going to happen.
Lake Nkuruba, Uganda: We might have coughed up a ridicoluos amount of money, spent a frantic thirty minutes behind some hyped up national park's high voltage fences waching miserable animals, while being sheparded back and forth between fat and pale tourists by the most unenthusiastic guide in the southern hemisphere. The thought of the tourists scared us, so we pitched our tent by an old crater lake where wild birds sang us lullabyes and the monkeys were our neighbours.
Lake Tanganyka, Tanzania: The only thing better than waking up to the tranquil clucking of a calm lake shore while the reflection of sunrays plays across the tent canvas, is walking naked down to the water with only a bar of soap in your hand to give the day a refreshingly clean start.
Livingstonia, Malawi: The first sunrays of a new day filtered through purple clouds, a vast lake, hundreds of husbands returning from a nights work in their tiny fishing canoes, rolling hills dotted with wifes campfires preparing a hard earned breakfast, a dramatic mountain rising vertical in jagged rock formations lit a deep red by the morning sun, a tiny ledge clinging to its unforgiving position, our tent.
Chintsa, South Africa: When you wake up in the black of night, tent piched in the middle of a dead quiet forest, to the approaching sound of rustling leaves and low hoarse grunting, the fabric separating you from whaterver's lurking out there seems pretty thin. Luckily it's only a tiny black pig too cute to be allowed.
Little Karoo, South Africa: Piching our tent between the rusted tracks of an old and abandoned railroad station. Getting drunk on local wine while digging into a fresh garden salad. Hardly not the grandest adventure our worn tent has seen, but a satisfactory end to our amazing journey of pegs, poles and canvas none the less.
