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DELIGHTS|destinations My Zulu love letter says: ‘Embrace the exuberance of South Africa’ Mary Alexander/MediaClubSouthAfrica.com Hout Bay is a coastal suburb of Cape Town. By Mohau Pheko My South Africa is the white man in his ML500 stopping to tow to a nearby petrol station the broken-down car of a young black mother and child stuck in traffic. It is the successful accountant who works for a global conglomerate and returns to Langa, the township he grew up in, to run Saturday school math classes in his community. It is the local mayor who has given up his salary to drive home the message that if his constituency is going through tough financial times, the sacrifices must be shared by all. My South Africa is my 11-year-old daughter who is passionate about giving and who requests that all her birthday gifts be donated to a home for children living with HIV/AIDS. My South Africa is the white woman who speaks fluent Sesotho and organizes music festivals for rural children in the Free State province. It is the guy living with a disability who wakes up rain or shine and directs traffic on crutches at the intersection near the University of South Africa in Pretoria. It is the radio station DJs who collect shoes for school children who often walk up to 10 kilometres to rural schools every day. My South Africa is the remarkable lives of ordinary people who will put out their best tea cups and ‘Eat Some More’ biscuits for strangers and visitors and treat them like long lost friends. It is the citizens’ passion for their country, and their obsession to keep it vibrant through millions of acts of daily kindness despite decades of oppression under the pre-1994 apartheid regime. My favourite parts of South Africa have to be a drive along the best coast in the world. Meandering slowly, the 200-kilometre route takes you through South Africa’s Garden Route. The south coast takes you between Mossel Bay and the mouth of the Storm River through resort towns, such as George, Wilderness, 88 FALL 2011 | OCT-NOV-DEC
destinations|DELIGHTS Graeme Williams/MediaClubSouthAfrica.com Mary Alexander/MediaClubSouthAfrica.com Graeme Williams/MediaClubSouthAfrica.com Beads in South Africa, particularly among Zulu-speaking people, contain codes for the giver’s feeling toward the recipient. The Northern Cape is famous for the Kimberley diamond mine, where digging started in 1871 and finished in 1914. Today, it’s a crater known as The Big Hole. A lilac-breasted roller at Limpopo Kruger National Park. diplomat and international canada Knysna and Plettenberg Bay. Stopping to buy a feast of seafood from the fisherman, inhaling the aroma of peri-peri prawns and curry fish and eating it on the sandy beach is nirvana. Replete with good wine and food, at sunset, the sky and the sea make perfect love to each other offering variations of blue, purple and turquoise and finally a reflection of bronze fire colouring both the sea and the sky. Ixopo in the Midlands of KwaZulu Natal has a beauty that is so surreal you have to keep pinching yourself to make sure it’s not a photograph in a coffee table book. I have sucked the most addictive, juicy, sweet sugarcane that flowed down my chin. It reminds me of my childhood when we could not wait for the sugarcane harvest to come. The landscape is so breathtaking; Alan Paton in the opening lines of Cry, The Beloved Country said “There is a lovely road which runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grasscovered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it.” Exquisite and lush, these hills are a mystical haven to retreat and renew. I love waking up to the fresh mist. Sipping a warm cup of tea on the veranda, I watch as the mist wages a losing battle with small rays of sunlight which allow a peep of homes painted in pink, blue and green hues in Zulu kraals [villages] scattered like polka dots on the rolling hills. Ixopo is where the old people speak proudly of great warriors of the past through the ancient oral tradition of storytelling. They tease the imagination with their legends and tales of victories in the great wars fought in the hills. Where else can you smell the heady scent of rain coming? It is across the veld amongst the flowers that perfume the grasslands with air so pristine its freshness touches your lips like a cool drop of water. Flower season begins as if by magic — an enticing tapestry of brilliantly coloured blooms in Namaqua National Park. In August and September, the dusty valleys of the Namaqualand are carpeted with wildflowers. More than 1,000 of the estimated 3,500 plant species are found nowhere else on earth. From Uppington to Port Noloth in the Northern Cape province, you can experience a sun that burns away the endless balmy afternoons to unlock the Southern Cross that will appear so close you’ll have an irresistible urge to reach out and touch it. If you walk softly in the Kalahari Desert, you’ll no doubt meet a meerkat, the 30-centimetre-high member of the mongoose family. A precocious animal, it is cute but strong enough to kill a cobra snake. This exotic combination of landscapes, people, history and culture offer the visitor to South Africa a unique diversity of experiences. It forces one to leave everything that’s ordinary at home. 89
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