The first hour hour brought us to Kruger. We saw none of it. The sun had begun to set as we entered the Park, and was but a memory when we rolled into the Park Lodge. We booked in, collapsed into our cabins, and caught up on much needed sleep. If Karongwe had been dark, Kruger was utterly black. We did not roam.
We were on the road to Lesotho first thing, leaving the bushveld behind and climbing higher and higher into the sky, arriving five hours later just before lunch to the welcome of monkeys howling from the high canopy. We found our bunks and were to congregate in the camp common first for lunch, then for our excursion. I was the first to arrive, lingering outside for some fresh air and a smoke, and thus, the only one to witness Jan’s deeply grained racism. He called out “Hey boy,” to one of the groundskeepers before realizing I was present. He started when he saw me. I knew then that he’d broken the rules. I suspect Contiki Tours had little tolerance for racism. He stammered some, trying rather unconvincingly to smooth the moment over by explaining that “those older Africans expect that,” he said, “they don’t know any better,” ending with, “he doesn’t mind,” as if that made it all alright. I didn’t respond, not liking what he’d said, but I didn’t interrupt him either. I offered him a cigarette, instead, as a peace offering. We both knew that were I to complain, it would cost him his job. And what would that have accomplished? I’m not stupid. I know the ways of the world. I understood that it would take years, if not generations for Apartheid to be exorcized from South African society, if ever. Were Jan sent packing, another just like him would take his place. And Jan was far more progressive, I’d discover, than other Afrikaans I’d meet. If anything, both of us being slightly older than everyone else on the tour, Jan and I got on. Jan was alright.
I’d begun to hang out almost exclusively with the English and the Germans on the tour. The two Albertan engineers and I didn’t get on much, and those Aussies along for the ride seemed to prefer their own company over others. The exception to this was Tanya Jesberg. A petite, short-haired blonde, she had an extra-large personality. She spoke her mind, voiced her opinion, drank like a fish, and took no shit from anyone. Her family owned the White Horse Tavern in Charters Towers, a rough and tumble outback town five hours from anywhere; that might explain how she came to be; that might explain why she and I got on so well. I came from that same town, half a world away.
We had our excursion. We had a sumptuous dinner. We partied into the night. There was a great deal of hooking up that night, I discovered, afterwards. I was oblivious. And I had a room to myself. I was excused the discordance of snoring for once.
Another five hours brought us to Durban, or just outside Durban. North Beach? South Beach? Selection Beach? I don’t know. I loved it there. Our Cabins were right on the Dolphin Coast. The sun baked the beach. The surf rolled in. Again and again. The monkeys howled and screamed and barked.
When I unlocked the door to my treehouse cabin a monkey barrelled past me, almost knocking me over the rail and off the ramp in his haste to escape. He was a brown blur to me, a fairly solid blur, but little more than a streak until I regained my balance and saw him race up the nearest tree. He stared back down at me, fear, loathing and anger in his eyes.
“Well, I didn’t lock you in there,” I said, before giving the room a once over to see if he’d broken anything while captive.
We stripped, threw on our bathing trunks and hit the beach. It was glorious. Until then, we’d had to wallow in tepid baths, otherwise known as pools. We wondered how well they were filtered, how current the chlorine might have been. I tossed a fouled ball cap that got drenched and wouldn’t release the reek it had absorbed. Not to worry in Durban. The ocean was clean. The ocean may have been full of sharks for all we knew, but that didn’t stop us from diving into the high breakers that crashed down onto us.
We didn’t see much of Durban. We went to a shopping mall. I discovered that toilets in shopping malls in Durban aren’t graced with seats, or at least those weren’t. They aren’t particularly graced with paper towels, either.
I got face to face with a few Afrikaans that evening who had the good grace to call me a fuckin’ Yank while I was buying a round for Tanya, the English girls, and the Germans. The Afrikaans were brave while I still had an armful of beer, less brave after I handed them off to the girls, braver still when the Germans resolved behind me. I jest.
“What you call me?” I asked.
“Yank.” Not fuckin’ Yank, anymore; just Yank.
“Idiot,” I said. “I’m not a Yank.”
“No?” they said. Apparently, my having three Germans at my back made my being Canadian better than my being a Yank. They even offered to buy me a beer. I can’t say my opinion of them improved much.
There was no formal dinner that night. We had a barbeque on the beach beneath a bonfire that launched streams of red flares into the swath of Milky Way that glowed overhead. Jan brought out a boom box and a box filled with cassettes. It wasn’t a guitar, but we were thrilled just the same. We sang, we lay flat out of the cool sand.
We thanked our lucky stars.
Or at least I did.
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