Going to ... South Africa

Feb 2, 2007
A week ago I was on board a bus headed for the March on Washington where hundreds of thousands of my fellow citizens were demanding an end to the debacle consuming Iraq. This week Stacey and I and Peter and Lori (Stacey’s brother and his wife) are on board a plane headed for South Africa for ten days of exploration and a communing with nature.

As I sat on the bus returning to New York, I contemplated the 17-hour flight I was to take the following week and which filled me with a feeling of impending dread. I tried to add up, in my mind, the bus trips going to and coming from Washington, plus the hours spent marching in DC and it still only came to to 14 hours and that was a very long day (broken, at least, by the excitement of the march around the Capitol). How could I survive for 17 hours in the cramped confines of a transatlantic jet?


Stacey makes a last minute phone call in Sam’s bar at JFK.


One way to make the time go by.

One hour, two hours, three hours ...


A magnetic mahjong set helps pass the time.

Thomas, our Georgian car service driver, who we use for airport trips, arrived early at 2:30 on Friday afternoon on a drizzly, frizzly and dreary New York winter afternoon. The day before they had been predicting some serious snow for our departure but it never happened. Off to the airport we went where Peter and Lori were waiting for us at the gate. We were to take off at 5:20 pm but finally left at six.

The trip, as it turned out, was not as bad as I anticipated. The first nice surprise was that there was to be a stop on the western-most point of the African continent: the capital of Senegal, Dakar. Here we refueled while some passengers got off and new ones replaced them. Although we couldn’t get off the plane, the Dakar stop psychologically broke the flight into smaller components. From Dakar we still had another 8 hours to go until Johannesburg where we arrived at 5 pm the next day (the time difference is 7 hours ahead).

Stacey, Peter and Lori drifted off to sleep but I found it very difficult to get comfortable and couldn’t sleep for more than a few, sporadic hours during the length of the trip.

At Johannesburg we picked up our rental car and drove off, intending to shorten what would be a very long day of driving the next day. We were headed to a remote section of South Africa in its northeast corner: Kruger National Park, the largest big game sanctuary in the country. It shares the border with other parks in adjacent Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

As we drove off into the dark we didn’t realize that we were embarking on what would almost become a late night tragedy but which turned out to be the kind of wonderful adventure that makes an ordinary trip a memory to keep forever.

Our reservations had been made by phone, email and fax from New York. We were staying, the first night, in a farm-turned bed and breakfast, The Inn Stone, in the town of Belfast, some two hours from Johannesburg. The two hours soon turned into three-and-a-half. I was driving much slower than usual, not used to the right-hand drive/left side of the road system in use in South Africa (a daunting exercise during daylight, let alone on dark, never-traveled-before roads). We found our exit and drove down a long and darkened entrance road into a group of charming old stone farm buildings. "Hello!", we shouted out. Nobody answered as we knocked on one door after another. Finally, a young Black man appeared at one of the buildings. Tycoon, as he introduced himself, was staying here with some comrades on a work detail from another African country, working on a construction project at a nearby mine. The owner of the inn, he told us, was not around but he generously offered us the use of his room and he would move in with the rest of the crew who appeared to be "celebrating" a South African soccer victory earlier in the day. We politely demurred and set off to the nearby town of Belfast in search of lodging. It was getting later and later. We hadn’t eaten and we were quickly getting the sinking feeling that we would be driving all night and would be sleeping in our tiny Nissan.

The town of Belfast was a dusty, abjectly poor and closed-up collection of run down and boarded-up shops – not your typical tourist destination. We had chosen Belfast as our first night’s stop because the accommodations in the more desirable town of Dullstroom, another 30 miles beyond, were all booked when we called from New York. Dullstroom, it seems, is the fly-fishing capital of South Africa, a sportsman’s paradise. It had been freezing in New York when we left, but this was South Africa’s summer and the season was in full blast; hence, no hotel rooms to be had in Dullstroom, not to mention it was a Saturday night!

It was well after ten when we drove into the pretty but tiny town. Peter, after seeing the condition of Belfast, had been predicting a night of doom. The rest of us were a bit more optimistic. We had read the description of Dulstroom and knew it should be a charmer. But we also knew that we hadn’t been able to get rooms even weeks ago. What would our chances be now, late on this Saturday night?

We flitted from inn to pub to inn and at each were told that not only was their kitchen closed but there were no rooms to be rented - they were full to capacity. Then, finally, one young waitress, Cindy, seeing our distress, sat down at her phone and made some calls around town. It seems, she said, that the inn just next door might have some rooms. Come, she said, I’ll walk you over and you can take a look, yourself. There she introduced us to our savior - Gerhard Strauss, the manager of the Flying Dutchman, pub and inn. He had two rooms and we could have them. "Come take a look." We followed him upstairs, but, disappointment again - one room was still occupied and was unavailable. "Could we all stay in one room?" "Yes, but two will have to sleep on the floor." "Not a problem," we shot back. "Could we have some dinner?" "Sorry, my kitchen staff has gone for the night."

At that point, I happened to relate to Gerhard the entire tragic story of the night’s happenings and how we had made our accommodations through the town’s booking agent, who had apparently gotten things royally screwed-up and, not to mention, was in possession of our payment. "Yumna? I know her! Let me call her." Within minutes, Yumna was summoned and arrived and with the most sincere of apologies, and had arranged for us to have an entire house, situated in town, inside a gated development and set on a lovely pond. Gerhard, meanwhile, had dispatched his bartender to cook up a gourmet meal of shepherd’s pie, salad and steamed vegetables which we devoured and was most fabulous dinner we had ever consumed.

The house was a beautiful and modern vacation rental that luckily happened to be vacant this weekend. Yumna kept the price the same and even paid for our breakfast the next morning back at Gerhard’s place. We slept well, said our very grateful farewell to our savior and, our faith in universal human goodness restored and amplified, set off on our way out of the town of Dullstroom. We had arrived in the dark. What greeted us in the morning was a striking landscape of heath and moor. But that, dear reader, you will have to discover in my next post.


Our dear friend Gerhard, makes phone calls for us, determined to find us a room for the night, while we have drinks and await the outcome.


"Here’s to you, Gerhard!"


Peter: "I told you things would work out OK." Yeah, right!


The charming Flying Dutchman pub and inn.


And this is where we ended up staying The house on the left was ours.


Peter poses outside our house.