Slow train to Jozi

 This story first appeared in the Sunday Times Travel section (12 May 2013)

I’m alone in the four-berth compartment as we pull out of Cape Town station but this doesn’t last long.  “Hello!  So where are you going?  Joburg?”  He sits down uninvited, but that’s ok, his smile alone makes him welcome.  His name is Zab and he’s just finished matric and he’s off to initiation school near Klerksdorp.   “In the bush with just a blanket for a whole month,” he tells me.  Yes, he’s nervous, he says, but when he comes home he’ll be a man.

I’m on the Shosholoza Meyl, the re-named, re-branded Trans-Karoo Express, for my return journey from Cape to Johannesburg.  “I wanted to be a musician when I left school but I’m not sure now.  I’ll probably go and study,” Zab is saying.  He plays the guitar.  I point under my seat to where my guitar case is stowed.  Zab’s eyes light up and soon he has pulled the instrument out and is strumming away.  He’s good and he sings well too.  “I used to write a lot of songs,” he says, “mainly for girls.”  He makes it sound as if this happened decades ago but he’s all of eighteen and his beaming face has not a line on it.  He plays for an hour and we’re joined by a couple of engineering students, at which point I stop my poor attempt at singing along to Marley’s Redemption Song.  

It’s a hot, still day as we journey through the Western Cape on our way north.  One of those days in early summer when the coolness of the recent cold front has given way to Karoo-like heat and the whole place is waiting for the relief of the blasting south-easter.  Table Mountain the only thing that seems not to wilt, it is magnificently framed by the bright blue sky.  Not a leaf stirs in the vineyards.

The engineering student from Phalaborwa, with the funky dreads, is debating with the Ugandan thirty-something man who’s joined us.  He’s making a concerted attempt convince the student that upgrading the rail system is the answer to South Africa’s transport problems.  “We need a system like the Gautrain!” he says earnestly.  The student has his doubts.  I try to contribute but the older man is on a roll so I wander towards to front of the train in search of the dining car.

As I sip my drink an eagle, wings low over the khaki scrub.  It’s so big even a springbok glances up and watches it warily.  I track its progress until the springbok has gone back to grazing and the bird has become a speck. 

Meyl passengers are late risers it seems.   There are only a handful of people in the dining car when I arrive for breakfast at 7.30am.  They’ve run out of chilled juice so I can have an extra cup of tea or coffee instead.  Filter coffee?  No, my waitress tells me, it’s a cheap chicory blend.  I choose the tea.

 We’ve stopped again, now somewhere in the veld near Gauteng.  One of the guys asks a crew member for a reason and is told we’re about to be diverted via Vereeniging.  We’ll be late.  Four hours late, as it turns out.  We crawl our way around the south of Johannesburg, stopping to wait for commuter trains to pass.  On the horizon the evening storm-clouds are towering above the high-veld, below, in an informal settlement, a group of women have gathered around someone’s corrugated iron home and are singing a sad-sounding song.  Giggling children chase each other in circles in front of a spaza shop.

This isn’t luxury travel, the Shosholoza Meyl is like a backpacker hostel on wheels, but it puts the traveller closer to the diversity of South Africa and South Africans.  It’s more interesting than haring down the N1 in an air-conditioned car or cruising at thirty thousand feet in an airliner.  It’s more fun too.

Nordic Eagle.

A Sailing story: Knock-down in Tallinn Bay

 A few years ago I spent a summer sailing in the Baltic with my good friend John Baker.  Mostly it was easy sailing and sunny days. Then this.

I’m hauling up the main and putting in two reefs because today is the windiest day of our three week cruise in the Baltic.  My gut is knotted and my jaw is tense.  The sea is lumpy and choppy and uncomfortable.  We get underway and I spend way too long fiddling with the buckle of my safety harness.  I’m tetchy with the skipper for not showing me how to use it before we left the safety and calmness of the marina.  He’s tetchy back.  He’s concentrating on the channel markers, trying to avoid the commercial traffic while I, the rookie crew member fiddle with a simple buckle on the harness.  Eventually I clip onto the ring on the side of the cockpit and I’m safe.

It’s an exhausting day. I’m constantly braced against the cockpit, legs on the opposite bench, arm crooked over the cockpit side, trying to keep my seat.  Trying not to be thrown from one side of the boat to the other.  When I’m hungry or thirsty I just have to bear it.  My stomach hovers just on the right side of nausea but I’m not risking a visit to the galley in case nausea gets the better of me. 

The skipper checks the level of water in the bilges.  He’s below for five minutes, peering into crevices and bilges with a torch.  Then he scrambles onto the deck and collapses on his back and closes his eyes.  He’s white and quiet for ten minutes.  I’m a little disconcerted that such an experienced seaman is feeling bad but at the same time heartened that the discomfort in my stomach and dullness in my head are not just the result of inexperience.  While he recovers I’m at the tiller, bracing and shifting my weight, staying focussed on the direction of the boat, of the wind and of our course on the satnav screen.

I’m irritable as well as nauseous.  We should have waited another day in Helsinki before attempting the long crossing to Tallinn, Estonia’s capital.  The forecast is for strong winds and rain and all the weather is coming from where we want to go.  I know we can’t sail into the wind.  We have to motor almost into the wind all day.  It’s wet from both the rain and the spray from the fractious and unpredictable chop.  I’m moody and sulky and quiet and pissed off at the skipper because it’s his fault that I’m cold and wet.  I’m picking up bruises from collisions with the teak deck.

Hour after miserable hour I gaze out into the grey wet day.  Reading is impossible, a sure way to ensure breakfast is regurgitated onto the deck.  I’m afraid to go below for the same reason and I decide that it’s too bumpy to attempt sleep. 

Fast ferries plough past from Tallinn and Helsinki.  Appearing and disappearing in a mass of spray, passengers invisible behind tinted windows.  I imagine them warm and sipping coffee or quaffing beer as I duck, unsuccessfully, another bucketful of the Baltic.

Now I see the outline of the Estonian coast, low and dark on the monochromatic horizon.  After hours of monotonous seascape I can see our destination.  Another rainy squall hits us, stronger and more intense than the last.  The wind speed indicator shoots up from twenty-three knots to thirty-odd.  It feels manageable, no need for any drastic action.  The grey sheets of rain close in around us;  visibility decreases to a few boat-lengths.  And then the squall is gone.  Moving out into the Baltic it sweeps down in vertical lines from steely clouds to steely sea.  The skipper pumps sea and rainwater from the bilges.  The dark line on the horizon is more substantial now.  I can make out a tower, just a blip above the low ridge of land. 

More commercial shipping activity is funnelling in and out of Tallinn Bay.  We’re more vigilant.  Large commercial ships are unlikely to give us much quarter.  It’s up to us to get out of the way.  We struggle to keep some wind in the sails and the boat’s engine throbs away below keeping us edging towards the harbour.

Then I notice that the clouds in the distance off the starboard bow have reached down in a black curtain to the sea.  We watch it for a while.  It’s travelling fast.  The sea turning to the black of the sky.  We roll up the jib but keep up the mainsail with its two reefs. 

The black squall closes in fast.  I say how much blacker it is than the last one we weathered. The one that spun our wind vane to thirty-five knots.  Should we take down the main?  No, we’ll leave it up for a bit longer.

When it hits the violence of it shocks me.  The sudden blast of stinging rain feels as if someone had flipped the switch in a wind-tunnel.  I’m sitting to starboard, on the windward side of the cockpit as the boat pushed hard over onto its port rail.  The skipper heads us directly into the squall and opens the throttle.  The engine growls defiantly.  I swallow hard, squinting into the rain, now like millions of needles attacking my face.  The wind dial shows 35 knots, then 40.  Jesus!  But it doesn’t stop there. The skipper is struggling to keep us heading into the wind.  The main keeps filling and pushing the bow out of the wind, tilting the boat at an alarming angle.  45 knots.  The port rail is in the water and the sea is rushing along the deck.  The wind screams and roars and I feel an icy hand clawing at my gut.  47 knots.  It’s got to peak out soon.  The skipper, as if reading my thoughts, says that these squalls don’t last long.  His eyes are wide, concentration, focus.  Should we take down the main?  No, it’s too wild.  Too dangerous for only one man to handle it’s flapping madnes.  We bite hard.  More throttle, almost at the engine’s limits.  Rocks on the satnav map are getting closer.  The squall has to stop soon or the rocks will stop us.  Did you notice where those ships were before the squall hit?  I’d forgotten.  50 knots.  Oh, fucking hell!  The boat is pushed over, further and further, a wave hits, I’m standing up straight clinging to the cockpit.  The wave surges down my back, inside my waterproofs but I don’t care.  The boat is on its side, sails nearly in the water, I’m looking straight into the Baltic Ocean, just below my feet.  Trying not to fall, I’m hooked in but how would I get back into the boat in this?

But that’s the worst of it.  The wind drops to 45 knots and it feels easy and manageable now.  43 knots and we’ve put the boat back on course.  37 knots and I’m sitting to leeward thinking of family. The adrenalin recedes.  Relief and exhilaration and euphoria mix and I shout profanities into the sky and laugh and we recount it all to each other over and over again on the way into the marina and later over a few beers.  I feel more alive than in many years and marvel at the lack of fear in the moment I was staring down into the water;  the moment when the sail seemed as if it were about to dip into the Baltic Sea, the moment when life was real, not the meaningless, monotonous grind of workaday.

Early Wanderings: Hitcher at the Border

Hunters, Hitching and driving Soweto taxis

A version of this story first appeared in the Sunday Times Travel section

The hairy Zimbabwean hunter wasn’t so happy that I’d shared a few drinks with black folks, but to him I was one of them:  I was white, so he was going to convince me of the error of my ways.  “He’s friendly to your face,” he said pointing his bearded chin at the bartender, not caring that the man he was talking about could hear every word, “but turn your back…”.  He shoved another brandy and coke in my hand.  “Drink!” he ordered.  I had another one and a half still sitting on the bar.  I was struggling to keep up.  Amid the racism and brandy, two things I’d normally retreat from in haste, the hunters with their beards, vellies and green safari suits where handing out biltong from a hessian sack.  Kudu biltong that one of them had made himself from animals he’d shot.  I’d hitch-hiked all day without a bite to eat so I traded my principles for dried meat.

I woke up after my night in the bush pub with a head full of desiccated Klippies and a tongue that felt like it needed mowing.  At the roadside I asked a man sitting next to his luggage how long it would be until the bus came.  “Half an hour”, he said confidently.   I sat down on my pack in the shade and waited.  After 45 minutes we were still waiting.  I wandered over to a women standing next to her large striped bags and asked the same question.  “Twenty minutes”, she said.  After another half an hour I asked a third person, “Is there a bus today?”

“Yes,” he said, “there is a bus today”.  I realised that this was the most important thing.

A taxi from Soweto stopped.  The driver lobbed my backpack over the high sides of the trailer and I squeezed myself between the migrant workers from Johannesburg who were heading home to Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi.  We chatted for a while before my hangover got the better of me and I fell asleep.

I woke to screams.  The mini-bus was hurtling towards the ditch on the other side of the road.  In the split second before disaster the driver woke up and dragged the steering-wheel to the left.  The trailer fish-tailed, threatening to jack-knife the vehicle. We were all over the road for a few eternal seconds before our driver regained control.

A few kilometres up the road the driver pulled over, stretched out on the front bench-seat and went to sleep.  The rest of us settled in the shade of the thorn trees.  After forty minutes I looked up from my book to find a semi-circle of stern-faced miners in front of me.  “Do you have a driver’s licence?” one of them asked.  I replied that I did.  “Can you drive that?” he asked pointing to the taxi.  “Sure,” I said.  They marched me over to the taxi and shook the driver awake.  The conversation wasn’t long

and although I couldn’t understand what was being said, the driver, irritated at being woken, was not letting a young whitey drive his bus.

Half an hour later I noticed the miner-deputation in a heated conversation with the driver.  I was called over to the driver’s door.  “You can drive it now”, I was told.  The driver didn’t look happy.

We continued our journey with me at the wheel, gingerly, because the instrument panel was smashed and the loose steering column had been lashed to the dashboard with a piece of flex.  Cruising down a hill I noticed, about a kilometre away, a small boy and a large herd of cattle were crossing the road.  “Brake”, said the taxi-man next to me.  “Sure” I said, thinking that I had several hundred metres before I’d need to brake.  “Brake!”, he shouted.  Alarmed, I pressed the brake and the pedal went limply to the floorboards.    “Again, again!” he said urgently.  I pumped the brakes until on the third attempt I felt a metal on metal grinding as something, very reluctantly, started working.  We came to a halt amongst the fringes of the herd.

Two hills later I found myself aiming at a single-lane bridge.  As we got closer a small smoking motorcycle pulled out of a side-road.  There was no time for the pump-pump braking technique so I hit the accelerator.   The only hope I had of not hitting it was to beat the bike to the bridge.  We screamed passed him, a glance to the left revealed that the biker we’d nearly flattened was a cop.

I pulled over at the turnoff for Great Zimbabwe and received a loud round of applause.   The driver refused me a discount for saving him from the angry miners but having another traveller’s tale more than made up for it.