the head trip to work

so my cousin amie ptak is back in the usa after a trip to build schools and teach english in tansania. she wrote extensively about her experiences in the deeper, more secluded we'll say, africa.

her experience was definitely more third-worldy whereas mine is maybe other-worldly. it's true i'm living in the beverly hills of africa and you might even go so far as to say i'm living in the los angeles of south africa. durban might be the san francisco and i've heard joburg described as the new york.

bear in mind that being the 'new york' of south africa doesn't mean lots of quaint jazz clubs, pretzel and hot dog stands on every corner and man dressed as a gorilla waiting to hug you on top of a building. and being the 'los angeles' of south africa doesn't mean taquirias, red carpets and 'pietermaritzburg' being prominently displayed in white letters on the surrounding hills. it just means sprawl. and sprawl means traffic. and traffic means pollution.

one misconception i may have fueled in my earlier blogs is that i live in an upscale, almost american, city. while true in some regards, i've elaborated at length and via pictures i've taken on my adjusting to the subtle differences and finding remnants of home (read: beer and cheese farms). it's easy to take pictures of the touristy and safe areas of pmb but the sketchier scenes don't often present the opportunity to pull out a camera.

amie's trip to tanzania was painted with a different brush than i've been painting this trip with. she talks about handing out shoes to children that have never seen a white person before. i've been been writing about joining a croquet club. so at the risk of offending any south african readers i'm going to try to paint with the same brush amie used to describe her trip.

ahem.

on the trip in to work from woodlands, joelene's side of town, we drive through a neighborhood consisting of two and three bedroom, one story houses. typical south african construction: brick with tile roof. usually one or two decent sized windows and a plaster finish with a recent paint job. the windows invariably have burglar bars over them and the property is lined with a fence usually fitted with some form of burglar prevention ranging from sharp spikes on top to the extreme of razor wire coils.

once i take a right and stop running parallel to the city of pbm, i roll down a hill overlooking the whole city. on a map and even from with the city itself, to me, it never looks a thing like it does from outside. scattered throughout are several multi-storey buildings but they don't create a sense of denseness. moreso a sense of legitimacy as the province's capitol. from afar the town center of pmb looks like it could take quite awhile to drive through seeing as no freeway runs through it but provided a steady flow to the traffic, one can pass through on commercial road, the busiest road through the center of town, or even speed along on one of the side streets.

but before i make it into the first road in the city center of pmb, i pass by a pocket of industrial factories. one road over is a more serious industrial area which, if you drive by with the windows down, will smell like the pet food it's turning out. while this industrial area may have once been technically outside of town, pietermaritzburg has grown out to meet it. pmb's poorest have taken advantage of the adjacent factories' impact on land value as well as a small river that passes by and created a squatter camp. of course the surrounding square miles of pmb contain dozens of such camps, this one is pushed up to within a few dozen meters of east street, the street that constitutes pmb central's eastern perimeter.

the houses are made of stolen corrugated metal panel and wood planks. some are identical to those you would find hundreds of kilometers away, far from a city like pietermaritzburg. a home built entirely from mud and stone with horizontal branches at six inch spacing running the perimeter to hold the walls together. laundry hangs from clotheslines endlessly and residents turn into pedestrians the moment they set foot outside their front doors.

sharing the road with me, and making frequent unannounced stops, is south africa's post-apartheid version of mass transit: the koombi. i've spoken about this already but this time i'll try to spare everyone the jaded perspective. imagine taking the aggressive driving tactics of new york taxi drivers, degregulating it, multiplying it by ten and then putting it behind the wheel of a squareback van. then mix in a little mexican lowrider look and you've got the koombi. the most extreme of which are bass-thumping, minivans with full-body paintjobs depicting american models in bikinis. the middle ground is a white van with some urbanized, quasi-ghetto expression painted in a pink or blue font with some silver glitter around the edges. unfortunately, most of these expression stick to my brain like an egg to teflon. think jonah...

"TOKYO DRIFT"
"IN MEMORY OF "
and my personal favorite:
"ONCE TASTED NEVER WASTED"

some even sport religious quotes, not necessarily biblical, but something an evangelical might spout on a television show. bear in mind that since routes aren't assigned by any governing metro body, territoriality does exist. conflicts between drivers are resolved with automatic weapons.

oops, looks like the jaded perspective crept in there at the end.

speaking of jaded though, i became unjaded this last weekend during a trip to the beach with joelene and her niece and nephew. as some of you may have heard from me, the beaches in durban stretch wide and far but swimming is only allowed in little 20 meter sections ever half kilometer or so where lifeguards sit and watch. the reason: riptides and strong currents. i thought it was just because 90% of the people in this country can't swim but it turns out the riptides are pretty serious.

i took the nephew pretty far out (on my back) and pretty quick found it difficult to paddle in. we were swept outside the 20 meter wide swath and we must have looked ridiculous enough to warrant a rescue with me walking along the bottom when i could and joelene's little nephew's head the only thing above the water after each wave. we were back in waist deep water by the time the life guard got to us but i learned my lesson: don't swim with children on your back.

there are PLENTY of stories that came out of that trip to the beach with joelene. the basic jist is that we looked like the proud parents of two children whose skin color didn't match that of their parents. she and i had a great time looking watching the kids throw themselves around in the shallow water and every now and then we even found time to steal ourselves a kiss. but by the end of the day, after we'd dropped the kids off back at her brother's place, we were too tired to even take off our clothes. "we ARE getting old" joelene remarked at one point.

so next chance i get to write, i'll relate the weird and funny stories about the beach trip.

in related news, at a company costume contest joelene won a weekend at a nice hotel in durban. so that'll be later this month. just the two of us. stories from that weekend might not be suitable for this family blog.

ahem.