Embrace The Detours

My most favourite thing about summer is the roadtrip. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of my grandmother and I, travelling in a Nissan E20 from Mdantsane, in East London, to Cape Town to visit her family. We travelled this route so many times that I need only close my eyes and the smell of freshly-baked bread, umleqwa (a home-reared chicken raised on mielies from the family mielie patch, ceremonially slaughtered for such a journey) and the twist-fizz sound made by a one litre bottle of warm Fanta Orange shared amongst passengers – friends and strangers alike – all come flooding back, belying the two decades in between.

Now in my thirties, the open road has become a bit of a drug. Like an addict searching for his first high – in my case, the first time I remember going into the Huegenot Tunnel and marvelling at the fact that I was inside a mountain – I find myself constantly stretching the idea of the roadtrip. And I have been rewarded handsomely with every endeavour. It also helps that I have an enabling friend whose default reaction to any suggestion of a roadtrip – no matter how long or short – is “Ja, sure. Let's do it!”.

Once we drove from East London, via Johannesburg, to Maputo shortly after Christmas in my friend's long-suffering jalopy.

“Oh, there's something I should tell you about the car.”, he casually informed me when he picked me up from my parents' home. “There seems to be something wrong with the clutch, but the mechanic said I could drive it for another few thousand kilometres or so.”.

Piffle, I thought. He'd driven from Cape Town in it without incident. Such concerns, wholly academic by our measure, would not dismay us. Onward we travelled to Joburg to fetch our other travelling companion, and continued through the highveld, with its vast farmlands, into the wilderness of the lowveld and beyond. Caught up in what the road had to offer, the potential for mechanical trouble became a rumour, a myth. Such is the power of the roadtrip that, even in the face of expert warning, one can think of nothing else other than the promise of magnificent vistas as the scenery shifts, always revealing a little more of itself to the traveller.

We did our best to see as much of Mozambique as we could manage in a car that wasn't exactly equipped for the rugged terrain that is our neighbour's roads. On New Year's eve we found ourselves at a beach party in Xai Xai, dancing the night away on a dizzyingly patterned mosaic floor atop a sand dune. Psychedelic patterns in glass tile that echoed the strobing of the disco lights as fireworks erupted from the sands, competing all the while with the moon for our attention. A fitting end for a roadtrip to a country that had simultaneously beguiled and perplexed us with its contradictions.

We were happily on our way back to South Africa when the mechanic's words came back to haunt us. The long line of cars snaking some 20kms to the border was amusing at first. We joked about how typical it was of South Africans, most sporting Gauteng licenses, to stage a traffic jam in a foreign country. It was this traffic jam that brought the gravity of our situation into sharp focus. The incessant break-clutch-accelerate-break-clutch of our movement as the line slowly dragged us towards the border  proved too much for our poor chariot. Our gearbox gave in and our car died.

We were fortunate to have made a very valuable friend in Maputo - the very generous Donna Manuela Soeiro – who took us in for a few days and saw to it that our car was repaired. In the meantime, we were treated to sights that we had missed. We saw an inner city garden that Donna Manuela had created within the ruins of a semi-demolished apartment building. Here in the midst of the inner city's perpetually decaying buildings that have given in to the unrelenting humidity and the resultant mildew, were specimens of new life – small shallow pots housing indigenous shrubs fixed precipitously atop pillars of chopped tree trunks; flowering plants that look as though they may have grown all on their own, like weeds, scattered around what were once the reception rooms of an apartment building. I enquired about the tree trunks – there were just so many of them. She told me a very amusing story of how she had been driving to her Teatro Avenida one morning when she came across a group of workmen by the side of the road felling dead trees. She asked the foreman how she could go about acquiring the tree trunks. He replied that she would have to write a letter to the municipality, which she did. In this letter, she had offered to purchase the trunks. The response she received was a stern “no”. After weeks of driving past these same tree trunks lying unattended by the side of the same road, she went to the municipality and hired a tractor.

“Why do you need the tractor?”, asked the official.

“I'm moving some tree trunks.”, came the reply.

“Well, in that case, you'll need some workmen.”.

And so it was that, with the help of a handful of municipal workmen, and the payment of a nominal fee for the tractor, Donna Manuela had her tree trunks.

These are the memories that make roadtrips special for me. The drama and catastrophe from which one rises; the friendships made and strengthened; the sights, sounds and smells – all these combine to give us some of the joie de vivre we need to carry on for the rest of the year. While we plan where to allow the open road to lead us next summer...

(written sometime in late 2012 for VISI magazine's summer issue of that year.)