If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the road to bush lodge paradise in northern Mpumalanga is frequently not paved at all. 7 hours it took us, my wife Andret and I, to get from Johannesburg to Sabi Sands Game Reserve, our first destination on the FTTSA/Getaway Blog Adventure. We were in our modern day kakebeenwa, a magnificent ‘out-of-the-box’ Hyundai IX35, kindly supplied by Avis.
What a splendid thing it was, receiving that car the night before. A journalist becomes accustomed to being received, if not with open hostility, then with guardedness … and rightly so. But the scene in the Avis office at 22h30 on Friday night was quite the opposite. I wandered in, having left Andret to pick up our bags (on the pretext that we were keeping good people from their weekend) and within minutes was warmly clasping hands with Fair Trade in Tourism South Africa’s Katarina Mancama, Getaway’s Ian Pepler, and Avis’ Herman Letsi. Papers were produced requiring a mere signature or two, a car key was handed over and my attention was directed to a gleaming SUV parked on a red carpet. Now the last few cars I hired were, in chronological reverse, a Nissan Tiida, a Fiat Panda and a Mazda 323, so you may imagine that in addition to feeling delighted I wondered a little anxiously about the vehicle excess obligations I’d just blindly signed for.
Mr. Peplar produced a bulging white envelope with some hesitation, ‘I’m not exactly sure what’s inside, apparel of some sort I should think,’ he said. He was right, it contained three blue Getaway t-shirts, a beanie, and a cap. Katarina handed me a FTTSA badge, and as several men whose presence I was only now beginning to register started de-holstering cameras I saw clearly where the night was leading.
‘Do I have to wear this stuff?’ I asked. ‘Er, no, no …’ said Pepler but of course I did, and couldn’t have cared less. Drunk on life, as they say, I nearly whipped my shirt off in the company of strangers, but it was a very good thing I didn’t. Around a corner, after checking that the t-shirt I had with me was properly labelled (i.e. XL), I dived into it, and was immediately seized with mortal panic. The t-shirt was small, barely a brassiere in fact, and while such things are well within the range of my sense of humour, there was something about the t-shirt’s sleeves … they were of stylish cut, which is to say deliberately skin hugging by design, but inhabited by a decidedly lapsed mesomorph they failed to even clear the shoulder bones, a spectacle I could picture so clearly in my mind’s eye I reflexively crumpled down to cover myself, as one would if teleported naked to Times Square.
I had a diminutive friend in first year high school whose formidable mother had a withering phrase for the school ‘heavy’ who gave us a hard time, and it came back to me then: ‘Never take seriously any person who looks like bunch of walnuts stuffed in a condom.’
‘Andret,’ I hissed, ‘Andret, get over here, I need help,’ but after taking one look at the Captain America lurking behind the cardboard cut-out of that smiling Avis girl, her instinct was not one of spousal protection. Momentarily all those with cameras were alerted to the spectacle by hoots of laughter, and the heightened sense of occasion collapsed somewhat, which is quite as it should be, and I was secretly glad that all those inconvenienced by our late arrival had at least had a bit of fun.
But about those roads. Many Jo’burgers, I’m sure, will agree that a journey away from the city on any of the eastbound arterials goes together with a deep sense of foreboding. In place of one-dimensional road markings the east rand specializes in erratic drips of paint, sudden chicanes made of yellow plastic walls and middle mannetjies resembling breakwater dolosse. It doesn’t help that every major freight company in the country is headquartered in Wadeville either, turning the peri-urban phase of one’s journey east into a life or death fight with low-bed trailers.
I must make an admission at this point: we’d brought along a Tom Tom Route Finder and might have chosen, when given the choice, to opt for a route that would not take us via any toll booths. This would be laudable journey-sense almost anywhere on earth but in Mpumalanga it’s deadly. Roads designed for cattle trucks and combine harvesters today break up almost before one’s eyes under 50 ton coal trucks, which shower smaller vehicles with pips of carbon while overtaking each other on blind corners. The road works —expected delay 30mins — started at Badplaas and didn’t let up until just before Hazyview. If these trials tested the Hyundai’s bonhomie, a burned toastie from a Nelspruit Mugg&Bean defeated it entirely, and it was no-talkies by the time we entered Sabi Sands’ Shaw gate and romped down towards Sabi Sabi Bush Lodge, as directed by our confirmation note. Spirits fell lower and bladders were strained when it turned out that we had been moved to another lodge, but that was before we understood that we were the happy recipients of the greatest upgrade of all time.
Sabi Sabi Earth Lodge makes ‘luxury’ seem like a superlative for underpants manufacturers. From the moment one is met at the vehicle reception, from which a rammed earth pathway burrows downwards into the main lodge, one anticipates meeting a gushing Jeannie D, or some other bosomy magazine show mama, and for it all – the strawberry cocktails and the driftwood furniture, the cool sealed concrete floors and the cleverly incorporated marula trees – to cut roughly to a detergent commercial, and the hard reality of a TV dinner. But no, the dream continued, and after ten minutes in Room 1, with its waterhole view, I felt like a Russian Baryn in Dostoevsky’s time, capable of picking up the phone and yelling, ‘Lady, we’ll be needing champagne, lots of it, and chocolate, candies, pears, boiled sweets, and, er, tyagushki. And hurry, little dove, we haven’t all the time in the world.’
Indeed all our horsing around mid-country meant there was only 20 minutes to spare before the evening safari, which was going ahead in spite of the fact that the sky to the east was smoking with what we assumed was the advance edge of tropical storm Irina. More on this and other matters in short order.
