Inquired or enquired about hiring a car to drive along the Garden Route (well trodden/driven road between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth) from Rent a Cheapie. Their website declares that they offer unlimited mileage on all cars. This seemed pretty good as the hire price was already very reasonable.

It turns out that the mileage is not actually quite so unlimited as it promises. If you go more than 200 km from Cape Town then there was an extra 799 rand to pay. When this became clear during my telephone enquiry it led to the following conversation.

Me: But your website clearly states free unlimited mileage is included in the cost of hire. You make a big thing of it. “Free unlimited mileage”.
Him: It is
Me: No it isn’t.
Him: It is.
Me: O K, we”re going to be driving to Knysna today (several hundred km). Is that free mileage?
Him: No.
Me: Not free?
Him: No. You draw a circle round Cape Town of 200 kilometres and you can drive anywhere in that circle absolutely free.
Me: Most of that circle is in the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic Ocean makes up the majority of your free mileage zone.
Him: You can’t drive into the Atlantic.
Me: I’m not going to. I want to drive to Knysna.
Him: That will cost an extra one off payment of 799 rand.
Me: And then the extra mileage is free.
Him: Yes.
Me: That’s really not free unlimited mileage then, is it?
Him: It is if you pay 799 rand extra.
Me: And then I can drive as far as I want?
Him: No. If you go across the border you have to pay much more.
Me: For free mileage.
Him: Exactly.
Me: Why isn’t it called kilometerage?
Him: Pardon me?
Me: Never mind. Could you tell me if there are any other, what I like to call, “hidden costs”?
Him: (in an outbreak of uncharacteristic openness) Yes. Lots.

After a long list of possible extras we could pay for, none of which, thankfully, we needed, I told him I would let him know. It then turned out, having rung several more hire companies, that theirs was still the best deal, even with the non-free free mileage so we went down and hired from them and tootled off in a car in which I can now drive for as many kilometres as I like (so long as I don’t drive across the border, and keep out of the sea).

We headed off along the N2 which is the road that runs all the way from Cape Town to Knysna. It’s one half of what’s called The Garden Route and we were told we would find it stunning. Now, don’t get me wrong, the mountainy bits were pretty enough but most of the rest of the way was nothing to write home about. (And yet, here I am……)

As we got closer to Knysna things got a lot more impressive. Long, curved sandy beaches. Sun-kissed wouldn’t do them justice. More like sun-snogged. Dramatic cliffs. High, steep sided gorges with a picture book perfect river running through them – the sort of river that makes other rivers feel just a little bit inadequate. I’m suspecting there is a lot more of this scenery to be seen.

Looking forward to seeing it.

Bringing to bear all the expertise which comes from an entire three days in a place, for sure, apartheid is a thing of the past; but it’s also for certain from what I’ve seen so far in one small corner of the country, that whites, blacks and coloureds form three very distinct groups economically. Stop and look at who is driving on the highways, who is working where, who has what would pass the test of being able to call themselves free.

Bur, it’s early days and I have no real concept of how things were before – so I’d like to dig a little deeper.

Knysna – Monday Jan 19th, eve

Lack of internet availability in places has caused a couple of minor inconveniences, one of which was that we didn’t know if the people we thought we were due to stay with in Knysna knew we were coming. Minor detail, of course – but Ella had emailed last week to say we would be arriving on Monday, if that was OK, but we had no idea whether they had replied or whether it was still OK for us to come as we’ve never spoken to the couple and correspondence thus far has been a little on the vague side as our plans for this first week were not finally firmed up until the last minute.

Turned up to the address we’d been given in an earlier email. We went up to the big metal gate and peered through and tried to look as welcomable innable as possible. A lady looked at us for a long time from behind the almost closed blinds of the sitting room. I think she thought she couldn’t be seen but with the light on behind her she might as well have been standing outside waving a flag.

We just kept standing there as we didn’t know what else to do. There was no bell to ring. No intercom thing. No side gate to go through. She waited. We waited.

We waved. She knew she’d been spotted and that her non-existent cover had been blown. She snatched up a small scruffy dog and came walking down the drive holding it as one might a machine gun. She was very Dutch.

This became clear when she started talking. We soon discovered, having said “Hi, we’re Jon and Ella: we did email: we hope you’re expecting us because otherwise this is going to be a little awkward……” that it was going to be a little awkward.

She was not expecting us at all.

It was made a little less awkward when we found out that although it was almost exactly the same address as on the email we had – she and her husband were definitely not called Steve and Dee but she thought that there might be another road similarly named to that one on a development the other side of town.

She fetched her husband who was even more Dutch than she was and he took to describing where we should go using a series of noises which sounded like he was trying to shift something stuck to his lungs.

He kept talking and I kept nodding until it seemed a long enough time had passed that I could walk away without seeming rude.

Using my awesome sense of direction and a phone call we ended up in a sufficiently useful place by the side of the road that our correct host could drive to and rescue us.

Early Saturday morning: somewhere quite far down the West Coast of Africa: ten hours in to flight BA043.

British Airways used to have that advert where they sang: “We’ll take more care of you!”

Only if they were comparing themselves to the mafia of this experience is anything to go by….

They are to be commended for managing to defy the laws of physics by crushing 240 people into a space where only 140 people could ever realistically physically fit. The fact the cabin crew were all holding crowbars when we boarded should have been warning enough.

Flying is a little like child birth methinks. It takes a long time, it’s uncomfortable, you accept whatever pain relief is offered and you find yourself repeating “I am NEVER doing this again”
Thankfully, God has given us memories that fade. And often, something beautiful and worthwhile is at the other end.

I’ll bear that in mind. I’m sat next to a rather large lady with a powerful left arm. She’s entirely covering my arm rest. It’s my arm rest. She has a perfectly lovely arm rest on her right. This one is mine. It must be: it’s got the controls for MY light and MY in flight movies and MY music options embedded in it. And they are somewhere under her powerful left forearm. She is asleep and I can’t move her arm. It’s like trying to move the sphinx. We fought over control of MY arm rest a few times while she was awake and she usually won – but you’d think her arm would be more easy to move than this now she’s asleep.

Unless she’s only pretending.

Or dead.

I hope she’s not dead.

I’ll feel bad.

I really want to watch a film.

Monday 19th Jan. Early morning.

It has been an incredible start to the journey. Two days in but many more days’ experiences seem to have been jammed in to the last 48 hours which have been wonderfully busy.

I”m sitting in the courtyard of a beautiful Cape Town home with Table Mountain forming the picturesque backdrop standing as stunning, silent, sentinel. It seems to peer imperiously over my shoulder as I type and whispers to me “don’t write such poncey nonsense.”

But what a jaw-dropping backdrop. I wonder how long you would live here before you start to take such a view for granted. How soon we can all too easily do that in our own lives.

Cape Town is blessed with many things not least of which is the natural beauty of its immediate surrounds. We have driven around and over the mountain several times already and each new angle changes how you see the whole. I don’t think I can pay the city a bigger compliment than to say that in less than a few hours it had already managed to compensate for the 12 hours of misery and discomfort that constitutes long haul flying in cattle class.

We arrived just shy of 8 a.m. and were met by Peter: our minder and tour guide for the next two days.

Peter is nothing short of a phenomenon. He is also nothing short. I’d guess at 6 foot 4 or 5 – a big bear of a man with just the most explosively enthusiastic energy. For the past four years following the passing of his beautiful wife, Bridget, Peter has been both mum and dad to his nine children who range in age from 9 on up. The household, which you might think would have to run with military precision seems, rather, to run on collective caring mixed with a little necessary and wonderful mayhem. They pool resources, look out for one another; the house had a wonderful spirit flowing through it.

Some people are glass half empty. Some people are glass half full. Some people are “Wow, I’ve got a glass! Awesome! And not only that, it comes with liquid already in it. Who can I share it with? This is great – I can not only help someone else to get a drink but I have one more glass than I did yesterday. Does anyone need a glass?” Peter is that person.

We had breakfast straight from the airport at a place just above the Cecil Rhodes memorial which is fronted by a large bronze figure of a naked man looking angsty on horseback which possibly wasn’t the exact manner in which Cecil used to get about. We then dropped bags at the house and embarked on a whistle-stop two day tour. We went down to Cape Point, where the Atlantic Ocean and Indian Ocean meet. There wasn’t a line separating the two to show where they met exactly which would have been nice. We toured Cape Town, we drove over and around the mountain, went to Boulders Beach and chatted to the penguins there: went to Kalk Bay and bought fresh caught Yellowtail to brie – brie rhymes with cry and it’s what they call barbecues round here – and enjoyed a wonderful Sunday afternoon in the garden of Wilfred and Debbie’s beautiful vicarage overlooking the beach. Wilfred is a black Anglican vicar whose church congregation are 60% old-school white Rhodesian. The congregation want ten minute sermons and services to be done and dusted in 40. I’m saying nothing. : ). He tells a great story and bries a mean brie. Though he is currently on holiday there were 5 interruptions to the afternoon with people coming to the front door asking to see the Father. He graciously dealt with each of them, even the one who just wanted to have some of the food having seen that the vicar was having a family brie in the garden. Some were invited through to the garden, some were asked to return later – ah, the trans-national minister’s dilemma how do you handle the balance between public availability and the right to private time?

(I have, since this was posted, been informed via Facebook, the blog, phone, people stopping me in the street, sky-writing bi-planes and angelic visitations about my appalling English spilling of what is, of course, correctly a braai – similar to a British barbecue but without the rain.) Apologies for denigrating an awesome African institution – and for likening it to French cheese.