Wild and wonderful at heart
HE WAS the tall, silent type, with fine muscles and a gait that said he knew what he wanted in life. I liked him instantly. Even so, it was quite out of character for me, kissing a stranger like that.
Maybe it was the romance of the setting, or the mild heatstroke from the day before (wear sunscreen folks, especially when you zipline).
At any rate, the world stood still as our eyes met.
Suddenly, his lips were closing in. I puckered up and panicked simultaneously, trying to stay cool.
There was an awkward moment when I went left and he went wide, then he kept on going and planted a soft tongue on my hand instead.
Cameras went off like we were on the red carpet at the Oscars. I might have swooned.
Abby was just a male giraffe, and it may have felt like being daubed with a big, dry sponge.
He may have been hoping for a mielie, but it was still the best kiss of my life. living as he has since he was a bottle-fed “Abnormally Big Baby” (hence his name) on a 350ha private game reserve that is part of the Areena Riverside Resort.
On the banks of the Kwelera tidal river, 23km from East London at the start of the Wild Coast, it’s a “something for everyone” sort of place, with adventure and leisure options on offer in equal measure. Feeling lazy? Sit on the quay and try to spot the odd fish playing peekaboo, making gentle ripples on the calm water; or lie by the pool and watch the weavers whip up a metropolis in the trees; or melt at the spa. Feeling twitchy? Well, there are quad-bikes and Segways and canoes, oh my – and it’s a 5km paddle to the beach.
I tried the Ama-Zing-Zing Zipline Tour which, turns out, is “aptly named”, as they say in the classics, giving you both an adrenaline spike and a grand overview of the wild forests and rivers that surround you on the ground.
The quad-biking through the game reserve was thrilling too, even without that unexpected kiss. away in the thick of the Wild Coast between Coffee Bay and Port St Johns, there’d been a zebra munching blissfully on the lawn outside a chalet at the Hluleka Nature Reserve.
It’s a long, rough road to get there – a full day’s drive from East London – and it’s easy to arrive a tad disgruntled, nursing a mild case of whiplash. Oh, those potholes. But then there’s that zebra, and that chalet.
On 772ha, Hluleka has just seven double-storey chalets, hunkering down on a cliff over the sea, surrounded by two coastal forest reserves and riverine gorges and a protected ocean off a wide and blissful beach.
The zebra was pregnant with the possibility of all this lovely land – and a belly heavy with more than just grass. And that made sense. Besides losing yourself in the view from the surprisingly plush chalets – which feel almost like private churches with floor-to-ceiling, A-framed windows in the upstairs bedroom – there’s little to do but be here.
Take walks along the rugged coast; or go to the symphony – starring sunbirds, the Knysna turaco, the Cape parrot and Narina trogon – in the forests; find quiet lagoons; spot bushbuck, eland, impala; and, from the hilltops, dolphins and whales. Or just do what the zebras do.
An hour out of East London again, at the Ngxingxolo Cultural Village, Zinzi Tofu is past all that romance guff – though the education she gives us deals much with the importance of pairing up in Xhosa culture.
She talks of how girls grow up waiting to be chosen for marriage; and how the women have an important ceremony – ntonjane – to pacify the ancestors when a young wife fails to conceive.
Tofu herself was never chosen. Once, years ago, that hurt, but today she sees it as a lucky escape.
“The first wife is the queen and the others work for her,” she said simply. At Ngxingxolo, however, she is the indisputable queen.
It was in 2006 that her mother, known by all as Mama Tofu, set up this business, a replica of a homestead with thatch-roofed rondavels and a kraal, to bring the tourists in and teach them about the traditions of this land.
Mama died last year at 96, and today her daughter, supported by a group of old-soul women with shining eyes, demonstrates practices such as the cleaning of mud floors with ubulongwe, a mixture of cow dung, soil and water. (Many modern rural women, though, are putting in vinyl flooring to save themselves the trouble.)
It was the unappetising prospect of an arranged marriage, too, that drove the Eastern Cape’s most famous son from his childhood home at Qunu, and into the arms of his great destiny – a destiny deftly traced at the Nelson Mandela Museum in Mthatha.
Conceived in 2000 as an elaborate trophy case to house his gifts and awards too numerous for the mantel, today it is a triumph of storytelling, where guests go from room to room absorbed by his “long walk” in photos, quotes, relics and old news reels ( nelsonmandelamuseum. ).
The Meaning of Nelson Mandela exhibit divides his life into six periods, including “Prison Life” and “Life as a Statesman”.
But it’s the first, “Character”, that brings you back firmly to the soil at your feet, to imagine the great man, just 30km away, at Qunu, slipping down rocks as a boy with his friends and slowly imbibing a pride in this land, and a determination that would one day change everything.
For her part, Zinzi Tofu has her own determination, and is working hard to make Ngxingxolo the success it deserves to be.
After our lunch of umbhako (bread) and samp and beans and meats cooked in flat-bottomed castiron pots, there is a moment to buy bead necklaces – insanely underpriced and excessively beautiful – before the women gather in a half circle on the grass.
Tofu beats a big drum and emits a wail with the sort of voice that would instantly fell the judges on any TV talent show.
The young girls dance, the older women adopt a rhythmic side-step and a clapping, and it’s all so invigorating it’s with oddly heavy-lifted hearts that we jig off to the van.
The women surround us, and smooth the awkward exit of goodbyes with a farewell song instead. They’re still singing as we bounce away, ears leaning out the window to hear them until the last, rolling our new beads like prayers between our fingers.
In a different place, on a different beach at sunset, different kinds of jewels await.
Picking over the rocks from the Double Mouth Nature Reserve’s idyllic beachfront campsite, we reach Bead Beach, where the lucky ones can supposedly still pick up carnelian beads, money cowries and shards of Ming porcelain that spilt into the sea when the Portuguese Santo Espirito sank here in 1608.
We find none, but on the 5km drive back to our Mitford Hotel, we pause on the Morgan Bay cliffs for a dazzling sunset – and there can be no greater romance than this.
Sometimes all you need to fall in love is a setting sun, a sea, the song of a drum still beating in your heart, and maybe, just maybe, the smallest frisson of a spark between you and a handsome giraffe.
Elizabeth Sleith was a guest of the EC Parks & Tourism Agency.