IN DEFENCE OF A BAD ROAD TRIP
Hitch-hiking is a skill, and we lacked it. After a long, cold day of standing and waving, my tjommie Robin and I had managed to catch only two lifts, covering 354km — from Grahamstown to Plettenberg Bay. We had thus fallen 520km short of our goal for the day: Cape Town. Maybe this was because we looked like unwashed, 18-year-old, BA-registered idiots — whether viewed from a distance or at close quarters. It wasn’t a misleading impression.
So we were stuck in Plett, with darkness and rain falling simultaneously. There are worse places to be stranded at night, but the real problem was that we had R5 left between us — not enough for the worst youth hostel, even back in 1995. Both of us had blown our travel budgets on falafels, tickets and Old Brown Sherry at the Grahamstown Arts Festival. Neither of us had any credit to draw on, and both our bank balances were south of R10.
Being Withnail & I aficionados, we initially found this situation amusing. Like the characters Withnail & I, we had come on holiday by mistake, and it was all a big laugh. But then a pig started to poo in our heads. The July cold front slammed into Plett, and I had a nasty cold coming on. We had sleeping bags, but the only shelter we could find was the rainy doorway of a dentist’s practice. Camping under the stars is fine. Camping on the pavement, while hungry and sick and wet, is not.
The next morning we blew our last R5 on breakfast: a half-loaf of bread and a half-litre of milk. If we couldn’t manage to reach Cape Town and parental financial assistance by that evening we would have to start begging for food. Things were getting real. The sun seemed to be out again, but our moods were foul.
Within 20 minutes, we landed one heavenly lift all the way home, in a friend’s Citroën 2CV.
Twenty-five years later, I love the memory of that bungling journey. I also get nostalgic about the time I lost both my bank cards in Berlin and just walked the streets and the parks for two days, bumming smokes and food and airtime from Turkish shopkeepers and Polish junkies while I waited for a money transfer to arrive from South Africa. It was fairly desperate. But I was strangely happy. It felt as though Berlin was consuming me; I wasn’t just consuming it.
Berliners are more relaxed than most Germans, but they don’t fully appreciate dozy South African journalists with cashflow problems. During my semihobo days, I asked a travel agent receptionist to advance me a phone call to my bank. She totally lost it. “MAYBE IF YOU LOOKED AFTER YOUR SINGS YOU WOULDN'T HAVE TO ASK ME FOR ZISS KIND OF SING!” I stormed off in a dignified huff. Anger is an energy. It helps keep you on your feet and out of the gutter.
Looking back, even my worst travel mistakes were weirdly worth it in hindsight. For example, I will always retain the three terrible lessons I learnt in the Mexican beach town of Playa del Carmen: (a) Don’t eat a cheap salmon burger in the Yucatán Peninsula, which is home to Moctezuma’s Revenge (a brief but awful bacterial welcome extended to unsuspecting gringos). B) One shouldn’t book a cheap hotel room above an all-night mariachi bar, particularly when Moctezuma’s
Revenge is on the cards. Even mariachis themselves don’t recommend vomiting to a soundtrack of mariachi tunes. (C) One shouldn’t read Crime and Punishment while queasy and alone in a strange land; it will send you into an emotional tailspin of devastating proportions. In short, don’t mix your Moctezuma with your Dostoevsky or your Mariachi. They all interact badly.
In my book, moderately incompetent travel is the real thing. It strips away the mental bubble wrap of the over-considered trip. And these days, the three smartassed nannies on our phones — Uber, AirBnB and Google Maps – have made it very hard to be stupid while travelling. But I think I can still manage.