letting it all hang out

The map spills over the side of the bed. It's marked with black penned notes like, "elephants!" or "rock art" or "women's art co-op" and highlighted autoroutes make colourful purple and green snakes basking across South Africa's surface. Durban is our axis, Cape Town is our endpoint, and our goalposts are everywhere in between.

Meg and I are flying out of Cape Town at 7h30 this Saturday, and we're renting a car from Durban and driving north to Swaziland. We don't really know what there is to see and do; Lonely Planet allocates only a mere 20 pages to the entire country in its guide to Southern Africa and details its various hiking trails, villages, and craft fairs. Honestly, I think I want to go to Swaziland just because I love its name. I've always judged books by their covers. It's one of my greatest flaws. But something baptised with such a vibrant face must hold something equally rich, and so we're driving on our impulses with wide hope.

We leave Swazi to re-enter Kwazulu-Natal, a province of South Africa, and from this point forward, everything and everywhere is a hypothesis. The city has worn down our resistance, and so we're driving clear of any starred circle on our map; instead, we're drifting toward the roads without names, where our African friends have told us to drive carefully because cows and other animals randomly and without warning decide to plop themselves in the center of our straight, straight path. We're abandoning touristy beaches for the mountains in Drakensberg where the caves are stamped with thousands of cave paintings, then falling back to the coast in the Eastern Cape to explore the secluded inlets, forests, surfing beaches with white sand, and Xhosa homes whose faces are tattooed with black, brick red and cream triangles.

I'm packing a swim suit. A turquoise and lime sari skirt. Sneakers. A yellow scarf for my hair. A fleece. A Nikon D40. Soap. A book by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. A pen. Rand. The map. A good friend. And not much else.