Letter from Durban

{In 2008 I spent nine weeks in Africa, where I lived as a child. Here, the 3rd of four articles written as letters to the hometown newspaper:}

DURBAN, South Africa--Successful overseas travel is all about making connections. Catching the plane, the taxi. Finding the right exit on a strange freeway in a foreign land, more challenging. Connecting with the people who can help you - or even save your neck.

Durban, on South Africa's warm Indian Ocean coast, is saying good-bye, as I write, to holidaying families at the beach with school children between the winter and spring terms. It also is fairly crawling with bug experts from distant lands such as the U.S., all drawn here by the 32nd International Congress of Entomology and Durban's winter sun.

The value to me and my traveling family, of these separate developments, is considerable, it turns out. Nightly accommodation will now be a lot easier to book and less expensive but for a new price rise to beat the country's 9 percent inflation rate. And I have found a promising general destination here for some of the refurbished computers that Redding resident Jim Ballard gives away free to the needy.

He and I agreed before this return trip to the country where I attended elementary school, that South Africa was a worthy destination and that I would try to help place them. The reason for the present optimism has to do with stinkbugs.

A woman sharing the Afro Colonial sitting room of a bed-and-breakfast across the street from the Durban Botanic Garden had her head buried, other night, in study materials - was she a student? No, she said, she was presenting a paper Thursday at the bug event. Important insect people were flying in from all over, and she was honestly more botanist than entomologist. Her topic? I enquired. Stink bugs - their use as a food item by two peoples in Limpopo Province, where she works as an environmental educator.

A certain model of stinkbug, fatter than ours, is a much sought after - and almost depleted - delicacy there; enterprising outsiders are bringing them in. By a special method, the stink is removed, and the bugs are then eaten fresh or dried like pumpkin seeds, with a similar crunch. Her Powerpoint file was impressive, cataloguing all aspects of stinkbug life. I and the host were intimidated, almost, into sampling from the pile of pale carcasses presented, until her husband said: "Oh, but don't make them eat these dry ones."

Here's the deal: The husband, it develops, is a computer teacher in a private school at Haenertsburg. He is sure he can find someplace in the lush but under-equipped Olifants River region that could put Ballard's computers to use. He's going to talk it around, meantime taking his two irrepressible young daughters daily to the beach and uShaka Marine World.

Another Redding connection ("connexion," actually, in this UK-influenced part of the world): Up the trail to a waterfall near Sabie, in Mpumalanga Province, my wife stopped a man and a girl wearing a sweatshirt that said "Austin." Was she from Texas? No, but she was attending college in my hometown, Sherman, and her father was Ed Taylor, formerly a forester for Champion International in Anderson and the partner of my wife's mother's next-door-neighbor.

Ed would like his former associates in the States to know he is happily at work in the forests of Africa, for York Timber. He could, I would imagine, write a book about forestry differences. I myself am amazed how South Africans manage to harvest eucalyptus poles straight as lodgepole pines, cutting and bundling them in the field like bales of hay, when those derelict eucalyptus groves south of Red Bluff are presented as a vision of money to be made, frustrated by a wood prone to warping and cracking. Another connexion, this one just personal, with Shaka, the Zulu historical figure, large as life still today: The set for Shaka Zulu, a 1985 miniseries, has been turned by a hotel group into a sort of Zulu Knott's Berry Farm (the funky pre-1970s one), up an improbably bumpy road near Eshowe. Despite Hollywoodization, everything here is authentic, from the millet beer you can drink from the communal dipper, to the dancing to pounding drums.

While there, through being talkative, I met a man my age who had been dropped off in my dad's three-ring tent during a Durban evangelistic campaign in about 1948. (My father appears to have been the first American-style evangelist to come here.) The preacher was a Texan, the presentation dramatic. "Man, is this church or is this show business?" the man remembers thinking. He had been dumped there by his father and instructed to "find the path," he said. Interesting that he remembered the episode, from 60 years later - and how improbable that I then connected with him at a time and place.

As improbable, almost, are those instances where people seem to show up when you really need them to - like guardian angels. We've had three. The first was a trucker in Botswana who cleared our path on a pitch-black night up the country's narrow two-lane north-south artery, over a course littered with cattle, goats, warthogs, elephant and, once, a big rig broken down in the north lane with only brush for a hazard marker.

The second was the trucker, already mentioned, who inflated our flat last tire from his airbrakes tank so that we could limp to a garage in Nata, Botswana, and repairs. (That tire then conveniently blew out only two kilometres from the gate of our next destination, instead of 200.)

The third angel was Lily, Zulu housemaid of the excellent Botany Bay B&B, where we stayed here. We had taken a taxi to see the so-called Indian market. (Durban has the largest Indian population outside India.) On a Sunday, almost all the stalls were closed, and we wandered away through a sprawling open area resembling a busy train station, where Africans were hawking everything from old batteries to traditional medicine - from there further outside recommended boundaries to the emphatically untouristic chicken and then the teeming produce market.

And here, with no taxis anywhere on the horizon, we found Lily, making her way home - or she found us. "It is me!" she had to say twice.