Letter from Kleinmond

{In 2008 I spent nine weeks in Africa, where I lived as a child. Here, the 4th of four articles written as letters to the hometown newspaper:}

KLEINMOND, South Africa--Delegates to the "power-sharing" talks under way at Cape Town between factions of the politically torn, economically melted down nation of Zimbabwe to the north raised weary eyebrows by walking out of their R750,000 ($100,000) three-star accommodation after 24 hours in favor of a five-star resort at Pretoria.

Among their complaints (reports the Cape Times) was a lack of in-room minibars and the fact all rooms were not equal, which led to delegates "refusing to socialize after the meetings or around the breakfast table."

Think of it: All this costly misery for the politicians of a country where I recently bought a $500 million note and another $50 million note, Zimbabwean, dated "on or before Dec. 31, 2008," both for $2, American. (I was robbed: The rate rapidly rose to 100 billion and then 200 billion to the dollar.)

Lavish spending by public servants of a sister republic is page-11 news in South Africa, itself beset by stories of greed and infighting among factions of its own oligarchy, by widespread corruption, rising prices, high unemployment and crime rates. By a recent poll, some two-thirds of whites asked would like to move to another, presumably five-star country. But fourteen years after the establishment of this "Rainbow Nation," the dissatisfaction is more about opportunity and class than about race.

A quarter of the well-off class now are black professionals, but some 30 percent of all blacks polled also would prefer other-country accommodations. Poor township blacks who had dreamed of homes, land and a job under the new regime now are taking to the streets. Getting away from them, whites currently are in movement from "the North" (Johannesburg and Pretoria) to the eastern and western Cape provinces, drawing grumbles there for the culture of high fences and attack dogs they bring with them.

There are strong contrasting views toward all this woe, however. One is that none of it actually is happening and to say so is unpatriotic. Another, which I as merely a visitor can subscribe to, holds that too many people are being a little high-strung. In the course of introducing my family to a country where I attended elementary school, I have sampled the full range of three-star South Africa. For a lower-income North State resident, its bed-and-breakfasts, cottages, rondavels, chalets and guesthouses have been at least adequate. Delegates at a talkathon should in any case have been drinking at the house bar that most three-star outfits provide. It's just more sociable.

You wouldn't want to stay in a township, unless it's three-star (and some hostelries already are). But three-star, midrange South Africa, from my experience, is in many ways exceptional, most of them positive. I recommend it.

It's not a motel, for one thing, and not part of a chain. It may be a thatched cottage or a room in a historical home, and it probably is all cozy and picture-pretty and planted in a garden, with a driveway and courtyard paved with bricks arranged in circles and scallops. It has a bath if not a shower, maybe a toilet adjoining with no door. (One in Sabie had a Victorian tub at the foot of the bed in the center of the room.) But it includes a "full English breakfast" of two eggs, sausage, thick bacon, beans, fried tomatoes, fruit salad, cereal, toast and coffee. It comes with daily made service. An all for $20-$30 a person.

South Africa has these places down every street, signposted at the corner.

In ("Ostrich Capital of the World") Oudtshoorn, two nights ago, we had the entire upper floor of a Victorian parsonage for the Dutch Reformed "mother church" across the lane; at no extra charge, the tones of choir practice wafted to our balcony stoep, thoughtfully appointed with easy chairs and capsule biographies of Their Royal Highnesses the Queen Mother and the Queen, along with an Afrikaans New Testament. The furnishings are all antique, the furniture crafted from now-rare stinkwood and yellowwood ($80 for 3).

But a week before, we resided in a hippie pizza joint up a muddy hill at Coffee Bay on the coast, above an all-night trance dance taking place in the banana trees below, for $55.

This, now, is being written from Apartment #1 of a vacation house at an unassuming village, Kleinmond, on the atmospheric but much cooler coast below Cape Town: no garden, but there is an exquisite Blue Flag beach across the road - river lagoon, crisp, blue-green waves and gnarled rocks - and towering purple mountains behind, set against a World Heritage ecozone ($48).
Until now, especially where we were taken into somebody's home, however weary of company they may have been, we have been able to count on the bonus of wonderful, old-fashioned conversation, often occurring late at night over Klipdrift brandy and Coke, the lubricant of cultural choice here for many. These encounters have been as memorable as the trademark ones with game animals:

The displaced Viennan now an adventure-tour guide, near Kruger Park, and his stories of monkey shines, stubborn lions and elephant browsing so close at night "you could hear them urinating and you could even smell it."

The two lightning-protection installers from Johannesburg, huddled with us around a coal fire in the sitting room of an old stone mansion on a chilly night in Mossel Bay, trading revelations about the others' history and present state of being.

The pert B&B owner descended from every Dutch and French Huguenot family in the phone book, a little insecure though she owns a huge, scenic swath of central Oudtshoorn and her husband an old farm up a no doubt scenic valley in nearby mountains. God, she feels, "put both white and black people in Africa for a reason"; she cites the zebra for confirmation of this intelligent design and frets that forces may be at work to "take the white out of the zebra."

Here at Kleinmond, owing maybe to building configuration, the conversation has been missing. Separate upstairs apartments are occupied by solitary males, both silent and maybe sinister. The gothic atmosphere - those worries about the future - that's drama in a country without much television: three to five channels, where available, running old U.S. movies, education, Afrikaans soap operas that veer into English and the news in Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho or, yes, Afrikaans.

A country where movie theaters are scare and vital road signs may be in any one of four of these languages. Where toilets flush from the center of the tank, by pulling a knob up or pushing it down. A country of chilly nights in winter (which this now is) widely without heaters. Where liquor isn't available on Sundays until 2 p.m. and then not for long - where, indeed, a small town like Kleinmond shuts down and goes home for the night at 4 p.m.

Late on a Sunday night, an owl hoots rhythmically in the mist out back, and the tense American upstairs continues to pace, bouncing his small ball and watching his window. He has been doing that for two days and nights. Maybe he too needs a five-star facility.