Fairest Cape Vol.I Pt.I: On Plans, the Landscape and Unwelcome Sensations

My approaching trip to Cape Town only begins to touch on my emotions on the evening before my flight out. An SMS arrives to tell me that my free accommodation is no longer available. I arrange a place to stay for a couple of nights after one of the five phonecalls I make is answered. The conversation goes: "Sure, it's not a problem. I'm here until Thursday. I am secure in my current relationship and you can sleep in my sister's bed. She's away."

My Mother tells me that I don't look excited. She asks me if I'm going to mope around for the whole time that I'm away. She makes me go out and buy a cross for my neck-chain. I just want to load up my MP3's. Cape Town's runway has just been repaired and there are many delayed flights. I listen to Portishead while waiting in line, in the waiting line.

Through the gate is a bus that takes five minutes to load and drive us a distance that would take forty seconds to walk. My hand luggage is stowed and I look out the window while I add 727 to the list of aircraft that I've flown on and wonder if there is a 717. The land speeds away in the other direction and I imagine that I'm standing still and that the world is moving around me. The land begins to drop away beneath me and the sky comes closer. I look through the window and I see how the churning, paper-white rapids of the clouds absorb the sun and how a dozen arrows of sunshine shoot through the clouds to be eaten away by the smog caught below.

This year's flight is free of babies and of Heineken so I decide to appreciate a small victory and order another Amstel. The flight over the Free State is the same as the drive through it so I read more Kurt Vonnegut. As we approach Cape Town, I look out of the window. The Earth of the escarpment is hard boulder with clumps of trees deposited like patches of moss across it. As the ground rises and the sky floats away, the mossy growths of litter clings to the sides of the Guguletu roads and pathways until we're at eyelevel with the slum apartments that ooze colour from each window like a fly through a fly-swat.

After another five minute bus ride I arrive, hair wind-tossed, at my pick-up. My smile lasts ten minutes until it sinks into a guilty knot in my stomach. The conversation goes: "I don't understand. Why are you staying until Thursday? I thought I was only a back-up plan. You'll just have to tag along." There is dinner and then there are drinks and there is a chaperone that sleeps in the sister's bed.