Haunting Boabab landscape © SAT

Table Mountain and its beautiful (but cable-car journey interrupting) tabelcloth

A close encounter of the best kind

Up close and personal

It happened in an instant: at first and then over again, when, as the sun set on a herd of elephants, or with the clean stink of the ocean on my face, or maybe in the dark of a Joburg nightclub, I fell in love with South Africa.

It’s recognition, I thought, of a land similar to mine that had me pressed, nose to window, as my plane came into land: red earth and drought, youth and memories now fossilised but lived.

There’s a poem for Australia that seems to fit South Africa too. It’s an unapologetic love sonnet about a sunburnt country, a pitiless sky and a land both beautiful and terrifying.

But you can’t compose a love letter for one by comparison with another – unless love is learned. And I was never good with lessons.

I guess it was her looks first (as often is and just as often denied). And then this—something. At best, I can describe it as an energy, or weight, or rhythm in the air and in the people.

I entered South Africa through Johannesburg and at first we (this country and I) were wary of each other. But then the coolness of a convention-ed Sandton was made suddenly real by a smile-broken-face and a night of music and poetry and food and wine and passion.

Armed with a pathetic camera, an empty notebook and what I like to think is an endearing naïveté, I next arrived in Cape Town, unsure of what to expect from the schoolgirl crush I had on this country.

I was travelling with a group of event and conference planners from New Zealand, Australia and the US, and between seeing the many hotels and venues in Cape Town, in stolen fragments of conversation and in unexpected, unplanned moments (my first zebra, Table Mountain, my first Castle Black Label) I realised my love did not grow from the romantic South African clichés I had always carried.

Yes, the night sky (my same southern sky) driving back from the thrill of chasing down cheetahs was beyond stunning; yes, seeing strange, almost out-of-date, wild animals was an incomparable experience.

But for me, South Africa was and is its endurance, its resurrection, its dirty, powerful, beautiful history, present and future.

I was warned by a fellow writer to not admit this love to print. It certainly isn’t the cool distance of a journalist. But isn’t this what all good love affairs are: fool-mongering? Real in their unreality, impossible in their possibility, the attempt, the survival, the imagining, and just a bloody good chapter in your life?