Warner Beach , South Africa

Sunday - Monday, April 17 - 18, 2005:

I finally flew from Cape Town to Durban on Sunday the 17th. The flight with Kulula Airlines (this time minus the cows all over the airplane) was smooth and my window seat on the right gave me great views of almost the entire south South African coastline for hundreds of miles including the "Garden Route," vast farmlands, and abruptly rising green mountain ranges.

I got into Durban at 4:30, where I was met by Jeff, who was temporarily managing the hostel I had booked at while its owner was off on vacation. We drove 25 minutes south of the airport (the center of Durban is about 10 minutes to the north) through a vast and homogenous suburbia enclosed by high walls with barbed wire on top and views of the deeply indigo Indian Ocean peering out on the left between the spaces separating high-rise apartment complexes from one another.

The hostel, Blue Sky Mining Lodge (to those who are wondering: yes, it's named after the Midnight Oil song "Blue Sky Mine"), was, Jeff explained, empty and entirely "mine" for the evening. A group of 20 people or so had all checked out earlier, after a raucous week occupying the place. Since I had booked a dorm room in order to meet people, I was a little bit disappointed. On the other hand, when I got to the hostel and saw its backyard garden with swimming pool, set on a hill overlooking the ocean and shaded by palm and coconut trees, I quickly got over any reservations. After a beer with Jeff, I took a swim, then settled into the living room to watch TV while the resident chef, Jason, a friend of the owner hailing from the Seychelle Islands, prepared dinner. Fortunately, our tastes in food couldn't have been more similar and so I had some incredible and incredibly spicy home-cooked tuna curry with chilli peppers on top for under $5. Since I hadn't met anybody from the Seychelles before, I was curious to hear Jason tell me that he only spent 3-4 months a year there, sometimes less. "Its paradise, man --- but there's nothing to do... Nothing..."

This sentiment was also proving to be true of the Blue Sky Mining Lodge. After dinner I watched a little TV and got back to reading Catch-22, but there wasn't a chance of being able to walk around outside at night and, anyway, there wasn't anything to see (other than the tip of a mugger's knife) as we were pretty much in the middle of a suburban nowhere. Realizing that I would quickly go insane if I had to spend more than another day there (maybe two or three days given the high quality of the cooking), I asked Jeff to see if he could book me for scuba diving the next day. It was a Sunday evening and he seemed doubtful of my chances, but put in a few calls nevertheless and found a company (the company I wanted to use, in fact) that could come pick me up in the morning and take me down to the town of Umkomaas some 15 minutes away where most of the diving in the area is based.

By 8:30 PM I went back to the dorm room, which was enormous, and settled into the one queen-sized bed it had to offer, which was built out of an old Land Rover's chassis, oddly enough, but very comfortable.

At 10:00 AM on Monday, an employee of the "Sea Fever" dive center picked me up from the hill below the hostel and took me on a madly driven ride to the company's facilities in Umkomaas, which translates roughly to "River of Whales," in the local (possibly Zulu?) African language (I have a hard time keeping the languages straight because, apart from English and Afrikaans, South Africa has 9 other "official languages," all of them native African ones). Sure enough, the town sits on a hill over a long stretch of beach which is bisected by the large Umkomaas River. Rough waves crash continuously against the shore and diving off of semi-inflatable "rubber ducks" requires some serious hanging-on during the ride out, as the boats are thrashed around on the incoming surf while motoring off to Aliwal Shoal, several kilometers away.

Aliwal Shoal is one of the sites ranked among the "best in the world" by the late Jacques Cousteau. My one dive there that day had me questioning this assessment (as the visibility was fairly murky and the marine life fairly average) until the end of the dive when a large green turtle and perhaps 15 or 20 sand sharks (guitarfish) were spotted resting on the bottom some 40 feet down. Resembling a cross between sharks and stingrays, they were very skittish and would swim off several meters each time they noticed us. Nevertheless, it was possible to get fairly close to some of the larger ones (nearly 6 feet) if approached quietly and from behind.

Back at the hostel, I had another fantastic dinner and another quiet evening with the whole place to myself. Since I was getting quite bored, I made plans with Sea Fever to stay at their affiliated lodge right next to the dive shop, starting the next day. Little did I know what Umkomaas would have in store for me...

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An Unsolicited Quote from Catch-22:

"Won't you fight for your country?" Colonel Korn demanded... "Won't you give up your life for Colonel Cathcart and me?"

"What's that?" [Yossarian] exclaimed. "What have you and Colonel Cathcart got to do with my country? You're not the same."

"How can you separate us?" Colonel Korn inquired with ironical tranquility.

"That's right," Colonel Cathcart cried emphatically. "You're either for us or against us. There's no two ways about it."

"I'm afraid he's got you," added Colonel Korn. "You're either for us or against your country. It's as simple as that."

"Oh, no, Colonel. I don't buy that.

Colonel Korn was unruffled. "Neither do I, frankly, but everyone else will. So there you are."