Umkomaas, South Africa

Tuesday - Sunday, April 19 - 24, 2005:

Umkomaas had very little in store for me. It was boring. Really boring. Excrutiatingly, painfully, disgustingly, dishearteningly, maddeningly and woefully boring. Were it not for the high quality of the diving trips during the earlier parts of the day, I probably would have lost my sanity altogether. As it was, I succumbed to afternoons and evenings spent watching dreary South African soap operas (just as trashy as they are in the US and South America, if not trashier) and some very special and moving episodes of Oprah in my charmingly cockroachy hotel room.

I pretty much wanted to die.

Umkomaas is bleak and depressingly ugly. But perhaps I am being too kind. There is nothing to do, I mean nothing to do, save head out diving (which really doesn't count as doing something in Umkomaas and which will be covered in a different blog entry) and avoid the occassional would-be mugger --- the sort of guy who would ordinarily try his best to stop you on a lonely street in broad, sweltering daylight and make a grab at your pocket, but for the fact that he is either too drunk or too drugged out of his mind to really work up the motivation to go ahead and do it. So instead he follows you a bit here and there and makes hungry puppy-faces at you from a distance.

There were only two restaurants in walking range to speak of (the ones I won't speak of are the sorts of places in which you are skinned 3.2 seconds after walking in) and one was attached to my hotel, the Sea Fever Lodge --- which was convenient but not particularly exciting when you crave nothing more than a walk from one place to another place (hotel to restaurant) as an activity to alleviate the boredom. The other restaurant was too far away to safely walk to at night, which meant that I pretty much always ate lunch there and dinner next to the hotel. People quickly became familiar with my face, hunched over a copy of Catch-22 and a beer bottle (or three).

Coffee shops? No. Internet Cafes? Nix. Sea Fever Diving used to have an internet cafe, but the computers had all been stolen recently, in the middle of the night. After asking around and being given multiple pieces of wildly inaccurate advice, I found that there was one computer available for use at a check-cashing joint run by a half-plastic woman in her early 70s who spent most of the time leaving me alone in her office trying to get the computer (from approximately 1993) to load more than one web page per fifteen minute (and $1.50) interval while she went off to get her nails and hair done up in the salon next door. She reminded me of the "cat lady" in New York City --- the one who has had so much plastic surgery that she looks like a cross between Zsa Zsa Gabor and Tigger the Tiger.

Otherwise there is little to mention. I watched some particularly bad television, as mentioned above. I squashed an average of one cockroach, sometimes two, each night. I read Catch-22 and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. Once, when I was reading the former novel in the Sea Fever restaurant over dinner one night, a bearded, hippiesque man in his 40s hopped off his bar stool and stumbled over to me to declare that I was reading "one of the greatest books of all times" and that, so far as he was concerned, the book was "the Bible."

"I think its a bit funnier than the Bible," I quipped.

"Are you kidding?!!" he shouted, twisting his lips into a drunken scowl. "The Bible is freaking hilarious!" He then staggered back to his stool and began a discussion with one of his friends over how Noah ever managed to get penguins aboard the Ark when "everybody knows" that there were never any penguins in ancient Canaan/Israel/Palestine. His equally drunk and philosophical friend postulated that perhaps the Biblical events in question transpired toward the end of the last Ice Age and was promptly cursed out and called a moron and "crazy" by the hippie and two or three men sitting next to him. I was hoping a fight would break out, but there was no such luck and I went back to reading my book.

About the only thing I was happy about was how I had a microwave and mini-fridge in my hotel room. This enabled me to load up on sandwich goods and microwaveable foods at the nearby QuickSpar supermarket (which I would wander about aimlessly from time to time because it was something to do) and prepare a random snack or meal now and again, for the first time in about 7 months. Never mind that these snacks and meals were no more inspiring than soggy ham and cheese sandwiches with spicy mayo --- it was a feeling of accomplishment, however slight, amidst the drudgery of it all.

I'm happy to say the diving at Aliwal Shoal was nearly worth the suffering through Umkomaas. In fact, the contrast between the diving and the time in town was so great that I can't write about them both in the same entry. In other words, the details on that will follow separately.