Wednesday, 23 July 1986: Liquor-Lubricated Ravings from a Port Elizabeth Hotel Room

Grand Hotel, 9:45PM

Ah fuck man, smashed again.  Half a liter of red wine at dinner and two scotch on the rocks since.  Hear ringing in my ears.  It’s lonely and too early for bed.  Earlier tonight, I tried to have dinner at a Chinese place, but they aren’t licensed.  Means I couldn’t have wine with dinner, old sport, unless I brought my own.  But the cocksucking drankwinkels (bottle stores) in this bloody city close at 6:30PM.  At 6:30, I was jogging through St. George’s Park.  Anyway, I would up at an Italian restaurant that was licensed.  The red wine for R2.50/carafe was decent and plentiful.  The food was decent, but they played this god-awful, American country and western music on their tape machine.  Was it for the benefit of this American diner?  There were only a handful of people in the place.  Since dinner I’ve hit a couple of bars. 

I’m not sure why white parents in Port Elizabeth would be concerned that non-white children might use the same playground equipment as their offspring.  Would non-white kids pass along an African disease to their kids?  Oh, I forgot – the races are happier when they’re separated.  Or, at least, that’s what South Africans were taught by their eminent pseudo-psychologist, Hendrik Verwoerd.

    

Coloured honeys are outasight.  Saw three of them at the Grand Hotel bar just before I came back to my room.  Stimulated the beast in me.  The fucking Afrikaner men like those guys on the train last week must be out of their minds not to crave coloured flesh.  Hot coloured women are on a par with hot Chicanas back home. 

Not much else to report on today.  I’ve been deliberately avoiding people so I can get more writing and photography done.  And I continue to be sick of talking politics with these people.  Like this morning, I’m taking pix of some historical homes.  This guy offers me the use of his front step to get a better angle.  That’s nice.  Then he starts talking photography.  He has a Pentax ME.  Tells me how he shot panoramas of PE and Cape Town.  That’s cool.  But then the guy has to slip in that he’s not a South African and doesn’t believe in apartheid.  But he worked here for General Motors for 36 years.  Shit – I get tired of these people and their apologies.  Does everyone’s defensiveness and apologetic demeanor indicate that they know they have to change and soon?  They all know something is wrong – even those jerky railway police I talked to on the train last Friday night.  No, you can’t fool ol’ Will.

Historic homes, Port Elizabeth

 

Off to the “Garden Route” tomorrow before winding up in Cape Town.  Have enjoyed my time here in Port Elizabeth.  I needed to be myself for a couple days to get centered again.

Fuck, what if I get shot and no one can read the handwritten scribblings in this notebook (but really, why would they want to anyway?)  Mrs. Jordan, my 5th grade teacher back in Warwick, Rhode Island was right.  I deserved a “D” in handwriting and it hasn’t improved all that much in 29 years.

 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thursday-Friday, 5-6 June 1986: An Amazing Employment Opportunity!!!

Image
June 6, 10:00 AM, Thornhill Government Guest Flats, Gaborone, Botswana Yesterday, I stumbled into an amazing, serendipitous opportunity.   While I had found my barroom conversations in Gaborone with the two British accountants very informative, I wanted to get some additional perspective on Botswana from local residents.   So, I took a walk to the campus of the University of Botswana hoping to meet a geography professor or two for a chat.   I stopped at the administration building and explained to the receptionist that I was an American geographer travelling through Botswana and was wondering if they had a geography department at the university.   No, they didn’t but they have an environmental science department.   I figured that was close enough having worked in environmental consulting for several years.   Were any of the environmental science professors around that I could perhaps meet?   The receptionist wasn’t sure because final exams were about...
Read more

Sunday, 12 October 1986: Extolling the Ex-Pat Lifestyle

Image
Gaborone, Botswana Look, it’s not that life here in Botswana is all that exciting, but there is something indescribable about living abroad.   It’s like my friend, Karen Collins from Lewistown, Montana, said recently when she was driving me back from a Monday night Hash House Harriers run out in the bush:   “People back in the States have no appreciation for the challenges of just getting by here like having to deal with getting stopped three times in one night by army roadblocks.”   Yes, the average American would be totally freaked out or pissed off by the automatic-rifle-toting Botswana Defense Force soldiers who had just stopped us and asked us to open up our packs.   We took it in stride and had a very polite, friendly interchange with the soldiers.   By the way, the reason for all the roadblocks was that we were driving not far from the South African border. The Botswana government is concerned about South African commando raids to go after ANC guerril...
Read more

Monday, 23 February 1987: Following a Long, Scenic Route to Pietermaritzburg

Image
February 24, 9:00 PM, Hotel Walter, Bergville, Natal Province, South Africa   Early yesterday morning, I rented the cheapest car I could find in Durban:  A Mazda 323 hatchback.  At R43.50 per day (including insurance, sales tax, and unlimited mileage, it was still a bit expensive for my budget.  I immediately headed southwest from Durban along the N2 freeway, which mostly runs a couple miles inland of the Indian Ocean coastline.   After 60 kms, I turned away from the coast on a two-lane highway which wound through sugar cane fields and African rondovals (round African residential huts).   The verdant and very hilly landscape was spectacular and quite a contrast to dry and mostly flat Botswana.   However, the bleak and foggy weather sucked for photography.   Lush landscape near Umzinto, Natal.  Sugarcane fields in the background.   I reached Ixopo near the Transkei “border”, a town made famous in South Africa by Alan Paton’s best-...
Read more