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

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-selling 1948 novel, Cry the Beloved Country.  I couldn’t have driven into Transkei (the first South African black “homeland” to become nominally independent) even had I wanted to.  The woman who rented me the Mazda said I couldn’t take the car into Transkei because they had had a car stolen there recently.  The police had been totally uncooperative in getting the car back for them.  They had found the car, she said, but some local guy said it was his.  So the police said there was nothing they could do.  I know it was mean but I couldn’t resist a little dig:  “I guess that’s what happens when you give part of your country away,” I noted.  As an American it seems totally amazing that South Africa can give independence to these black homelands when nearly 350,000 Union soldiers died in the U.S. 125 years ago in order to keep our country together.   

My circuitous route through green hills of Natal from Durban to Pietermaritzburg.

 

From Ixopo, I drove 80 kms northeast to Pietermaritzburg, a city of some 225,000 residents (excluding the neighboring black townships) and the capital of Natal Province.  Along the way, the curvaceous highway crossed the deeply incised, dramatic valley of the Umkomaas River.  Even with the fog and drizzle, the scenery was quite impressive.  Native villages and little farm plots clung to the hillsides within a patchwork of lush forests.

The Umkomass River flows through a deep canyon south of Richmond, Natal.

  

Among my hobbies is a passionate, nerdy stamp collecting impulse.  I wanted to attend the monthly meeting of the Maritzburg Philatelic Society in Pietermaritzburg.  It was my first chance to attend a South African stamp club meeting, and I was able to discuss prospects for selling or trading South African covers (stamped envelopes) sent to America which I had brought with me in exchange for American covers sent to South Africa.   One of the club’s members, who is probably in his 60s, has a bunch of covers that he received from the U.S. when he was a kid.  He has a son studying music in Gaborone and said he will bring them for me to look at the next time he visits Botswana.  Otherwise, the meeting was totally boring.  There was no program, only the annual election of officers and other dreadful administrative garbage.  They had a big argument over whether to raise the dues by R3.00 per year while I sat in a corner with my road maps and guide books planning the next three days’ travels.

Anglo-Zulu War Memorial (left) and 1852 Presbyterian Church (center), Church Street, Pietermaritzburg.

 

I spent the night at one of the crumbiest dives I’ve stayed in yet in South Africa.  It was the cheapest Pietermaritzburg hotel listed in my guidebook.  [My typing has just been interrupted by a little froggie hopping around my room which I helped out the door.]  The hotel was just north of downtown in what appeared to be an Indian area.  The Indian manager said he’d give me a double room which normally rents for R22 for only R15.  He stuck the money in his pocket and didn’t even charge me sales tax.  Most of the hotel patrons were black which doesn’t bother me since I live in the midst of noisy black students at the University of Botswana.  The sheets were clean but appeared to be at least 20 years old.  The hotel had a slightly strange, indescribable smell.  Every once in a while, I’d hear Africans out in the hall or adjoining rooms yelling at each other in Zulu or some other undecipherable language.  I’m trying to conserve finances but this lodging was a bit too Spartan.  

Pietermaritzburg’s Old Colonial Building, completed in 1901.