#Evening lights bathes the hills above Lubanzi beach, Coffee
Bay is a nine-hour drive from Drakensberg
“I couldn’t live in a South Africa that didn’t have this,”
says Dayne Topkin, shouldering his surfboard across an arc of sand shared with
some offbeat beach bums: a donkey, several goats and two cows, browsing through
a dune stacked with milkwood trees. The Indian Ocean is gathering itself into
some impressive aquatic walls as it rushes shore-wards between Coffee Bay’s
grass-topped cliffs, but Dayne-a gap-year student from Port Elizabeth-hasn’t
just come to the Wild Coast for the surfing.
“This place isn’t about the beach, it’s about the walk to
the beach.” The cows in the sand, the dog that follows him everywhere, the farmer
he just helped to re-thatch a rondavel: “It’s like an escape to my nation’s
past-not the recent history, with all its ugliness, but a deeper past that kind
of defines us all. It’s weird: this feels totally alien to me but at the same
time totally familiar.”
Blustery and rollingly green, the Wild Coast seems like a
tropical Donegal. In a land dominated by the scrubby Karoo, it is a place of
bracing singularities: just as the rains are coming to Cape Town, here in the
Eastern Cape they’re into the dry season. The track south out of Coffee Bay
bumps through scenes of rural timelessness. Xhosa women in kaledeidoscopic
dresses carry butts of water on their head: hunched men plan maize in the rich,
red earth. Grids of shiny new mud bricks are laid out to dry, and children
greet the rare passing of a vehicle with awed excitement.
“When my friend come over from Jo’burg they usually freak
out,” says Aidan Lawrence, stamping a bare foot on the accelerator of his
ancient jeep. “They live behind razor wire and electric fences. I don’t even
have a front door.” The vehicle bucks wildly onwards down the coast. “In south
Africa, you drive on the left of the road. Here we drive on what’s left of the
road.”
A few miles on Aidan,
owner of the off-grid Wild Lubanzi Backpackers guesthouse, points out the Hole
in the Wall a perfectly hemispherical tunnel that the restless Indian Ocean has
bored through base of an offshore island. “We have a lot of ionist Christiants
here, and they do their baptisms in the hole. And we have a lot of hosa shamans,
sangomas, who climb to the top the island and sacrifice goats.”
Beyond fishing an ceremony, the interface between sea and
land has no appeal to the locals. “When I built this place on top of a cliff,
the villagers thought I was crazy,” says
Aidan. “They told me the roof could blow off and the waves would never let met
sleep.” One of his geese honks suriously at a neighbour’s cow inveigling us
snout through the banana palms and riffid-like wild aloes. “They were right, of
course, but then so was I.”
The late sun has turned the sea below glorious, come-hither
turquoise; half a mile but, its gently billowing surface is punctured they
spout of a humpback whale. Aidan tolds his arms and surveys that vindicating
view, with the whimsical smile of a man who still can’t believe his luck.
Wild Lubanzi is accessible only by four-wheel drive, has no
mains water and runs on solar power. There are double rooms as well as a
dormitory. Hearty casseroles and risottos use herbs and vegetables grown on the
property, for more detail about this wild lubanzi backpackers see the web site
: wildlubanzi.co.za.
