A whole other mountain....

Hasty Tasty. Its a little Indian style fastfood place much like the roti shops in the Oriental Plaza in Joburg except this ones tucked under a coke sign at the edge of a strip of concrete shops along the main road in Iringa, Tanzania. The town's bizzare straddling an impressive mountain range bang in the middle of Tanzania. Founded by German missionaries 100 years ago its a cool mountain top town with great personality.

Tonight sitting in Hasty Tasty we were joined by a texan missionary family that's lived in Tanzania for ten years...across from us, and the place only had four tables, sat a german missionary family, 3 white blonde little girls and their folks...been here for 17 years....I've never met a misionary before today.

The road up to Iringa snakes through some of the most beautiful little valleys I've seen before. Strips of it felt just like the lowveld and so felt like home, others where oceans of Boababs. It felt like a world inverted, like being underground and if you flipped the world over the trees stood tall as red woods. I've also never seen bush as 'alive' as those boababs, each its own shape. 'Like odd interpretive dancers', said the american I'm working with.

The road also ran through a nature reserve, got hooted at by trucks while we tried to see an elephant cow and her calf on the road side. Wonderful. Wonderful. And great people doing great things. 'Safi'...'Lekker'....

the space between...

The space between the tower and the mountain...between this post and the last one...its also the title of Dave Matthews song. Of course it is.

Haven't written since the attacks because as it spread to Cape Town I got a little twisted by it, it made my stuff too melodramatic. It sucked.

But I'm back! First up was the getting down. The drive is testimony to South African ingenuity because it is a planet on it’s on this own this place. I’ve not been here long but I’ll tell you that much. The N1 South to Cape Town may just as well be a highway to the moon. Stuff NASA, it SAMRA that impresses me. Heaven alone knows how they got the highway in here, or the voortrekkers got those ossewaens out.

It cost me about 2k to switch universes. That’s 3 tanks of petrol, 1 Nando’s pita, 1 wimpy burger (at 2am), and 17 packets of enerjellies. I LOVE enerjellies. I was meant to sleep in Kimberly but I couldn’t even find the big hole let alone a decent place to sleep so I kept driving.

I slept trucker style under the dark, star pierced karoo sky for two hours instead of forking out for a farm bed and tiger oats…sorry mom.

The beauty of that decision was a badly creaked neck, a spectacular sunrise in the hex river valley and a traffic jam at ratanga junction at 8 in the morning.

I drove into town, smelling bad and looking worse, found my new housemate who I’d first found on the internet, picked up my keys and arrived home. “Hello Cape Town” I said from my new little deck with a harbour view one way and a mountain view the other.

I’ve been out on that deck a few times since. Gotten very wet all but once, and in summer I’m putting in a monster plastic pool and getting wet properly. Yay! Joburg’s still home but so far CT will do pig, it’ll do. More to come. (I'll spare you the gory details of three hours of RSG in the northern cape...except to say that Radio Plays rock, and they reminded me of my ouma.)