Better than Hollywood

I’m sitting here eating a little piece of heaven in the shape of a dark chocolate combination mousse brownie cake that I picked up at the very first patisserie in Durban. Chateau Gateaux opened a few weeks ago and it happens to be located oh about three blocks from my flat. I’ve decided to couple this decadence with some visual indulgence by watching some Sex and the City. This of course reminds me of New York, so I think it’s high time to write about my recent little vacation with my New York man.

Now I have a warning. Part of this post will be the gushy gooey stuff of chick flicks. Because me oh my, was the time we spent together here just plain amazing. But interestingly, the past two weeks were more than just love happiness. Life continued for us and everyone in our respective worlds. Life, with all its ups, downs, beginnings and ends.

But before the heavy stuff, I’m going to get all the gag-worthy goo out first. So. Here goes. And don’t say I didn’t warn you. Although I live in Durban and my boyfriend’s ticket here was booked from New York to Durban, our many-month separation ended…in Johannesburg. How did this happen? Well, as it turns out, almost all international flights into South Africa have to go through Joburg. And it’s much cheaper to book national flights through the local budget airlines so I offered to book the Joburg-Durban leg of his trip. After I’d booked his seat, I forwarded him his e-ticket. What I didn’t forward him was MY e-ticket. Booked separately, but on the same day, same flight, also from Joburg to Durban.

See my plan was this. Given the general cheapness of internal flights and the fact that one of my newfound South African friends was celebrating her birthday in Joburg on the night before he landed, I decided I’d fly to Joburg for about…16 hours… to personally welcome my love to this country. I know, I know. I’m crazy. So Friday night after work, I made my way to the capital and spent the night celebrating with my friend. However, I left the bar a bit early because I had to get a good night’s rest for the next day. My plan for Saturday morning was to arrive at the airport just as B’s plane from New York was landing, check in for the flight back to Durban before he did and sweet talk whoever was at the counter into seating us together. Then when he got off the plane and had his domestic flight ticket printed, he’d be none the wiser that he’d already been seated next to me. Then he’d go straight to the gate and there I’d be waiting, with open arms.

At least that’s how I pictured it going down in my head. What ending up actually happening is that my taxi was late to pick me up so by the time I arrived at OR Tambo International Airport, B’s flight had landed and he’d already checked in. (Always the efficient traveler.) The thought of my plan not being executed to perfection made me panic and before I knew it, I was spilling my personal life story to the women at the ticket counter. I swear I thought I was a composed woman but man, I guess I can be pretty convincing as a half-crazed girlfriend. Because I spent the next three minutes of my life literally blabbing to these three women that the love of my life was somewhere in this airport, and by the way I haven’t seen him in five months because we’ve been living continents apart but somehow we’ve made it this long and oh my goodness, we simply MUST sit next to each other on this plane ride or else my epic plan will have utterly failed. Well, my emotional rant must have turned a boring Saturday morning into an airport soap opera because I had all three women leaning in towards me with sympathetic “Oh shame”s. (South Africans say “Shame” to everything from cute babies to neurotic people like me.) After listening to my story, the woman who was actually checking me in then goes, “Ok honey, let’s see. The flight’s pretty full but maybe there’s an available seat next to him.” All four of us then waited with bated breath until she looked up and with a literally triumphant smile stated, “The aisle seat next to him is free!” I swear, I don’t know which one of us cheered louder. I departed with my ticket in hand and three of the friendliest South African women telling me to “Go get your man, baby girl, go find him!”

Picture if you can, a Latina version of the Pink Panther and you’ll have an image of me. My heart was racing and I was excited as a kid in a candy store but I was still (for who knows what reason) trying to follow my original plan of surprising him at our gate. I didn’t want us to see each other from across security lines as we each put our bags into the scanner, because everyone knows there’s no romance in security scans. So instead I stealthily crept my way through the line, then through the domestic wing of the airport, trying subtly to hide behind columns, all the while stealing covert glances all around me. (Again, I know, I know… I’m crazy.) Well, I made it to our gate and…he wasn’t there. “Did he decide to wander?” I thought to myself. “Why can’t he just beeline to the gate?” (Clearly when I direct chick flicks in my head, I expect the unknowing party to follow my script.) I started getting restless and in a burst of inspiration, decided to send him a helpful little text message: “If you’re early and want something to do, there’s a great little coffee shop called Vida e Caffe you could go to.” Proud of myself for herding my unsuspecting prey to a place I could easily find him, I started to make my way up the stairs to said coffee shop. And that’s when we finally found each other. In the middle of a stair landing, with travelers streaming around us, we were finally together again.

I could go into detail about the next ten days but suffice it to say that it was just as perfect as those first few minutes on the stair landing. We spent the first weekend in Durban doing basically the same simple things we enjoy doing together everywhere else. To resurrect the chick flick analogy, you can picture these days as the part of the movie where they play music and stitch scenes together without allowing for dialogue so you can watch several days’ worth of action in a single song. Our movie would have a shot of B&D tanning on a beach flowing into a scene of B&D watching a movie, before segueing into a view of B&D at dinner. Nothing special, just plain wonderful.

Then on Monday, we flew to Cape Town. This is where the movie becomes downright sappy. We watched the sunset on Table Mountain on Valentine’s Day, enjoyed wine and chocolate pairings in Stellenbosch and lounged/napped in the famous Kierstenbosch Gardens. We posed with penguins on the beach and ate delicious Malay-style curry at the home of some wonderful family friends. Then on Friday, we flew to Joburg to stay with another family I’ve become friends with through my boyfriend’s family. (My boyfriend’s family connections in South Africa have truly hooked me up.) After a day of driving around the greater Joburg area and getting lost in the middle of nowhere when my trusty GPS lost signal for hours, we were ready for our safari.

I still can’t decide what the best part of that safari was. There was of course the fact that we got to stay at a luxury lodge for a THIRD of the price because of a fantastic website that heavily discounts pricey lodges and hotels if you book within 7-14 days of traveling. Then there was the fact that we were the only ones on our first ranger-led game drive so we got our first bush sunset all to ourselves. Oh incidentally, we were also the only ones on this drive when an elephant raging with hormones (technically called an elephant “in musth” which essentially means desperate to mate) passed so close to our open-air jeep that we could have reached out and touched it…. had we, you know, wanted to die. Scary? Actually quite terrifying because of something that had happened just a week prior in the same game reserve we were at:

http://www.2oceansvibe.com/2011/02/23/aroused-elephant-flips-car-in-pilanesberg-game-reserve-updated/

But, exhilarating? Hell yes. (Incidentally, this is obviously a great story only because....we're ok...)

If I had to pick though, I’d say my favorite part about our safari experience was the ranger assigned to us. He led us on all three of our game drives and boy was he a character. Not sure if this picture does him justice so I’ll try to supplement it with a description. He’s clearly a tall, large man with the face of a baby which created the illusion of a grizzly bear with a teddy bear head.

He told us that he was new to the lodge and thus didn’t yet have a uniform. In retrospect, I now believe this was a subtle attempt to excuse the fact that he may have worn the same set of khaki shirt and shorts at least the 3 days we saw him. Interestingly, though he perspired profusely on our tours, he never sme

lled….How he managed this is just one of the many unanswered questions I have about that man. Another mystery to me is how a guy who looks like he should play rugby for a living (and indeed he apparently used to play non-professionally) goes from being an athlete to a semi-professional motorcross driver to a hairstylist for South African fashion models before finally settling down on a game reserve as a safari photographer/bird watching aficionado. One of these job descriptions is NOT like the others and I loved it and him. I love people who do not fit into pre-conceptualized boxes mainly because I like to fancy myself as one of those people.

In any case, I guess it would take someone like him to get me excited about everything from every little brightly colored bird in the bush to whatever dung we happened to pass by. (I kid you not, at first the man at was stopping for nearly every piece of poop on the ground, explaining how he knew it was a certain animal’s and why the coloring was such.) Sounds weird? Well yes, at first I was semi-annoyed. But after spending hours with him and his uncanny ability to accurately guess where the best animal sightings would be even when more senior rangers were taking other routes, I became a believer in his methods. Take for instance, the last day of our safari, when I wanted to sleepily strangle him because he was itching to go before even the scheduled 5:30 AM departure (oh yes, 5:30 IN THE MORNING) but then we rounded a corner before any other lodge guests had ventured out and bam! Three huge male lions just lounging on the road. My camera doesn’t have night vision and since it was essentially still night time, I don’t have the best pictures unfortunately. But I’m sure the image of that breathtaking scene will be seared in our memories for a long time.

So it was a great safari, to say the least, and a perfect ending to a perfect trip with the perfect man. (I was hoping to say perfect at least three times in one sentence so that was definitely intentional.) However, as you might recall from the introduction to this post, I mentioned that this trip showed me how life continues even when we feel like we’ve escaped into heaven for a few days. Both our worlds moved on and we both had to deal with work-related stressors while we were together in South Africa. Deadlines continued to exist, emails had to be answered, calls taken and HIV didn’t stop killing children just because I was happy and away from the hospital. In fact, as we were on our way to the aforementioned perfect safari, I received some devastating news.

Remember that little patient I spoke about in a previous post? The teeny tiny smelly little girl with scabies who was the first official subject I enrolled in my personal study? In less time than it took for my boyfriend and I to fall in love all over again, she came down with meningitis, got admitted to the hospital and passed away. I write it like that because that’s exactly what it felt like. On the one hand, I was having some of the best days of my entire year abroad, happier than I’d ever been, but when this news hit me, I literally felt like I’d been slapped.

It’s not like I hadn’t prepared myself for the possibility and in fact, inevitability of this. My study enrolls some of the sickest little children in the world. They’re severely malnourished and contracted HIV at birth; they are thus fighting two of the major causes of infant mortality in the world. So I knew this could and would happen. Patients I knew and got close to would die and to be quite frank, it’s one of the reasons I came here. As anyone who knows me well can attest to, it is quite easy to make me sad (I’ve been known to cry during cheesy credit card and life insurance commercials. Embarrassing? Yes. I only mention this to elucidate the pullability of my heart strings.) In any case, given what I knew about myself and given that I knew I was choosing a career path that would place sick and dying children in my path, I knew I had to do something drastic to strengthen my heart. So I came to one of the countries with the highest infant mortality rate. Trial by fire, I thought to myself.

And it’s not like I’ve been here 5 months and not seen a child die. Unfortunately, that above statistic exists for a reason and a good number of the children we’ve had in the wards end up dying. But what I never predicted would happen (and yes I understand my naiveté now), is that this trial by fire would continue when I was on vacation. Don’t ask me why, it just never crossed my mind that one of my little subjects—and I only have six so far—would go and die on me while I was purposely trying to create emotional and physical distance from them.

It was a valuable lesson. I learned to mourn while living my life, to grieve but then come back to the happy moments that were playing out in my present. I suppose I’ll get better at it with the years, but I’m still struggling to find a balance for myself. Part of me understands that in order to emotionally survive decades of sick children, I shouldn’t feel like I’ve been physically hit, slapped or punched every time a child dies….

Or shouldn’t I? I can’t think of a greater tragedy for the world than when a child dies and shouldn’t someone feel the greatest of pain when it happens? Yes, I understand I can’t be the one to feel the greatest of pain all the time. But maybe it’s ok and in fact necessary to my humanity to feel a painful jolt every time. And I realize now that these lowest lows can and may come tightly interlaced with the highest of highs.

At the end of my trip, as I settled back at home still riding the high of reaffirmed love, I received one final painful jolt. My family informed me that my golden retriever, my beloved Golden Rose whom we’d had for 11 years, was diagnosed with inoperable cancer while I was away and had been put down. As I cried for her, I realized man, God is really trying to drive this point home for me.

Not quite the chick flick ending you were expecting? Yeah I wasn’t expecting it either. But I think this is better than Hollywood. Happiness and sadness are entwined in life. One does not prevent the other and I can’t change that. So I might as well embrace it.