For the penultimate weekend of Zithulele 2010, Sam and I, together with Liz, Lisa and the entire Gaunt clan made our way to Bulungula for a chilled weekend by the beach, enjoying some good food and life without electricity or mobile phone signal. Due to the ongoing saga of Liz's broken car [which, after 2 months, is still being not-fixed by the East London branch of the International Department of Inefficiency] we ended up having to take Kate's car. (Before I launch into a description of this car I would like to point out that we were all EXTREMELY grateful for having a form of transport for the weekend!)
Anyway, so this car has no shocks whatsoever and the road to Bulungula is, shall we say, not conducive to a smooth drive in any case. With no seatbelts to hold us down, we improvised by cramming all of our luggage in on top of and around us, creating a special sort of Transkei seatbelt. Although, to be honest, I think that if we were to crash at any sort of speed, the car would just have fallen into two pieces given that at one point Lisa had to reach up and screw the roof back on! The four of us enjoyed the next hour or so of being tossed around inside a very noisy motorised tin can immensely, probably because we were all so hyped up on the near death adrenalin rush that the experience induced.
[Okay, maybe I exaggerated that a little bit.]
I won't describe what Bulungula is like again, but I will mention that our good friend Ma Bru and his legendary 'Beat Tone Tone' drumming was still hanging around there, and had grown himself a beautiful afro, just to complete his chilled-out look. After catching up ['Hi, bru, howzit? then he walked off], all of us sat around for the evening chatting and had some traditional samp and beans [umngqusho] for dinner. The sky at night here - and particularly at Bulungula where there are no lights whatsoever – is AWESOME. I could look at the stars all night, in fact, even while I was stood outside brushing my teeth, I saw four shooting stars. Why would you ever want to live in the city?
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| The Gaunts' epic beach maze |
The next morning saw us all down by the sea for beach games, Gaunt style. Most people are content with random sand castles and the like, but Ben and Taryn drew a giant maze in the sand that kept all of us [from Elijah, who is 2, Grace, 4, Josh, 6, me, 18 and Liz and Lisa who are...other ages] entertained for a long while. After some enormous toasties that were bigger than some of our heads, we just chilled for the rest of the day. I ended up spending a good few hours drawing random pictures [for some reason of Christmas themed objects] with Josh and Grace. For some reason, a whole group fo local kids also decided that they wanted to join in so were all crowded round my seat watching me ineptly draw a picture of Father Christmas...possibly one of the most bizarre moments of the last 7 months! None of them had any paper to draw on so resorted to drawing on their hands and showing me what they had drawn, fun times.
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| My art draws in some adoring local fans... |
When had exhausted all the possible Christmas drawings, someone got the drums out so I had a brief reprieve before continuing my role as child entertainer [something I'm willing to embrace until my mental age reaches double figures] on the beach where after much discussion, the Gauntlets decided they wanted to dig sand baths. To be fair, I did most of the digging while Josh used his magic powers to keep the tide away, Elijah threw sand and made cute noises and Grace did...whatever Grace does. Either way, it was a great afternoon, lots of fun :)
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