ALMOST MUGGED AT MAGWA

IN JULIA'S WORDS

The woman we asked for the road to Magwa Falls near Lusikisiki in the Eastern Cape gave directions that were quite wonderful. 
In succulent English she identified landmarks in detail – the school, iFektri, the small shop, the triangle of grass – all of which we were to drive past. She said to stay on the road until we reached the waterfall. I love that approach: the listener striving to memorise the info, and each elaboration entirely irrelevant to finding the way. Just jigga straaaaight.

She was resting under a tree next to tea plantations psychedelic and expansive. Yes, she said, the Eastern Cape has long been where Glen Tea and Lipton’s and who knows who else have their tea plantations. And we thought you had to go to Kenya or Uganda to see such things.

The road ended at the rim of an incredible slash in the Earth where a dozy river fell in a lazy mist over the edge. Below where we parked our car, we could see under the hot summer sun leisurely rockpools and this coast's choice of scrumptious lushness surrounding it. Also, we could see a few young men leaning lizardly on the rocks.

Magwa's delicate curtain of water

Slowly we meandered downhill towards the river and the edge of the world to see for ourselves the waterfall. But immediately one of the men – probably the oldest, mabbe 23 or so – attached himself to us in a demi-goofed manner, mumbling vague keywords like “community tourism” and “guide” and “car guard” as he stumbled wherever we went.
He had this odd habit of repeatedly lifting up his red T-shirt and tucking the end under his chin to reveal his stomach. The other four followed us only with their eyes.

I was immediately prickly and on edge. No, thanks, don’t need a guide. No – oh, ok be the car guard – but PLEASE leave us alone. ALONE! PLEASE!

“I. G. N. O. R. E.”, advised Rehana as she and Picca led the way across the rock pools.

And I tried, but the mumbling and stumbling at our side continued, and my snappy responses got more snap, until FINALLY the semi-sane grunglet made his way up to our car.

We found a path and indeed followed it to where we could look down into the incredible chasm where the softly descending water catches the sun in rude rainbows. But I was distracted – by my fear of these boys.  
I chastised myself for being paranoid, for worrying that we were shortly to become statistics, for thinking of the woman who had given us directions at the tea plantations as someone who would become a witness and remember the two women in the BRC whom she pointed towards their shocking experience. 
Or our demise? After all, the boys may be scruffy and languidly rude, but there was no other reason to expect trouble. Besides them being South African men – sometimes called predators – and us two women alone.

“No Jules, stop worrying so,” said Rehana. “We’d have heard if tourists have been attacked here, it doesn’t go un-noticed.”

“Yes,” I grudgingly agreed. “But their last victims are the ones still listed as missing.”

So I tussled with my fears and urged myself to sink into what should be a gorgeous day’s day among warm rockpools under summer’s sun. We’d have a picnic on the rocks.

See that shady spot on the far side? We had plans 

We crossed the river again towards our car where we would make sandwiches before finding a semi-shaded perch on a rockpool’s edge. The red T-shirt dude had attached himself to two other mlungu women who had arrived and they’d gone off to see the falls. I didn’t envy them their guide.
But as we crossed the river two other of the men – actually just teenagers, scrawny as well as scruffy – roused themselves to follow us. The one with the black shirt was particularly in our faces, making a point to be exactly in our path as we made our way across the rocks.

“Name?” he asked, rudely.

“Frankenstein,” I eventually replied.

“What?”
“Frankenstein.”

A baffled silence. Hoo-fucking-ray.

“From?”

“Johannesburg.”

A mocking chorus of “Jo-hanness-burrrg” echoed us from all four wankers as we climbed to our car.

Still the two followed us up the hill, the one with the white vest less obnoxious than the black shirted bugger, but fixing us with this weird kind of leering grin (a gleer?).

At the car we had a very strange stand-off with them, as the two just hung around and gleered at us, poking odd statements our way here and there, while we tuned out and stared in the middle distance waiting for them to go so we could unpack our food and make sandwiches. FINALLY, all four drifted off.

“Yuck,” I said to Rehana as we prepared our picnic.

“Assholes,” agreed Rehana. “Let’s go down to the rock pools and eat our sandwiches while there’s no one staring at us.”

We found our spot; I relished the musical gushes and tinkles of the water as it made its way in a game of liquid hopscotch from pool to pool and then over the chasm’s edge. 
I was only just starting to munch my lunch in that kind of mesmerised mist that heat and water can create when I saw movement out of the corner of my dream: yup, a black shirt and white vest, the two serial fools coming down the hill. And not just towards the pools generally; towards us specifically.

This time my fears wouldn’t be doused.

“We’ve got company,” I told Rehana.

“I know,” she said. “Ignore, please.”

In their shambling, sauntering way they approached across the rocks behind us. For a while I did ignore, my back to them, sandwich in hand. But I started paying close attention when White Vest stopped about 5 metres from us, and Black Shirt walked slowly closer and to the right towards where Rehana sat.

It was at this point that Picca, too, started paying attention. She extended her sausage self menacingly, raised her enormously frightening hackles, bared her teeth and growled.

Very unlike this docile doggy. And very impressive.

Gleering White Vest, his hands behind his back, stopped. When I said, “Get him Picca, bite him!”, he took a very large step back.

But it all got very adrenalin-rush when Rehana suddenly went from sitting to alert-standing, glaring at White Vest and saying, “He’s got a knife behind his back. I saw the handle. You’ve got a knife behind your back,” she accused the gleering, shifty-eyed half-wit.

By then I was on my feet too, and Rehana and I were staring at White Vest, wondering what the fuck. And what the fuck next if he did pull out his knife and approach us?

His hands still behind his back, White Vest was now clearly trying to tuck his knife into the pocket of his pants.

Picca growled on. Then shrugged off her fierce impression and reverted again to the love-the-world doggy we’re used to.

“Get him Picca, come on,” I urged.

Wag wag wag, she responded.

Black Shirt, meantime, continued to sidle menacingly nearer to Rehana. Just arm’s length away now.

“We wa' money,” he said. “Or cellphone.”

Rehana and I both thought he had said, “We want money for a cellphone.” Could he be saving?

But he clarified. “Money and cellphone, all we want,” he said, eyes wild-hard, body language somewhere between attacking and fleeing.

It was the lamest attempted hold-up, really. Rehana and I spluttering rage, probably words like “Get lost” and “Are you mad?” and “You’ve got a knife you bastard”; and Picca rose to the occasion with a fresh show of pearly whites and rumbling growl.

Step by step White Vest and Black Shirt retreated across the rocks, their defiant looks perhaps a last ditch attempt to hold up their shaky pride in light of a failed robbery. Probably their first. Attempt, I mean. Lucky for us.

It was when I tried to collect the rest of the things – shoes, hat, Rehana’s iPod – that I noticed the half-sandwich I still clutched was shaking. Took an extra big bite to catch the cheese sliding out.

So it was that Magwa did not become Mug-wa, and we did not become nog a number on the wrong side of thugs who prey on the vulnerable haves.

And, really, I think Picca with her Just Don’t Come Here answer to their would-be attack was the telling factor. Yes, the juveniles were but novice criminals; yes, Rehana and I were not easily going to crumble to their demands; but a small, cross inja? This you just don’t risk.

Rehana and I have joked, after 10 months being absolutely vulnerable in 12 countries, that we’d probably need to come home to feel threatened. So right we are, though it’s funny in the not ha-ha-ha kind of way.

Picca the hero, having a blast on the beach the day before the mugging

IN REHANA'S WORDS

In the depths of rural Pondoland men carry machetes as they walk down the side of the road. We were struck by the casual transport of all kinds of weapons, mostly machetes but also several AKs, in the countries we’ve visited. In Rwanda men with machetes are ominous. And so are the men in South Africa.

We let our guard down for a few minutes while we struggled to relax in a beautiful environment – the soaring Magwa waterfall outside Lusikisiki and the tempting, deep rock pools above it. The teenaged louts foisting their attentions on us made it impossible to stay.

In a few short minutes we learned our lesson good. Our home country is where we are most in need of a guide whenever we step out of our campsite – to keep louts at bay, not to show us the way.

When I first saw the switchblade in the boy’s hand I pictured myself toppling into the rock pool in which I was cooling my feet with a knife in my neck. That’s all the fear I had time for. Anger took over.

It must have been one of the most inept armed robberies ever. The boy making the demands mumbled and his armed accomplice hid the weapon instead of brandishing it in our faces. I felt like going back afterwards and showing them how to do it properly. 

It never occurred to us to report the boys to the police after we told them to voetsek. What would our complaint be? A pathetic attempted armed robbery? 
We told the people at Amapondo Backpackers where we were staying in Port St Johns what happened. They phoned the elders in the community nearest the falls who decided to give all the boys who matched our description a good beating. A preemptive strike before anyone got ideas. Sounds like a good plan.

The attempted mugging spoiled only a few hours of our Wild Coast holiday. The rest has been amazing, as the hippies floating along the coast would say. We soared into the area along the spines of hundreds of green hills. 
It looked exactly like the landscape where Madiba is buried. Will we make the pilgrimage? I’ll check if Qunu’s on our route.

Pretty Pondoland

The hills circling Port St Johns are green and jungly, thick with vines and monkeys and thinning to tangled milkwood where they meet the beach. The air’s chewy and tasty – except on the beach where the air tastes and smells organic. The beach is plastered with towers of cattle shit.

The cattle stand for hours in the shallows, staring out to sea. It’s eerie. While millions of other cows and bulls seek soft grass and fresh water to wash it down, these hulking beasts choose to spend most of their day in sand and saltwater. 

Makes me think of Nongqawuse. In 1856 the teenaged girl promised the people of the Eastern Cape that, if they killed their cattle, an army of dead people would rise from the sea and slaughter the British. Maybe these cattle are seeking vengeance for their dead ancestors, waiting for the army to rise from the sea so they can slay them for coming too late.

Waiting in vain for something to happen

We’ve been spoiled by our sea and lakeshore accommodation on our trip so far, always camping or lodging a few steps from the water.
Port St John’s has no well-equipped campsite at the edge of the beach so we made do with a wooden chalet at Amapondo Backpackers, on a hill overlooking Second Beach.
We had to walk about five minutes to the beach but Pikachu never once complained. She was in heaven. There were monkeys to chase up trees and that’s always a lot of fun. The donkey at the backpackers was a bit of a puzzle though. It’s too big to play with small dogs, but it doesn’t know it.

Julia will never get over the fact that I said she looks like a breker in this photo

We walked, every day