Mexico's Mom

I'm now in the cold but beautiful town of Wilderness (its actual name), staying at a very random farm/hostel/perpetural techno party, and football fever has beset us all!

Justin and I spent most of Thursday on a fantastic bike ride. A guy who worked at our hostel in Oudtshoon drove us and two other Americans up to a frigid starting point called Swartberg Pass in the mountains outside of town. The drive was breathtaking but terrifying: our driver, like all others I've encountered in this country, drove way too fast, zipping around corners and flying past pedestrians, all in a 15-passenger cube van with a bicycle trailer on the back. This was bad enough on the regular streets outside of town, but when our road changed from cement to gravel and began switchbacking up the side of the mountain, I got downright nervous. The gravel changed to mud near the top, prompting our driver to weave back and forth across the narrow road in order to maintain traction. We passengers from the Nation of Civilized Driving sat in tense silence as the van's front wheels zigged toward the mountain and then zagged back toward the cliffside, so close that we could actually see over the edge before our driver aimed the van back the other way. When we finally rounded the last bend and came to a stop, the irony of the Afrikaans sign labeling the area as "Die Top" was not lost on us.

The driver set us loose on our bicycles, and the first few hours proved lovely but frigid as we descended the mountain and made it back to the relatively flat land of the desert area known as the Little Karoo. A few hours of riding brought us to the Cango Caves, an absolutely amazing network of underground caverns. Two tours were available - Standard and "Adventure" - with the latter involving crawls and squeezes through sections with such claustrophobia-inducing names as "the postal box". While the latter option sounded exciting, I've been known to feel mildly panicky in spaces as large as small cars, the window seat on airplanes, and in bed with the blanket over my head; in other words, though I was indeed tempted to try some super-spelunking just to see if I could do it, I also didn't want to hold up an entire caving group while having some sort of subterranean panic attack. We opted for the standard tour, therefore, and were not disappointed.

The roomy mouth of the cave opened up into one grand chamber after another; a million years of water droplets had hardened into petrified ballrooms with structures resembling massive organ pipes, chandeliers, and decorative columns. When the guide turned all the lights off, we got to see the complete blackness that greeted the cave's first (European) discoverer back in the 1700s.

Several more hours of bicycling and two roadside ostrich burgers later, we were back in Oudtshoorn. We rounded out out time in the town with a game of Scrabble, a load of laundry, and a few minutes of watching the World Cup opening concert on TV (was Desmond Tutu drunk?? His speech made about as much sense as Mariah Carey's famous ramble).

The next day, yesterday, we left for the town of Wilderness, chosen only because of its name. We're staying at a wacky farm that doubles as a hostel; our incredibly laid-back host, Theo, gave us a room for the price of a campsite and met us in town upon our arrival to usher us into a bar where we could all watch the opening World Cup match. Vuvuzelas (the incredibly loud long plastic horns) blared through the night as Bafana, the South African team, tied Mexico 1-1. Our host then drove us and a carload of his shnockered friends back to the farm in his truck while his brother followed in the farm's other vehicle, an open-topped bus spray-painted with orange and yellow soccer slogans. The dude in the front passenger seat of our truck was hilarious, pointing his vuvuzela out the car window and yelling to Theo to alert him whenever we were about to pass an expensive house. Theo obliged, even giving him a countdown: "Expensive house on the left in THREE...TWO...ONE!!" On cue, his friend would honk the vuvuzela out the window at top volume (just one of those instruments is about as loud as a full blast from a car horn), and then scream out an indecent phrase in semi-Spanish about what should happen to Mexico's mother. In this way, two carloads of horn-blowing, insult-hooting, rowdy South Africans, plus two American backpackers who couldn't stop laughing at the whole situation, disturbed an entire neighborhood before arriving back at the farm. Upon arrival, as Justin and I were settling into our chilly but comfortable room, our host and his guests turned on some loud techno music, a disco ball, and a strobe light (who wouldn't have such things at their farm?) and kept the party going for hours and hours more.

Today we took a long walk around the outskirts of Wilderness, ending up back in town to watch the USA/England game. The 1-1 tie, while not ideal, was a better outcome than most would have predicted, so we headed back to the farm contented.

Tomorrow we are probably heading out to some village about 20k from here...we got a very random invitation from one of the guys we met for about 5 minutes at the party last night to stay at his house while he's away in Joburg! He drew us a very incoherent map, gave no address, and said only that the key should be "under the pepper pot," whatever the crap a pepper pot is...so we'll see if we find it! Adventures galore!!