The Ministry of Fabulousness: Sailing the Straits of Salamander

The Ministry of Fabulousness: Sailing the Straits of Salamander: Smooching girl sailors                                         It’s not often one gets invited aboard a yacht called Salamander b...

Sailing the Straits of Salamander

Smooching girl sailors                                        

It’s not often one gets invited aboard a yacht called Salamander by a lesbian sailor with a bottle of whisky. “She’s an ace skipper”, said her girlfriend, a journalist, so I armed myself with a stiff Hankey Bannister and climbed on.

We started our adventure with a hearty breakfast at the Yacht Club at the Ebenezer Dam which is near Haenertsburg village in Limpopo. Not many people have heard of Haenertsburg, never mind the Ebenezer Dam, which is one of the area’s most beautiful and underrated water holes. Deep, clean, crowd free and encircled by moody mountains.  

“But the Yacht Club is for members only”, I began my witty repartee with the lesbians…  Yes indeed someone has to be a member haha, and so it turned out that Ace Skipper was, and had borrowed the yacht from a friend. Full of of faded photographs, not-so-shiny trophies and the odd needlepoint painting, the clubhouse has been around forever and is an old and somewhat shabby Deco style building overlooking the dam. But with a fringe of creeper and the right light on the distant bobbing yachts it feels vaguely European, possibly even Eastern European. 

Gracious views from the yacht club terrace

It took quite a long time for us women to get on to Salamander who is a rather small girl herself. But we did eventually set sail, with assorted cooler boxes, cameras, cell phones, ipods, speakers, sarongs, hats, sunblock and nary a man in sight. Sadly I am from that rather old-fashioned school that thinks sailing is something men do for you while you worry about your hair and your wineglass. This time however, my skills were going to be required and Ace Skipper was very patient and explained carefully what a cleat was and also why we all needed to sit at the back of the yacht on take-off.

A good breeze, a sunny day, we headed out towards the waterfall which is at the western end of the dam. We chugged past the old community hall, various holiday homes and newer developments on the shore. I have to say there’s not a lot of taste going down here, and there are a bit too many clubs for my liking - the boat club, the yacht club, the trout club, the angling club and so on. I am a bit Groucho Marx about clubs (won’t belong to one that will have me as a member) so I settled into the Monaco Position (lying on top of the yacht with a drink) and just chilled out.

Reflections on a sailing salamander                                            

What a glorious day. It scored very well on my Whisky Index - proper short glasses, endless ice, soda water – which is always a good thing. We loved the mountain view, swam to the waterfall, endured a brief cloudburst, shared a lot of stories about boats, yachts, sailing. My sailing skills are abysmal but my story was impressive thank goodness– I had recently sailed the bay of Waikiki in Hawaii which is part of some wanky Conde Naste magazine bucket list, so we drank a bit more and decided I should do a story on Yacht Clubs in Africa, starting with the Ebenezer Yacht Club. 

I have already done the Maputo Yacht Club, as it were, which is jaunty and retro-nautical and has a steel band in floral shirts that plays Afro-Mediterranean beat as the waiters prance around dispensing plates of prawns and cold beers . So that's two. And Ace Skipper’s lovely friend’s husband has a yacht in Lagos apparently, so it looks like I may be onto something ... 

Wild times at the Ebenezer Yacht Club in Limpopo 

The Ministry of Fabulousness: Malawi via Hawaii

The Ministry of Fabulousness: Malawi via Hawaii: “I want to go to Hawaii” I said to a connected travel person last year. We were at a noisy cocktail party. “Malawi?” she shouted back. “I...

Malawi via Hawaii

“I want to go to Hawaii” I said to a connected travel person last year. We were at a noisy cocktail party. “Malawi?” she shouted back. “I am going in March, come with me”. Sometimes there is opportunity in confusion. I just said yes and then through a complicated conspiracy of love, luck, hard work and hustling, I got a ticket to Hawaii too and somewhere in between dotting the i’s as it were, suddenly I was going to Malawi via Hawaii.

Sailing the bay in Waikiki in Hawaii

My flight went like this: Jozi, Dakar, New York, LA, Honolulu, Houston, New York, Jozi, Lilongwe, Blantyre, Jozi. At a critical leg, our national carrier lost my luggage and there was a desperate wardrobe crisis, but at the eleventh hour it was retrieved by a man called Gift and my Hawaiian wardrobe went straight into the Malawian suitcase, unwashed and reeking of coconut oil.

I have just returned from my extravaganza - some 45 00kms, ten aeroplanes, one microlight and countless subway, train, bus and boat trips later. It was an epic adventure, a complete spectacle at every level, from humanity to geography. I remain ever the bride of amazement and wonder. From the Pacific islands with ancient green volcanoes to the African rift valley with its glorious lake of stars; from the legendary Hawaiian North Shore, where global surfers  hang ten and pull chicks, to the wild shores of Lake Malawi where fishermen still go daily out in handmade wooden canoes, to catch fish to feed their families.

Likoma Island, northern Malawi

It was also an amazing exercise in the absurdity of global capitalist economics. Hawaii is an American state in the middle of the Pacific Ocean whose main employer is the US military, and second main revenue stream is tourism. Malawi, bordered by Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia, is one of the poorest countries in the world. Its main exports are tea coffee and tobacco, pretty much everything else is imported, with massive duties.

Hawaii is very expensive. According to my Whisky Index a regular bottle will cost about R300, which is about half the monthly wage of the average Malawian tea estate worker. But Malawi is also very expensive. A bottle of ordinary whisky imported from SA will set you back about R500 which is almost the entire wage of the average Malawian tea worker. A night in a luxury lodge on Likoma Island in Malawi will cost more than a night in an average Waikiki beachfront shag palace in Hawaii.

The obvious place for a beer in Malawi

Hawaii is sophisticated, culturally diverse and pretty much everything works. There are sporty people with six-pack stomachs, Kens and Barbies in surf gear, the wealthy and the tanned with yachts, loads of young grungy travellers. There’s a strong military culture (don’t mention Pearl Harbour ha ha), a fantastically outlandish nightlife and apart from the disaffected local Hawaiian meth-heads who live on the edges of beaches, everything’s pretty much tickety boo. There’s even toilet paper provided in the local campsites.  I found this detail astonishingly reassuring.

Malawi has the gentlest people out, is donor driven with loads of Aid workers from the First World, is dirt poor and pretty much nothing works. The cities are proverbial Africa-style chaos with some high-walled guarded wealthy suburbs and the rest an endless sprawls of taxis, markets, shacks, spaza shops, dilapidated squalor, ill-treated donkeys and an astonishment of hair salons and churches. And of course the government and the Chinese are spending trillions – there are a lot of noughts in the currency – on a conference centre and stadium that could probably send all the Malawian tea estate workers and their families on a trip to Hawaii, with whisky.