Ten Rural Bars You've Probably Never Been To

Ruby Tuesday I order a Tipo Tinto, meaning island spirit, the local rum, and fall hopelessly in love with this quirky, unpretentious bar at Ruby’s Backpackers on the far flung island of Ilha de Moҫambique some 2000 km north of the Mozambican capital of Maputo. It's tucked into the heart of Stone Town on this historic island which was settled in the 8th century and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site because of its amazing coral rock buildings and architecture. What a powerful sense of history.   www.facebook.com/pg/RubyBackpackers/about/ 

Happy mercado You must pay for the cold Dosh Em (fabulous signature Mozambican beer) but the ukulele tunes are free at this small baracas in the mercado in Bilene, southern Mozambique. Bilene is a happy, shabby lagoon 'n seaside town an hour plus from Maputo. I don’t know why, but I just love this mercado so. It makes me want to laugh and drink rum, sing songs, slap my thigh. It's a warren of stalls selling food and drink and stuff. People gather here to haggle, trade, gossip, drink beer, watch soccer and sell just about anything from cashew nuts to cell phone covers. www.mozambiquetourism.co.za

Name of the game The Hang Over Bottle Store and its adjoining beer garden is a fabulous place to have a few G&Ts if you happen to find yourself in the middle of the market in Likoma Island in north eastern Malawi. Which I do. The island is charming and lapped by the waters of Lake Malawi, lake of stars. The Malawian gin - Waragi - is clear and strong. And Likoma Island is a great address. To its north is Tanzania, to its west Mozambique, east, Zambia, and all around, Malawi. ww.malawitourism.com

And Englishmen Even though my ship has still not come in, I always love coming to this bar with its neon sign and beautiful wooden counter at Mad Dogs Café near Hoedspruit. In my years of travelling between Limpopo and Maputo, I stopped here often, either for an early coffee or a late afternoon vino depending on whether I'd come down or up the escarpment through the Strijdom Tunnels above the Olifants River. This is a classic traveller's pit stop. www.bluecottages.co.za

High on beer This is Colin Ntshangase, a cricket loving Zulu and the brew master at Hops Hollow which is at the top of the Long Tom Pass in Mpumalanga. Colin recommends the Mac’s Porter ale which he tells me he formulated with women in mind. He says it has a “malty creamy fullness, smooth as silk”. Hops Hollow, outside Mashishing, claims to be the highest brewery in Africa - it’s 2150m above sea level. www.hopshollow.co.za

Wild horse grooves We day trippers beat a steady path up the steep pass to the eccentric misty village of Kaapsehoop in the mountains outside Mbombela. The Bohemian Groove Café is the soul spot here. Kaapsehoop was once a gold rush town - for about ten minutes -  and today is famed for its wild horses and lovely walks, as well as a cast of interesting local characters, bistros, bars and fabulous people. www.bohemiangroovecafe.co.za

Change your relaxing style We take the road to Vutuwangadzebu, deep in the heart of Vhembe district in Limpopo, and end up high in the rural villages apparently very far away from everything. So it’s completely fabulous to find a cold beer and some surprised looking locals at the Speakeasy Entertainment Hub. Don’t change your lifestyle said the billboard outside, change your relaxing style. Yebo yes. www.nightjartravel.com

Ten green bottles I am very impressed by the wall of green Jagermeister bottles that forms the display at Biker’s Rest bar in Graskop, on the Panorama Route in Mpumalanga. In case you didn't know, Jagermeister is a digestif made with 56 different herbs. And this is a real biker spot, like pub and grub like, with flags and paraphernalia and stuff so don't expect craft gin or canapes.

Another roadside attraction The crazy Toeka se Dae is on the R516 to Bela Bela, off the N1 to Limpopo. The décor is wacky - corrugated iron walls, road signs turned into tables, a bright orange Shooter Bar. I have a tequila. The waitress' name is Bella from Bela Bela. She had another late night she said and recommended the freshly baked bread from the deli. www.toekasedae.co.za

  

I know I had a beer here once because I took this picture. It was en route Carolina or Piet Retief or somewhere in the wetlands regions on Mpumalanga, details sketchy. I love this mural on the walls of the Kuyawiso Tavern. I am also struck by the similarity in style to the mural below which is from a bar in northern Malawi. 

Missing Melea

In times of mourning and healing, one misses the wise elders. Today I am missing my mogadibo (my darling) Melea Letsoalo, domestic worker for the Hilton-Barber family for almost her entire life. She held me just after I was born and I held her just before she died. She was my anchor, my grandmother, my comforter, my friend. We really adored each other – despite the rule of apartheid at the time, despite her servility in our household. Well into my forties and her nineties, her favourite thing was letting me paint her finger and toe nails post box red, while drinking sweet peach-flavoured champagne. 

Long life! 

Melea cared for me through happiness and heartbreak, through tragedy and trauma – my brother’s death, my armed robbery, me being stabbed in the head. I cared for her too, after her own daughter Carol died, and her son Harry, after her knee conked in and her eyesight faded. Melea was wise and warm, with great humour and healthy streak of anarchy. She was an irrepressible joller. She smoked, she drank. She ran a small but lively shebeen from the alley in Northumberland Avenue in Jozi where we lived for twenty years. 

When I was writing my matric (both my brothers had left home), my parents went overseas for a month and Melea and I were left alone. We had the family Peugeot – and I had a learner’s license - and Melea and I drove all around the suburb visiting my friends and hers. Almost every nearby domestic worker and gardener came to sit in the sun drinking all the stuff we’d raided from the liquor cabinet; as did my friends, but we sat near the pool.  

Colonial family photo 1947

Melea was born in ancestral Letsoalo land in Limpopo, in the green upper reaches of the Letsitele Valley, near Tzaneen. Her people were forcibly removed from there in the 50s. When the land was successfully reclaimed by the Letsoalos in the late 90s, Melea was at the handing back ceremony. “Bloody liar”, she shouted at land minister Thoko Didiza, “all governments are liars!” 

Melea’s father worked for my grandfather on Kings Walden farm in Agatha at the beginning of last century; a skilled stonemason who built the original walls of the now famous gardens. As a teenager Melea went to work on a nearby farm where the farmer tattooed all his workers in case they ran away. Which Melea of course did. I will never forget how I used to trace, with my baby fingers, the warm initials ML in Victorian cursive script on her left inner wrist. 

Not so colonial family photo 1986

Melea fled back to Kings Walden where she went from kitchen ‘girl’ to nanny for my newly born mother Tana. During this time she fell in love with the Portuguese farm foreman, Fernandez, who had come from then Lourenco Marques in Mozambique to manage Kings Walden. Melea and Fernandez lived in a little cottage (which later became mine) and were arrested several times under the Immorality Act in 1948 (no Sex across the Colour Line as it was known then) but continued as lovers ‘til his death in the late 70s. 

Melea eventually retired to a cottage my parents built her in Direpeng Sreet in Lenyenye, down the road from Kings Walden, with a couple of fabulously feisty gogos who smoked newspaper joints and hustled me for bucks to get hot stuff from the local bottle shop. I visited her often there, bearing nail polish, sweet stuff, mielie meal, chickens, eggs, clothes. I got to know her family and relatives, and maintain contact with those still alive and kicking. 

Melea and Tana testing the summer punch 

Born a few days before the Titanic sank in 1912, Melea lived to be 102. I dreamed about her the night before she died. Come quickly said her son Mickey when I phoned the next morning, she is leaving us. I raced down to CN Phathudi Hospital near Lenyenye and saw her for the last time, peaceful and paper thin on the hospital bed.

“I love you”, I said, holding her tiny old hand. “I love you”, she whispered back. 

Love you mogadibo forevah!

Love on the Brooklyn Bridge

Brrr. I crossed the Brrooklyn Bridge on the coldest day in living history. It was minus 20 something Celsius with the wind chill factor and a very long way indeed from summery Seffrica. Fortunately I am hardy and was prepared. Leather boots, thermals, a fake fur hat and coat (my Welkom mink as my friend Kate calls it), and a full length Uzzi black leather jacket. Looking like a Russian whore, I ventured across New York’s famous suspension bridge with wild snowy views of Manhattan and Brooklyn and a great happiness in my heart. Bridges are inherently romantic structures aren’t they? 

There were only about three other stupid, frozen, excited tourists crossing the Brooklyn Bridget that day and what an advantage it was. We pretty much had the whole bridge to ourselves. As my nose froze and the snowflakes fell it was so enchanting and I felt like a character in some old black-and-white movie romance, and I did a graceful twirl, considering my outfit, and my tears also froze.

The Russian whore look 

I talked to myself and sang and read the graffiti and the billboards and stickers, a surreal urban narrative as I went along: I’m from Brooklyn it’s that way. Eat plants and train hard. Cunt ripping death metal. I live for moments of random pleasure. General Confusion. Too weird to live, to rare to die. I was here. Buy Art not cocaine…

And I loved all the padlocks attached to just about every part of the Brooklyn Bridge. Hundreds of padlocks engraved or painted with the names and initials of lovers. I wished desperately I had a padlock for my lover and I. But he was in the middle of the Pacific and I was the only living girl in New York. And I didn’t have a padlock on me and sure as hell wasn’t going to buy one at the current rand-dollar exchange rate from some extortionist vendor on the Manhattan side. So I shouted out his name instead and thought again about how romantic bridges are and how love can cure just about everything except poverty and toothache, as Mae West once said. 

I got to see the Brooklyn Bridge up close and personal and later when I was in post-bridge bliss, and was finally able to use my frozen fingers again, I drank whisky and did an online trawl and found out that these lovelocks as they’re known began appearing on the Brooklyn Bridge in the late 90s. And then in 2006 the tradition suddenly went befok across the world because of a teen novel turned international literary sensation.

Italian writer Federico Moccia’s 2006 novel Ho Voglia di Te (I Want You) featured a young couple attaching a lock to Rome’s Milvian Bridge as a sign of their eternal love. The thousands of sweethearts imitating the brooding young Romans in the book were among its 2.5 million readers “and that is why padlocks are now appearing on bridges right around the world, including Brooklyn Bridge” the author told the UK Guardian. And if you up for some gritty urban romance read the fascinating piece called Love in the Time of Padlocks: Has a Craze on the World’s Bridges Gone Too Far? in National Geographic online.