The Ministry of Fabulousness: Someone bring me a river, a hippo and a G&T please...

The Ministry of Fabulousness: Someone bring me a river, a hippo and a G&T please...: The Lowveld bush is my happy place. If I could right now, I’d be deep in the bush with Darling, a cold G&T in hand, cruising slowly w...

Someone bring me a river, a hippo and a G&T please

The Lowveld bush is my happy place. If I could right now, I’d be deep in the bush with Darling, a cold G&T in hand, cruising slowly with all the windows open, perchance to spot an impala under an ancient fig or a pod of hippos basking in the sun like giant aubergines.

Hippos like giant aubergines in the sun 

Living in Limpopo I have been blessed to be able to disappear into the Lowveld bush in between all the madness, and as that good old-fashioned bushwhacker TV Bulpin wrote: “There is nothing quite like it anywhere else on earth. There is a sense of a presence brooding over this wilderness, imparting to it an indefinable character and allure.” This presence he says, embodies all of our longing for adventure, discovery and exhilarating freedom, and is the most unforgettable thing about the Lowveld. Yebo yeah. 

Some of my best soul moments have been seeing the creatures of the bush. A very muddy terrapin in a puddle in the Kruger, a wild dog puppy with satellite-dish ears in the Klaserie. A leopard that simply slunk across our path in Garonga, a hippo dancing at dusk at Ntsiri, a herd of elephant crossing the Timbavati river road in Kruger. And the trees and the rivers, the sunsets, the sunrises, the smell of woodsmoke. 

Sleepy buffalo calf x

Loved for its bushveld spirit, the Lowveld includes the Kruger Park that stretches down from Punda Maria in the north all the way down south to Malelane near the border of Mozambique and Swaziland. It includes the luxury private reserves like Sabi Sands and Mala Mala and the humbler provincial reserves and parks; the Limpopo Valley and the meeting of the borders of South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe….where it seems like the elephants an baobabs will never end, although we all know the sad truth that humanity seems ever hellbent on destroying the wild and its creatures. And thank you for the places where they are at peace. 

Pregnant rhino x

I need this virtual reflection of the bush after a befok crazy year in which I packed up the old family farmhouse, packed up dad who went off to Hermanus, packed up myself and packed, many, many suitcases and went to Jozi countless times, New York, Hawaii, Malawi, Ilha de Mocambique, Thailand, and Maputo twice.

Muddy but determined terrapin x

And as the famous South African rhino conservationist Ian Player said, the wilderness is a place of reflection. It's by considering the wilderness as a whole system that one starts to find its real magic. Everything in the bush is interconnected – from the slenderest grasses to the biggest trees - and the more greater the connection the more powerful the amazement. 
Bring me a river, a hippo and a G&T please someone…

Soul spot of note - the Timbavati River Road in the Kruger 

The Ministry of Fabulousness: From a hotel room

The Ministry of Fabulousness: From a hotel room: I have spent an inordinate amount of bed hours at the Southern Sun in Maputo. That’s because general manager Bruce Chapman - s urely o...

From a hotel room

I have spent an inordinate amount of bed hours at the Southern Sun in Maputo. That’s because general manager Bruce Chapman - surely one of the continent’s finest hoteliers - was kind enough to host me once upon a time while I researched and wrote a guide book to Maputo and beyond. 

Low tide walker 

It led me to witness extraordinary spectacles across that delicious city, but also some extraordinary spectacles just from my window. An urban beach, a palm tree, a window frame -  what a fabulous composition aid for the framing of the clam pickers, the lone wanderers, the capoeira dancers, the lovers and very late at night, the traditional healers who bring their clients to the seafront to cleanse them or heal them or put them in touch with their ancestors. Which involves a great deal of loud prayer, sometimes weeping and wailing, unnerving at 3am for those who are not familiar with Africa’s religious customs. You hear it better, or worse, from the right hand wing of the Southern Sun. Often this was the time myself and my fearless street guide Phil Baker would be arriving back at the hotel after many satisfactory evenings of er, research. 

Sunrise

In the old days, before the $30 million dollar refurbishment, sigh, Bruce used to routinely book me into the Presidential Suite. It was his idea of a joke and I loved it and found it most funny, especially when one of the waiters started calling me Mrs President. Oh those were the days. Since then, Maputo has had an Economic Miracle - although it’s increasingly shaky and dubious - and I have been bumped from my perch by more important people such as those building bridges, importing cars, setting up banks and exploring coal and gas deposits.

Dear Bruce made sure it was been a very gentle transition down to the Superior Executive Princess Suite Extraordinaire on the floor below, although I do miss the big lounge of the old Presidential Suite, its two flat screens TVs and two bathrooms, vast lounge with leather couches. There was more space to shoot pictures while lying on the floor too, although my new suite has a stricter frame for composing pictures and perhaps it has made my eye more disciplined. 

The new refurbishment of course has made the Southern Sun even bigger and better and Bruce is still ever generous with his champagne and hospitality and friendship and I now have this fabulous collection of photos from the window of my hotel room. 

*  Check out www.tsogosunhotels.com/hotels/maputo

Reserved for the Ministry of Fabulousness 

The Ministry of Fabulousness: The Unbearably Bad Architecture of the Afro Parado...

The Ministry of Fabulousness: The Unbearably Bad Architecture of the Afro Parado...: The most luxurious apartments in Africa It is not in our power but in our paradox that we should search for the essence of humanity...

The Unbearably Bad Architecture of the Afro Paradox

The most luxurious apartments in Africa

It is not in our power but in our paradox that we should search for the essence of humanity - so said Robert Ardrey, Canadian playwright and palaeontologist in the 1930s.  And so it struck me recently, as I put on a hard hat and steel-toed boots and went inspecting the site where the most expensive, luxurious apartments in Africa are being built, as we speak. 

And sigh and wonder why the rich and the foreign in the poorest of African countries still go for über bling and zing instead of going for sustainable poverty alleviation and socio-eco development. It’s like , ok, you had a 20 year civil war, millions died, it’s over now, now you’ve found oil and gas and multinationals, wanna spread the love? Hell no, let’s build luxury apartments with remote controlled curtains and heated towel racks. As that iconic South African expression goes: The rich get richer and the poor get Khayalitsha. 

Over the road, women picking clams to make a living 

And as I wander, dumbfounded, there they go, up into the Mozambican skies, twin towers, one block apartmentos, the other a luxury office “park” as they say in nouveau Afro-MICE-speak (MICE being Meetings, Incentives, Conferences). 

Team Cynical 

Here you can step out of the humidity and into your uncapped, touchpad fluffy white dressing gowns with pop-up whisky in crystal glasses, and anything else you want, just call room service, darling. And next door, the rapidly rising Golden Peacock 200-plus-bedroom hotel, conference centre, shopping mall and décor ala Chinese kitsch extraordinaire. 

It was the same thing in Lilongwe, Malawi earlier this year. We visited Umodzi Park with its similarly indescribably odd architecture. Umodzi is a Chinese-built five-star hotel – puffily called The President Walmont – that also features an Afropolitan Terrace Bar as well as a conference centre, banqueting halls, wedding decks, über cocktails and dinner venues and the apparent capacity to do anything from summits of heads of state, to weddings, banquets and concerts. Just not build a clinic, a school, a wildlife centre, a food garden, an AIDS orphanage or a hospice.

It's yours for a few bar x

We toured the Umodzi like we did the luxury Maputo apartments, hungover and cynical, oohing and aahing at the expensive-expansive views over the ancient koppies of Lilongwe and surrounds, over the melancholy Indian Ocean, over the invisible poor people, over the imported suede couches and the minimal ergonomic lines of the desks and the builders asses and the sheer bizarre Shakespearean spectacle of it all.

Book now for your Malawian banquet

Dreaming of Snow

Snow poetry 

There's nothing like a heatwave to make a girl dream of snow and gosh have I been dreaming of it! I’ve only ever seen the real thing a few times, and the first proper-proper time was this year in February in New York. 

Vanessa, hot in the cold 

We were upstate near Ellenville, a few hours from NY city. I’d landed that morning at JFK - one of the coldest days in living memory - and my childhood friend and china bean Vanessa Solomon and her man Tim, and I set off into the snowy foothills of the Catskills. It started snowing as we left the city and by the time we arrived at their cabin, it was - gasp! - proper snow. Vanessa and Tim were very patient as I frolicked around laughing and patting the stuff, licking it, kicking it, patting it, rolling it up, lying in it (not such a good idea). 
We made a fire and cooked food and drank wine (we left the second bottle in the snow by mistake, not such a good idea either) and listened to Frank Zappa on old vinyl records and laughed about the weird old days. 

Toasty house 

Vanessa comes from the farm next to our family farm in Limpopo and will always have a special place in my heart for throwing a glass of cane, lime and lemonade at a racist hotel manager in Tzaneen in the 80's when he asked her to leave because he thought she was a so-called coloured, and this was a net blankes (whites only) hotel, jy weet, you know. She is now a famous sculptor in New York, so make that an extra drink thrown in that stupid oke's face haha. 
That night, fluffy, silent, sexy snow fell and draped everything in tiny crystal poetry and by morning it was thigh high and was the most enchanting thing I had ever seen. 

Fake fur to go 

I was on my way to Hawaii to see Darling - going from NY in deep snow to the balmy beachy Pacific, which presented a few minor wardrobe problems for one small suitcase, but despite my excitement I got the right wardrobe for the snow - fake fur and leather - and Vanessa was in her retro silver cat suit  looking completely hot and not unlike something off an old James Bond movie set.
In the morning I woke up and went walking into this strange snowy landscape, giggling and shivering and falling on my mielie a few times because of the ice. We sent messages of love to Darling on the frozen car window and drank more wine and the world seemed such fun and full of possibility but mainly it was cold! Sigh. 

Snowy message for Darling 

And remember this snippet from Too Darn Hot by Ella Fitzgerald:

“According to the Kinsey Report, ev'ry average man you know
Much prefers his lovey-dovey to court
When the temperature is low
But when the thermometer goes 'way up
And the weather is sizzling hot
Mister, pants for romance is not

'Cause it's too, too, too darn hot
It's too darn hot
It's too, too darn hot”