I spent most of the day at the beach.
Steve suggested that I give snorkeling a try. Why not, I thought, I've been almost drowned once already while on this holiday why not try for twice? Steve explained the basics of snorkeling to me and I promptly forgot them. There was something about a mask, flippers and a one way valve in there somewhere but I'm not quite sure. All I knew was that I was about to breathe while my head was submerged. A whole new and quite disturbingly scary thing as I was soon to find out.
I was helped into the flippers, I can't remember the technical term for them, by Steve and was told by him to walk backwards into the sea. This, I grasped, would make it easier for me to lift my feet and not have to worry about the incoming waves catching the flippers and tripping me up.
I walked backwards into the surf, waded out until I was waist deep in the sea, turned around and swam. I saw clear blue water stretching away from me. It looked as though the sea was turning from clear blue to dark blue and then off into the purple and black that was further out.
My breathing was coming to me in short and distinctly panic filled gasps. I thought to myself that panic and trepidation at the thought of inhaling a load of seawater and drowning was causing me to breathe in this abnormal fashion so I told myself to calm down and relax. It seemed to work well enough and my breathing returned to something akin to normal. The only sounds I could hear was the distant Shoosh of the waves hitting the beach behind me, the sound of my heart beating and the wheeze of my lungs from too many years of smoking.
I watched in amazement as beautiful silver colored fish flashed and swam beneath me and darted out of my field of vision. I turned over onto my back to see how far out I was from the beach and was rather surprised to see that I was further out than I thought I was. I decided not to worry about it as I knew I wasn't far enough out to have cause for concern so I rolled back onto my stomach, took a few deep breaths, shoved my bum up and my head down and swam down towards the seabed.
As I swam along the bottom of the sea an image flashed into my head. It was an image of myself as a dolphin cutting through the water with little to no resistance upon my skin and for a few seconds I allowed myself to be overrun by what I can only describe as Dolphin Consciousness. Or whatever my mind thought was what a dolphins mind would be like. Then again, maybe I'd just overdone it with the Durban Poison at Mtwalume and I was suffering a flashback of some kind. Whatever it was it felt real enough to me.
As I surfaced my mind cleared and my own thoughts and feelings returned. My soul, spirit and mind had been shown a different way of life through the interaction of me and the Indian Ocean and I knew I'd remember this place for a long time after I had left it. I swam back in towards the shore and played for a while in the breakers. I had a great time bodysurfing at the front of the waves as they made their way towards the beach.
Then it was back to the hut to grab a shower, a pair of jeans and a shirt and head to the pub to watch the Uefa cup final between Liverpool and AC Milan.
Tamlyn decided that she was not coming to the pub to watch the match so Steve, Steph and I walked to the pub, got a drink each and sat down to watch the game. At the end of the first half Liverpool were three goals down and it looked, to everyone, like the game was all done and dusted.
Then came the second half. Liverpool came out strong, pushed hard and scored thanks to a header by Stephen Gerrard. 3-1. The game may not be over quite as quickly as we had expected it to be but I was to be proved wrong on that. As I sat glued to the TV one of the resort employees leaned over and said to the three of us that the generators were being switched off in five minutes. What the fuck, I thought, and just as I did Liverpool scored again. 3-2.
The resort employee told us that if we wanted to take our drinks with us he could give us some plastic cups. Steve asked why it was that the generators had stayed on until 11pm the previous night, "Was it because there was a rugby match on?" he enquired. The resort gimp said that it was but only because there were nine people watching the game and they were drinking at a rate high enough to justify the $40 per hour it cost in fuel to keep the generator running. I poured my drink into the plastic cup and stood up to leave the bar. Liverpool were attacking and were certainly looking like they were going to score. But we wouldn't know if they did or not as as soon as we stepped out of the bar the lights snapped off.
We walked back to the hut, Steve grabbed his car keys and we both piled into it to see if we could get commentary on one of the radio stations. Scanning through the wavelengths Steve managed to pick up the BBC World Service, who were giving a running commentary on the game. We sat listening to the game through the crackling static and bleedover of other stations whose signals were bouncing off the low cloud cover.
As I sat in my seat I struggled to hear the game it was drowned out by the sounds of African music, Indian bhangra house and the sounds of Steve snoring. Ahh well, I thought, it's not as if I'm a Liverpool fan anyway. I'm sure I'll survive not knowing what the final score was until the next morning.
Steve woke up and I informed him that most of the rest of the second half had been difficult to hear because of all the other channels bleeding over the top of the BBC signal. He said that we'd no doubt be able to watch the highlights of the game on one of the sports highlights channels when we got back to Johannesburg.
We got out the car, made our way into the hut, wished each other a good night and wandered into our rooms to get some sleep as the following day we were to begin the long drive back to Johannesburg.
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