To Infinity and beyond

Wear some ointment for the heat eh.

The taxi man’s advice when he dropped me at the hostel. His version, I assume, of ‘wear sunscreen’.

I had walked around the airport with my day-pack backpack, white lace up shoes and (too) short hair looking like a French schoolboy – or perhaps, with the addition of a small white dog, I might have looked like Tintin. I’d sampled whiskies from the duty free shops that were dispensed in small white paper cups like pills in a medical institution. I hoped it would remedy my nerves, and that a further dose on the plane would send me to sleep. But it didn’t. And I had watched the morning sun stripe the sky orange like a tiger’s back and then melt into milky greyness that turned my tv screen into a mirror so that instead of the film I had been watching (too violent for that time of day anyway) all I could see was my tired reflection.

And then there I was outside the hostel, dressed in the wrong clothes for the heavy heat of the day and longing for a cold, fizzy drink. I have avoided making too many friends there. Hostels are wonderful places when you are passing through a place: you make disposable friendships with people and enjoy their company for that short bit of time and then you move on. Not so great though if you are staying for a while.

I walked down to the outdoor pools in Sea Point with one of the guys who runs the hostel. We chatted and I asked questions – allowing him to talk whilst I listened to things he told me about his life and the hostel and the town in a low drawling accent, pushing the words from the back of his throat like he was yawning whilst he spoke.

We left when we say the weather change. The clouds seem to rise like dust from the earth rather than form in the sky.

The first few nights were hot and muggy and I woke up more than once in my bunk wondering where I was. The heat helped remind me I was not at home.