Post-holiday blues

Cape Town was absolutely fabulous – I highly recommend it to anyone missing bookshops, live jazz, affordable meals, fantastic wine, walking through the streets unhassled, shopping, cinemas, decent newspapers, ice-cream, metered taxis, roads without potholes, art galleries, and pampering in general. Not to mention, of course, the ocean, whose scintillating blues kept us in awe for hours on end, particularly further afield around the lovely fishing village of Aniston and de Hoop Nature Reserve.

From this (de Hoop Nature Reserve)...

In fact, the only people I don’t recommend Cape Town to are England fans during a rugby World Cup final pitching England against South Africa – a lesson we learned the hard way, being naïve enough to show up in a bar to watch the game wearing red and white and carrying a (small) Union Jack (and I’m not even English!). In fairness to South Africans, most of the people there were very friendly, and some even bought us drinks; but it only took one idiot determined to burn our flag to ruin the evening. An isolated low point in two weeks of pure bliss.

The return to Kinshasa, by contrast, was more unpleasant than usual. It was raining and grim; our pool was black; our house had been flooded and all our books (which we stupidly kept on the floor) were waterlogged (i.e. ruined); we had no power or running water, and when the water finally came back on, I brushed my teeth and got a mouthful of disgusting reddish brown water. Harrumph.

...to this (driving home from N'djili Airport)

A couple of mornings later, I sat in the glorious sun eating a delicious mango and papaya salad prepared for me by our housekeeper, listening to the birds sing and watching the pool man painstakingly turn the grimy waters an inviting shade of cool blue. Later, I drove to work, as usual trying to circumvent the rush-hour traffic by taking the long way through the friendly (if muddy) backstreets, steering around stalls of brightly coloured fruit and vegetable held by mamans dressed in brightly coloured pagnes, peering into open yards full of women braiding each other’s hair, tiny children bathing in buckets, and an incongruous number of confused chicken. And just like that I was reconciled with Kin.

R.I.P.