Seldom have my expectations been so deflated as they were when Jia Hui and I arrived in Durban in the second week of our South African expedition. Perhaps we should have read some kind of warning into the almost deserted airport at which we landed late at night, but I refused to acknowledge that that was a foreboding of things to come.

I had especially booked us into a hotel on a part of the beachfront that I remembered as being lively, colourful and fun. It was a place that I had spent many of my younger days running around and swimming in the sea. And it was where I thought we would have the most interesting experience on New Year's Eve.

The next morning we set out to explore and traipsed around the beachfront market and then I thought we would walk down the main street, West Street, with all its typical holidaymaker's stores and ice-cream parlours and tourists everywhere. Just as I remembered it. Just that it wasn't just as I remembered it. The colourful stores were gone, replaced by dingy, grimy-looking take-away outlets that sold oily fish and chips and an assortment of other cheap unhealthy foods. The tourists had been forced out by drug dealers, offering me their wares and leering at Jia Hui.

It was in this atmosphere that we decided not to venture out on New Year's Eve, nor the following day, when we awoke to an unbelievable sight of crowded streets and beaches below us, which seemed more threatening than inviting. Even the women selling their crafts in the street market were absent. Instead, we spent the day in our hotel room marvelling at the ever-swelling crowds.

What struck me most about this experience in Durban is how much our memory of something can, not so much cloud, as raise our expectations of it. I was not disappointed by the crowds, which I expected, nor the feeling of anxiety which I often feel in crowds, and which was equally expected, but I was disappointed that the reality did not reflect my memory.

I look at the pictures I took in Durban and cannot recognise my birthplace in them. Instead, I feel that I was a tourist in a strange place, which is not such a bad thing, perhaps, given that I was on holiday.

21 February 2004

Dion Marc Delport

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