I made up my mind on Thursday night that I'd drive down to the Drakensberg 'when I woke up'. It just so happened that I woke up at 5 AM, and by 5:30, I was fuelled and on the way. To say that the traffic was horrific would be an understatement of the highest magnitude. It was an absolute abortion, and coupled with the mist and the sheer volume of cars, it took me almost three hours to put 100 kilometers between myself and Jo'burg city limits. Once I was was past the second set of tolls, things got a bit better, but what should have been a relatively quick four hour drive was almost eight. Not fun.
I arrived at roughly lunchtime in Bergville, where my queries regarding the location of the nearest hospital were met with more than a little curiosity from the locals. Apparently, there are no hospitals for 'white people' in Bergville, and I had to make it abundantly clear that I was looking for a rural hospital. That particular phrasing, I'm sad to say, didn't come to me immediately. I tried 'black hospital' in my head for a second before abandoning it, likewise for 'Zulu hospital'. I almost went with 'provincial hospital', which would have actually been quite correct, as I found out later. Anyway, I find it highly enjoyable to make my brain think somewhat outside its comfort zone from time to time, and between pulling over at the side of the road and asking pedestrians for directions (it's been a long time since I've done that) and some furtive guesswork via Google Maps, I eventually found myself at Emmaus Provincial Hospital, a level 1 care facility located smack-bang in the middle of fucking nowhere, KwaZulu Natal. You get urban, peri-urban, rural, fucking rural, and Emmaus. For a city boy like me, it was a bit of a shock. I loved every minute of it, from the goats and children in the road to potholes the size of small swimming pools. Rural as all hell.
Anyway, I was greeted with a fresh quiche, and I quickly found out that Laurene is every bit the chef she claims to be. Will wonders never cease? There's certain things you take at face value, but when someone claims to being amazing in the kitchen because they spent a year in an Irish five-star hotel you don't necessarily get your hopes up. After a bit of quiche we snuck in an afternoon nap - I was, after all, pretty tuckered out. Friday night is very much for the nightlife, and I'm well aware of Laurene's propensity for excessive drinking, smoking and partying. She has a zest for nocturnal mischief that has all but fled from my other friends, and I find it invigorating being around her if only for this quality (although there are many others). Needless to say, there's not a whole lot of options for drinking in rural KZN, which meant we ended up at Amphitheatre Backpackers drinking quarts with her male nurse friend Ayanda, laughing at the chubby American tourists, the dour German backpackers and playing pool, badly.
Eventually just before midnight we decided a change of scenery would be nice, and Laurene 'knew a place'. Cue a dramatic and highly exciting round of getting slightly lost in the Drakensberg looking for a place to go drinking. In Jo'burg, club-hopping is something that one reasonably allocates a few minutes' worth of time to, perhaps half an hour at most. Almost 90 minutes later, after at least one wrong turn that ended up with us on a road surrounded by corn fields (creepy) we find this place, and make a beeline for the bar and some hard-earned libations. At this point, I'm well and truly loose-tongued, and start chatting to a very cute Australian girl named Hannah as I'm setting up for a pool game with Ayanda. Laurene's at the bar getting us a round, and as Hannah asks very sweetly where I'm staying, I use the opportunity to introduce Laurene, who is sauntering back with drinks. "With my friend, Laurene. She's this amazingly talented doctor - oh look, here she comes." One look at Laurene, blonde locks and pouty lips and this poor girl scuttled off, no doubt massively intimidated and more than a little crestfallen. Cruel perhaps, but highly amusing. It was a scene that repeated itself not an hour later, except this time, the perpetrator was an obviously camp young chap named Tom. Fortunately, Laurene was there to save me from his advances, and she ended up dragging me out of the bar in a very protective and amusing sort of way.
After dropping off Ayanda in the middle of fucking nowhere in the middle of the goddamned night (seriously, we stopped in the middle of the road nowhere near civilization to drop him off), we were both starving, so on getting home, while I proceeded to pace about the kitchen, Laurene made what can only be described as the 3 AM steak roll to end all other steak rolls. If this steak roll was a historical figure it'd be Adolf Hitler - massively charismatic and the progenitor of a master race of steak rolls, custodians of a reich that'd last a thousand years. It would enslave and oppress all other steak rolls it deemed to be unworthy. It was that good. There were onions and cream and butter and a mushroom reduction sauce that made me question not just my sobriety (limited) but my very sanity (hopefully still intact). I realise my faculties were somewhat impaired, and in fairness, at that point in the night a petrol station pie would be arguable as well-received as a risotto prepared by a master chef, but this steak roll was perhaps one of the crowning achievements of my culinary life, a true high point not just in drunken cuisine, but in my long and varied (sober) gastronomical journey thus far.
The next morning I drifted in and out of sleep for quite some time, but eventually came around to the sounds of breakfast being fried in the kitchen for me. There are few things better, and Laurene's skills in the kitchen are capable of reducing a grown man to tears. If she's as good a surgeon as she is a chef (and I know she's better) she's going to immortalised in medical textbooks, probably for inventing some highly technical procedure that revolutionises a surgical method. I guarantee it. The woman no doubt resorts to some dark witchcraft to make a plate of eggs, bacon and toast so delicious (she feigned ignorance to any deal with the devil, and instead credited copious amounts of butter and cream) but I was in heaven all the same.
I wanted to take in some of the 'Berg that day, so we headed off to a local hotel which served as a departure point for some of the more scenic hikes in the area. Because she was recovering from pneumonia earlier during the week, we limited our hike to a fairly easy two hour affair up to a local waterfall. Yes, she's fucking hardcore. She works 80 hours a week, sleeps three hours a night, had pneumonia earlier that week but was still up for a hike. Anyway, reflections on her testicular fortitude aside, it was honestly one of the most profoundly enjoyable afternoons of my life. Easy conversation, albeit about very intense and varied subject matter, staggering, breathtakingly beautiful scenic vistas and nature all around us. I had an enormously good time, and was tremendously sad to hike back down the mountain to the hotel. We did however enjoy a decent snack before we headed back, which was nice. I had a French onion soup, and although the croutons were oversized and soggy, it was hard not to enjoy the view.
Saturday evening was always going to be a lot more chilled. Supper was a prawn noodle soup, lovingly prepared entirely by hand from fresh ingredients. I learned the secret to amazing pan-friend prawns (the butter needs to be slightly burnt) and watched in no small amount of awe as what was quite possibly one of the most finely crafted, subtle dishes I've ever eaten was prepared from scratch in front of my very eyes. It's a real treat to watch someone so talented work, and enjoying a magnificent bottle of Rupert and Rothschild while I did so certainly didn't make it any less of a pleasure. The end result was a dish as picturesque as the Drakensberg itself, artfully crafted with the skill and passion of a true artisan, full of complexity and subtle flavours that danced across my palette with a such a sense of uniformity of purpose I was honestly emotionally moved. I may have proposed marriage. I'm fairly sure I did. Apparently, it's a fairly common reaction to those fortunate enough to sample the dish. I am in rare and distinguished company then.
We moved fairly quickly from supper to a blanket in front of the fireplace along with a further two excellent bottles of red wine I'd brought down from Jo'burg on a recommendation from a friend. By happy chance, the Kanonkop was her favourite wine, and the conversation flowed easily on all manner of topics as varied as scrotum splints (she's going to be a urologist, so there was more than a little discussion about the subject) and Jazz and modern art. At some point, we started running low on firewood, which prompted a highly amusing foray into the wood behind her house in the pitch dark to forage for firewood. "After all, we are in rural KZN, we may as well make like the locals and forage!" she grinned before bounding off into the darkness, leaving me to breathlessly run after her, more than a little tipsy, laughing and tripping in the mud and generally behaving like a raucous child under the most majestic night sky I've seen in many a year. When we ran out of the good wine, we made Gluwhein (and when I say 'we', I mean her, naturally), and by the time we ran out of Gluwhein we were both exhausted, the fire was mere embers, and it was already early morning. We still chatted for hours afterwards and eventually fell asleep to the sounds of some musician, now long dead, playing the piano and the saxophone. It was an entirely surreal experience, and I suspect I'll never forget it as long as I live.
I had to break myself away today after breakfast (croissants, preserves, coffee, cheeses). As I drove back, I put on the new Explosions in the Sky album and savoured the afterglow of an entirely majestic weekend. Despite the fact that all the goodness of that weekend was limited to that weekend (I don't know when next, if ever, I'll see her again), I wouldn't change it for the world. Sometimes it's worth taking a shot just for taking it, and it was great.
No, it was glorious. There are no other words.
