Riding a Harley in Cape Town by Binyavanga Wainaina

My mind is in one of those reality warps, like cheese that smells of smelly socks, but being cheese, conspires - as soon as you realize that it is cheese - to smell delicious. I slept in my living room last night watching CNN, and woke up at midday, my mind having achieved oneness with Elmer Fudd.

He who was singing - Kill the wabbit! Kill the wabbit! After a few seconds, a bomb went off, and Bugs Bunny was flying through the air chewing his carrot, and saying - I hope you realize, this means WAR.

My fever has broken. What a night. At some point I was this hapless Commando in the desert being chased by cartoon characters who wanted to play. I couldn't play: I was stuck in some gritty, war drama reality, some Platoon-like environment in a jungle of garbage, cement, plastic flowers, graffiti and people who wore oversized clothes and said 'yo' a lot. I couldn't fall off cliffs, bounce off the ground like an accordion, then pop back into shape, so those toons scared the shit out of me. I switch off the television.

Until yesterday I had Malaria. I had forgotten just how bad it can make you feel. I crave cheese. Pungent, pungent cheese. I wobble downstairs, my legs still feel like spaghetti. After my third cup of coffee though, I swear I could twirl my legs into Pirellis, and growl out of the house, farting a parachute before I crash into the gate. There is a coil in my belly that hopes that I will open the door, and find that the world burped, and settled everything back just a little bit different.

I stand on the veranda, and think about what to do for breakfast. I live in Cape Town. For those who live here, it is considered thoroughly uncool to rhapsodize about Table Mountain. Such enthusiasm is for tourists. But after the vast city-jam screams of Nairobi, and after the cramps and delirium of malaria, looking at this looming monster that belches fog and cloud is a relief. All cities should have this - a vast natural edifice that so dominates the skyline, that you are forced to remember that we are actually teeny tiny specks building mechano skyscrapers with a bit too much seriousness. Even the tallest buildings in this vast city are not the skyline, Table Mountain is.

There can be no better time or mood for me to celebrate this city. I pick up the phone and call Harley Tours, and book a Harley Davidson. The trip up the Peninsula is the only one I can afford.

I live in Observatory, an eccentric old suburb full of white witches and their cats, Professional Students, Film people, Artists, DJ’s and a mysterious person called Jo who leaves a newsletter in my mailbox every day. I don’t know anybody else who recieves it.

I make my way to Lower Main Road, a place I hate during the day. Lower Main Road Observatory was created for nights out. Those old rickety double-storey buildings crammed on both sides of the narrow road; the New Orleans style wrought iron balconies. The clubs and neon signs, and restaurants, and deli’s, and strange tribes of people wearing hemp and talking about ‘energy’.

During the day, it looks like hangovers, and truth revealed.

However, there’s always Divas, the stylish eatery that makes basics well, and sometimes with a twist (their Smoked Ostrich and Mint Pizza is to Cross Enemy Lines for). I have the full breakfast, and ask for blue cheese on my toast, and have more blue cheese on my toast, and a little more before wheeling out of there to catch the Charl, my chauffeur in Seapoint.

Greenpoint/Seapoint is South Africa’s National Closet Door. Behind the facades of the faceless apartment blocks; hidden from the (living in a time warp) Jewish pensioners walking their dogs on the promenade by the beach; separate from the hordes of Transvaal Blacks who live here because it has no real ethnicity any more, and they can feel at home. The drive, and character of Seapoint isdominated by Coming Out.

It is a place of transitions. At some point in the fifties and sixties it was dominated by Jewish immigrants from Europe, and Italian immigrants, and Greeks.This area, with the ethnic restaurants that sprung up, and seafront, and promenade was for years the place to own a holiday flat. Now, most flats look like scenes from a bad seventie’s movie, and the whole area is littered with Funfair Americana: bright and chirpy plastic constructions designed for fun. Fun, it seems, does not age well. The waterfront development has stolen most of the tourist trade.

Starting from The Waterfront, a wave of chic developments has started creeping Seapoint. New York Style Loft developments, resturants, pubs, delis and clubs. Most are gay owned, and have a mixed patronage. But, in odd, view-free corners from Moullie Point to Seapoint, there are many dilapidated flats. Many black people have moved in. They are cheap, and easy to get. Getting a flat if you are black in Cape Town is still very difficult. Many people use their white friends to get one.

So walking down the beach promenade I bump into white haired pensioners, greasy-haired dealers, fur-wearing cross-dressers, shy township couples, joggers, and loose horny looking people on the prowl for a pick-up.

Now there is a strange and ignored reality to this city I guess in the same way that LA is an Hispanic city, Cape Town is a Coloured city. Coloured being one of those name political correctness has failed to replace. Coloured covers a whole Nation of people: descendants of the original tribes of Cape Town; descendants of Indian and Malay slaves who were brought here; descendants of black people who migrated South looking for work and needed a permit and got one by being classified Coloured; descendants of the first Angolan and West African slaves; descendants of the first (black or mixed race) Boers who lived and owned property here, and then lost it when the British introduced the color bar. Later of course, the Afrikaners legalized it. There are Afrikaans speaking Coloureds, English speaking Coloureds, and Xhosa speaking Coloureds. There are black Coloureds, blonde Coloureds, moslem Coloureds, cross-dressing Coloureds, catholic Coloureds, Coloureds who miss apartheid, when the blacks knew their place; Coloureds who died fighting it.

Maybe the only universal things Coloured people share is their accent possibly because they go to the same schools, and were made to live in the same neighbourhoods since 1948.

I meet Charl, the driver, in Sea Point. We have a coffee, put on our helmets, and were on our way.

I'm not a two-wheel person, and the first few minutes are terrifying. I keep having flashes of landing on one side at 100 kilometres an hour, skidding on the tarmac, and peeling off the skin of my thigh. Charl has asked me to hang on, and make sure I turn with him when he takes the corners. Riding through Seapoint is irritating: full of beep-beeps, and strange people, looking as if they just walked out of my delirium, so focusing on the thrill of the ride is difficult. At the traffic light after the Spar, a Drag Queen with a poodle on a leash, dressed like Cruella Wotshername in 101 Dalmatians waves her spotted hankie, and shouts, " Ride it hard boys!"

We climb into Bantry Bay; we are surrounded by follies of too much money. Three storey houses built into the cliffs, with roofs that double as parking lots. There are lots of new ones being built, mostly German money. It fees like a ride through the debris of a former wedding cake. I see freedom up ahead, and I tighten in anticipation.

" Relax," Charl calls out, " Just move with me."

One turn, and blue sea blows open the bonds that were lashing my mind together. We are now riding the edge of the cliff, surrounded by ocean. Charl steps on it, and now we are the wind, and a tunnel of blue cocaine. Nothing ever leaves the mind; there is nothing that I can just forget. Last night I was in retreat: stepping back, stepping back, a human pebble on a cartoon catapult, stretched back at my most taut the moment I woke up. I am now a growl on two wheels, defying physics on every corner. The cartoons roam my turf, feebled as they now come in two dimensions. They flutter past my ears, papers in the wind, daring to challenge! Running at me with their jousting-lances; and unicorns, which have wheels, like formula-one cars. Some are riding bashful, wide-eyed scooters with large sleepy eyes.

I fart a pungent cheese into the wind and laugh.

People on the street, a blur through my goggles: moving with the languid, aimless speed of normal life, slow motion from where I am. I see one couple staring, and giggling at a humour too slow to catch up with me. Sunday tourists from Johannesburg, coming from the Chapman’s Peak drive:

Daddy red-faced and irate, Mummy red-faced and exhausted, Kids, red-faced and exhilarated:

Beep beeep!

We descend into Camps Bay, now the growl nears the sea, and a whoosh every few second becomes part of our world-space. Each whoosh anoints us with spray. We are in South Africa's plastic capital: plastic smiles, plastic breasts, plastic millionaires with their plastic barbies (bikini-model). We could be watching some American Daytime Soap.

I conjure in my mind an image of Bugs Bunny trying to run away from a giant set of teeth. They snap at him, he runs, and gets stuck in the pert breast of Bikini Barbie- who says, " Oooo? Do you have a Gold card?"

As we climb out of the town, the twelve Apostles are a menacing threat to our left. Jagged and weathered cliffs that stand like the bared teeth of some fossilized monster. The sea from here is a deeper blue. I have to stop myself from shoving Charl forward so we can dive off into the water. It is that inviting.

We start to climb, and the road winds, and is no longer a universe of concrete. It is a long skinny tapeworm. Strange how big a road can seem in town. I too am diminished, as if I'm riding a mosquito. Even the roar of the bike is muted by the wind, and the adrenaline and the soundless blue below us.

We get to Oudekraal. There isn't a single building around, just rocks, fynbos, and endless ocean. This land belongs to some gazzillionaire. Just before we turn into Llandadno, his hotel appears: an ugly, ugly white thing. Every time I see it, I feel want to quit my job and join Green Peace; then I remember that I am an African, and give five hundred million more shits for the people of this continent than for some poor beleaguered lab mouse.

A final bust of speed, and we surge up the final climb. At the top of the mountain, we look down upon Hout Bay: preening itself in Ye Olde Worlde cuteness, daring me to look out for Smurfs. The last thing you think about when you see the Neo-Whitewash Thatchings and Post-Warhol homes is a Quaint Fishing Village. This is what the brochures say it is.

I am giddy, feeling chilly, naked and higher than the fly that swam across the Gin and Tonic. I could do this every day. We stop at the mall. I get off, and arrange to meet Charl at two.

Yikes! My body is a demented accordion. My walk into the Mall is composed in Nashville, a bow-legged spongy walk. I manage an orange juice before my heartbeat pitter-patter's me out of air-conditioning. There is a Sunday Flea market on a lawn on the other side of the road. I haven't seen a single Smurf.

I wander about, and end up buying a book by Dambidzo Machirera (the late Zimbabwean writer who won the Guardian prize for fiction in the late seventies).

I find a quiet patch of grass, take the kikoi off my neck, and lay it on the ground. The sun is unenthusiastic, and there is a lazy, breeze, heavy with brine. I lie on my back, and watch clouds for a while. After a couple of minutes, my mind realizes that it doesn't have to keep churning out a stream of mundane. For a few minutes, all I hear is rustlings in the grass, a distant mowing machine, a bubble of distant chatter. Routine can be such a wall sometimes. It is as if that part of the mind that deals with it is like some choking weed, covering all opposition, and designing your existence around its no-nonsense priorities.

Dambudzo's spews are words of hate and bile tossed into the air and let to land on the page at will; then, a couple of paragraphs down, he sews their chaos into a new truth; not truth as I know it, built upon a thousand silent assumptions that I have never questioned - a discordant, anarchic truth, always re-inventing itself, and never fearing to self-destruct when one brick turns out to be a false assumption.

My body sinks into a bonelessness . I find a desperate sensitivity in Dambudzo’s writing. He lives in a world where peeled bodies walk about wearing only their motivations; men become animals, as their petty moralities fail the test of truth. Eyes pop out of all sorts of places, peeking at hidden things, looking at things from below, above, sideways - always revealing bits of obvious that are often too obvious to notice. People truer than I know them end up seeming as crazy as cartoons.

I stretch, my mind seared by pleasure. The book and I have our own body, a virtual thing that contains me. A body so confident in its existence that I can lift my eyes from within it, look at the sun, and decorate my vision with a galaxy of light-dots - and still not lose the body. Where the book ends, and sleep comes is a blur.

A sudden chill wakes me up. I stand up and stretch. A couple of days after it has rained, if you grab hold of the stem of a largish bush, and pull with all your strength, the roots detach themselves from the soil. They groan, and creak, then give suddenly, shivering a deluge of rich earth. This is how my stretch feels.

I walk down to the beach sand is pelting my skin like a Men’s Health warning: EXFOLIATE! I have fish and chips on the pier, then sit and watch the sun set, so beautiful no way to describe it without seeming trite. Poets have a lot to account for: they've killed the idea of sunsets, made meadows boring and completely exterminated starry (starry) nights. Sometimes I think they're just as bad as Polluting Industrial Conglomerates Run by Men

I see Charl Roar in with the Harley. It’s time to go.