Molweni Ghost Town

Hello from Ghost Town.

I find myself flowing through the streets of East London in the arms of a family by the name of Gamiet. Their end of the city is called Buffalo Flats, yet is ever so cleverly nicknamed Ghost Town due to it's close proximity to a graveyard. Yesterday I made quite the trip jump from Durban through the Eastern Cast and down a little ways on the Wild Coast. Two words can describe the landscape of this part of South Africa, Other Worldly. I have had this feeling once before, when I looked over the rolling hills of the Guatemalan campo. Spirits of old Earth fill the air. A place that now is home to different people but has never lost the electricity of it's creation which one can almost see with their eyes. The countryside is simple and in it's openess comes an untouchable something, a something that poetry would only hope to capture.

Can you tell that I love the place?

East London holds no different a feeling though it comes in a different expression. Earlier in the day I had been picked up from a hostel in Central Durban called Nomads, a great place filled with travelers mostly out of Europe though I'm sure I got a scowl from an American girl. The host was a young English South African guy with kilowatts of energy, striking up multiple conversations between nursing his beer and finishing off various rounds of billards with an British fellow. It was built out of an old house that tourists would see throughout Durban, but rarely get to walk through. I had stayed at 3 other really great places in KwaZulu-Natal, and Nomads was the easily the icing. Yet the next place I could think about staying was in East London with the Gamiets, the family of a great friend of mine named Germaine.

Now, East London isn't nessesarily the backpacking hot spot of South Africa. If one is heading West then they are far more likely to end up in Coffee Bay or another hidden nook of the Transkei, and coming from the East it is just a stop off for supplies before elbowing North onto the Drakensburg or whatnot. Most other travelers I shared my destination with gave funny looks along with twisted heads, an expression of "Why there?" I have found that staying with people is far better than hostel jumping, yet my next stop showed me something very interesting. The bus I used dropped me off at another backpacking spot called East London Backpackers, only as a place for the Gamiets to fetch me. Though when I went inside I found it very different from Nomads, or anyother. It has the same interior setup of most backpacker spots, but the people inside were quite different. They were African. From various parts of Africa along with black South Africans. This is untypical of most hostels here. The chance to be able to sit and speak with people from the major culture in a more informal and laidback way is uncommon to the see-it-all, always moving western traveler. I was only able to say some Hellos and explain my quick passing. But to be introduced to a place with such contrast to everywhere before it breaks any bond I have with putting life on the road into simple organized boxes.