Donkey Crossings, by Kim McGowan

Donkey Crossings. A wild and desperate journey down the Transkei coast, by Kim McGowan. Umuzi; Cape Town, South Africa 2009. ISBN 9781415200858 / ISBN 978-1-4152-0085-8

Donkey Crossings: A wild and desperate journey down the Transkei coast is as the whacky, off-beat, jaundiced, and altogether wonderful account of Kim McGowan's journey along the Transkei coast.

Kim McGowan  

To begin: These journeys we promise ourselves, they open with no map, follow no fixed route and cannot be closed with a cross. To leave tomorrow, first thing, is the idea, to simply throw it in and go, the essential adventure, ill-starred, dangerous and thus fulfilling. Some leave with a view to covering distance, others to document, to confirm ideas. No such rigours for us. We went from here to there, it is true, and might have gone further. Were it in us. But no journey is ever quite done, or properly begun. Our accomplishment, in the end, was in chucking it up. And what a relief that was. Having chucked it all in, we then chucked it up. This is a story of a journey through the Transkei in the year nineteen hundred and eighty-eight. We (or at least I) had in mind Khartoum, for some reason, as our escapades end, with Port St Johns and Morgan Bay as way points to Cape Town, our meridional and point of departure for the west coast, for West Africa, and thence around the corner to Egypt, and Alexandria. But first the Transkei, which we would enter from the dusty border town of Kokstad. Conceived of in 1955 by the Mad Hatter apparatchiks of apartheid, the Transkei came into 'independent' existence in 1976 - a quiet, bucolic region of rolling hills and distant huts and retiring rustics that many travellers thought was best avoided. Armed attacks, bombs, coups, roadblocks and a general sullenness among the population of South Africas oldest homeland (now part of the Eastern Cape province) had skewed the perceptions of many. Haunting and deceiving, full of hardships and hidden meanings, the Transkei was just the place to begin an excursion like ours. A combined journey, each of us with his own idea of what we thought we had in mind. Expedition, exorcism, quest, covenant - these were the charms we set out with. Charms that became chasms. Ours was a chaotic trip beset by mischief and misfortune even before it began. And it was with difficulty that I recorded, on a daily basis, the indignities that befell us, many of which we brought upon ourselves, by what is known as collaborative effort. How to start to tell this story? The diary approach, some other? A transcription of my own minutes seemed the easiest. I recalled the observations of a sailor who came close to winning one of the world's great sea challenges, the first solo circumnavigation of the globe, only to abandon the race short of the finish. He no longer saw the point of combat and sailed on without going in for his prize. His account, as I recall, was written as a diary, his passage documented thus: [...]

This is an excerpt from the book: Donkey Crossings. A wild and desperate journey down the Transkei coast, by Kim McGowan.

Title: Donkey Crossings
Subtitle: A wild and desperate journey down the Transkei coast
Author: Kim McGowan
Publisher: Random House Struik
Imprint: Umuzi
Cape Town, South Africa 2009
ISBN 9781415200858 / ISBN 978-1-4152-0085-8
Softcover, 15 x 22 cm, 175 pages, several b/w photos