As an average kid growing up in a hot, concrete suburb of Dallas, Texas, National Geographic was a revelatory introduction to the world that was somewhere out there. I’d browse through the magazine each time it appeared on our coffee table and by far the most engaging photos were of Africa. It was about as opposite of an extreme from my life as anything I could imagine. I always had it in my mind to visit Africa and one day during my last year of high school we seniors were asked where we would be in the year 2000. I said I’d be chasing lions in Africa for National Geographic. That was 1992.
In 2001, I remembered I had said that. I was working as a research editor for Islands Media just outside of Santa Barbara. I had started with them as an intern research editor for Islands Magazine, which you’ve probably drooled over in the dentist’s office, then was hired as a research editor for a new magazine they acquired called Spa.
In other words, it was my job to verify that, yes, the Hawaiian Lomi Lomi massage that such-and-such author received was still available at that resort in Chiang Mai, Thailand. I called people all over the globe to double-check every single fact that was written in the articles in front of me. On my lunch break, I’d step out of my office that was overhanging the ocean and facing the Channel Islands to take a run along Rincon Beach, a well-known surf break.
Up to that point, I had led 118-mile-per-day biking tours as a guide for Backroads Bike Tours in Glacier, Bryce, Zion, Grand Canyon, and the California Wine Country. I had led people down the Kern River as a class four river guide. I had backpacked through Chile twice and crossed the Salar de Uyuni to Bolivia. But I had not seen Africa yet, nor at my previously appointed time.
I quit my job, which was shallow and low-paying, and decided I would go there on my own photo expedition. I was a no-name in the photography industry but I assembled a long list of all the travel publications that could possibly include my work in their pages.
Having no idea where to go, I asked my travel companion if he had any ideas for a starting point. What do you know? His aunt had happened to marry a South African man – Norman Levy – many years before, so Cape Town could be our starting point. Soon after that decision was made, someone connected me with a filmmaker living in Montecito (just south of Santa Barbara, where Oprah lives) who would be following sharks off the coast of Jeffreys Bay in South Africa, so I gave him a ring. What do you know again? Without even knowing us, he said we could stay with his crew in a most unique house of a retired surfer, right on the beach in Jeffreys Bay. “J-Bay,” as it is called, is known for its fast, perfectly tubular waves and annual Billabong surfing competition, which draws professional surfers from around the globe.
Exhaustive magazine list in pocket, destination booked, and 100 rolls of slide film in my bag, we left for a month or two. I can’t even remember at the moment how long.
We arrived and our gracious hosts decided we should see Robben Island. It was then that I began to grasp the depth of the people we were visiting. Norman had worked alongside Nelson Mandela in the anti-Apartheid movement many years before, and continued to work on issues related to injustice, so we were treated to a private tour of the island where Mandela was jailed for 18 years. Norman and our tour guide, who had also been jailed with Mandela, had embraced when we arrived as only close friends would, and chatted about personal issues as we scoured the grounds learning about what had once happened there.
After doing a little looking around Cape Town and the surrounding areas, it was soon time for us to begin journeying by the seat of our pants, so off we drove in a rental car to see the rest of the country. Before leaving the US, I had done some calculations based on currency exchange rates I found online. I had approximated how much money I would need for the various things I imagined doing. Only a week or two into the trip, something was wrong. Even though we were subsisting off soup and bread, I was going to run out of money at some point fairly soon. I was shocked.
The next day we happened to visit a place called Monkeyland where monkeys of all kinds were being rehabilitated. We brought our camera and video equipment, capturing gleeful moments all throughout the day. While doing so, the woman who ran Monkeyland approached us. “You have very nice equipment,” she said. “Are you professional photographers from the United States?” I explained to her that we were both aiming to get a foot in the door and that we had no professional connections yet. “Well, you sure have nice equipment. Would you be interested in photographing some South African resorts?” I wasn’t quite sure where she was going with this. “I know all the game resort owners. I could set you up in resorts all throughout South Africa in exchange for your photography of those places. South Africa desperately needs publicity in American magazines in order for these resorts to thrive.”
“Oh gosh,” I said, “I would never want the resort owners to be misled. I cannot guarantee even one publication. I don’t have a name for myself yet.” She reassured me, “That’s okay. You wouldn’t have to guarantee anything. If you’d be willing to try, they would be willing to have you stay with them.”
I couldn’t believe it. The night before, I was imagining myself destitute in Africa. Now, we would be staying in one incredible game resort after another. And that’s what happened. For the rest of the trip, the videographer and I photographed interiors, exteriors, gourmet food, wart hogs, and elephants as we traveled from one resort to the next, working our way northward on the eastern side of the country. I awoke before dawn to capture all angles in the best light and stayed out until after dark on jeep tours searching for wild animals. I made it abundantly clear each time we arrived at a new resort that there was no guarantee that I could get their photos published in American magazines. Nevertheless, they all opened their doors, welcomed us in their luxury canvas tent accommodations (unlike any canvas tent accommodations I’d ever seen), and served us gourmet courses with silver finery.
Somewhere in between all of it, we stopped for a one-week stay in Jeffreys Bay to convene with the shark documentarian. He was true to his word. In our original and only conversation back in the US, he had told me which week to show up. When I asked how to find the unusual house on the beach, he said, “Don’t worry. Ask anyone in town where Derek Hynd’s house is and they’ll point you in the right direction.”
He was right. We walked down the peaceful streets of town until we saw the house. Whoa. It had a roof of many triangles, an enviable placement right on the sand, and a rope swing and tube slide inside the upstairs area. I awoke each morning to a rainbow of pre-dawn colors coming in the triangular window overlooking the sea from my powder-blue-colored triangular room built with the same dimensions as King Tut’s wife’s tomb.
Out each morning before the sun’s rays lit the sky, I hiked along the solitary miles-long beach and documented the changing light reflecting on the waves. In the afternoons, I stood shoulder-to-shoulder with countless surfers whose names I didn’t know, watching the endless heats of the Billabong Pro competition. In a beautiful, lazy little surf village far from a big city, here I was ambling around drinking hot chocolate alongside a bunch of world-renown athletes. At one point, Mark Occhilupo, “Occy,” was chatting with someone beside me in his twangy Australian accent. Aside from pro surfers and a few locals, the only other watchers were the surfers’ young bleach-blond fiancees and wives, huge diamond rocks on their fingers and Roxy logos splattered fluorescently over their immaculate sponsored attire.
When I wasn’t milling around on the boardwalk with the others, I was balanced on the tide pool rocks right where the waves came in, clicking photo after photo of surfers mid-wave from my tripod set-up.
Jeffreys Bay was like being in a quiet little white California beach town. Except for a visit to have our fortunes told by a local witch doctor. And the fact that every South African town, no matter how small, is abutted by a “township,” which is a slum where most of the black Africans live in total squalor.
Back on the resort schedule, we photographed ostrich eggs, listened to tracking experts, and watched as black resort employees worked three times longer and harder than white resort owners. Employees’ lives and wardrobes appeared fancy but only a few questions in and we learned that was a facade.
Somewhere in between, we booked a walking safari tour, where we came upon giraffes and white rhinos in the day and camped in tents wherever we happened to stop at night. Our guide, rifle in hand, told lots of tough-guy stories about his life, and his time in the Angolan Civil War. He found it humorous to let us learn the hard way about the veldt, like the night I found 60 tiny ticks all over me. The next day we were all picking ticks out of each other. He had not one, claiming immunity.
Thousands of miles, waves, and photographs later – 3,000 slides to be exact – I returned home. It would’ve been tens of thousands of dollars too, had I been charged for all the resort stays. But somehow I saw the most expensive side of South Africa for almost free. And though I gave countless slide shows and presentations around Santa Barbara of South African surf, botanical gardens, and wildlife, I was never able to publish even one photograph in an American magazine. Which is a shame; they were really good. Thankfully, my photos did get me a lot of other opportunities.
I still fantasize that someday I will break those slides out of their silent captivity to be showcased for National Geographic‘s cover story, “South Africa, Then and Now.” And on the flip side, I hope I never get a call from a resort demanding $10,000 in unrecovered payment.
One thing I know for sure is that the best way to really see a country is from its most down-home hostels. What I saw was neither from the pages of those magazines when I was a kid nor from the reality of the country itself.
But it does make for a good story.
(The photos that say Edee Olson Photography are the only scans I have left of my Africa slides. The colors are dull because of the type of low-res file they happen to be. I accidentally deleted my Africa folder with hundreds of high-res scans when transferring from one computer to another 10 years ago. A troubling exercise in “letting go,” as it took dozens of hours to scan my favorite slides.)
