It’s been four week since I arrived in South Africa for this glorious adventure. Even though I grew up in Johannesburg, I’ve lived in Canada for more of my life than I have in South Africa, so Canada is home. I’ve been back 3 times in the 30 years I’ve been away, the last trip being 9 years ago, always returning to see family.

This trip is different: I came to South Africa to do a 3-day mountain bike stage race and am spending my time in places unfamiliar to me, seeing South Africa like a tourist.

And yet, there’s enough familiarity to spark memories long forgotten.

Locked in

In South Africa, the toilet is often in a different room from the bathroom. The doors have locks where a clunky key fits into a traditional keyhole, usually located at a height not suited to small humans. For this reason, among others, we were always warned not to lock the door when we went to the toilet.

At some point, small me decided I was old enough to need privacy, so disregarded the rule of not locking the door, and I locked the door. Upon leaving, I reached up up up as required by little arms to reach high things, to unlock the door and the key fell to the ground. I struggled and struggled to get it back into the keyhole without success. I don’t know how long I struggled before I called for help – likely one of those 5 minutes that feel like 2 hours. It’s the combination of knowing you’re going to be in trouble for not having listened, and you have the rising panic of being locked in the toilet forever, and likely also having lied the first time someone asked through the door if I was ok.

The panic was followed by a lot of shouting. I was shouting for help, I was being shouted at for not listening, someone else was shouting about rescuing me and not scaring me more – there was just a lot of shouting. I remember a kind voice through the window trying to calm me.

That’s it – that’s all that’s come back to me. I don’t know how I was rescued from toilet jail, I only recall my despair as small child locked in.

Dip and bake repeats

Here in Stellenbosch my airbnb has a pool by the main house. After a ride the other day I went over for a dip. The woodwork around the pool was hot and burned my bare feet. So I hopped across it quickly going “ouch, ouch, ouch” with each step. I walked in to the blissfully cool water and waded about until my fingers started to wrinkle.

Then I got out of the pool and did the ouch ouch ouch dance again to the grass where I spread my towel in the sun and lay down to dry. Within 10 minutes it was way too hot and I was driven towards the shade. Head in the shade, legs in the sun, is my first move. Then as it gets too hot again, there’s shifting and rotating until the last resort is back to the pool. Which requires the ouch couch ouch dance again. Followed by the wrinkled finger tips, and then back to the grass in the sun.

This ritual, on repeat, is how we spent all of December as children once we had the pool put in: in the pool and then baking beside it until we needed to go back in. Being here, doing just that, brought back the delightful abandon of carefree summer days.

A number of other useless threads find their way back into my consciousness: the kidney shape of the pool, the contractor being Champagne Pools with a frog logo, the thump thump thump of the Kreepy Krawly that kept the pool clean, the task of managing the water quality with chlorine.

It’s the simplest things that make you smile.