Travel Chapters in a Maserati levante Out of Africa into Italian class. When the wild wants to take you there. I am getting too close for comfort. Do you blame me? With this amount of power underneath me, do you blame me? I just got too close. Let me take you to the place where I am now. A crowded N3 surrounded by the mediocre whispers of a thousand irritated engines, asking to be pushed further than that frustrating first base. And here I sit, in a white Maserati Levante, my body aching to push this snow-wolf past the hills and craters of average, into the realm of the impossible, a place where the real she-wolf that I am hunting is flying far ahead of me. I can still smell her perfume on my skin. Here’s a flashback, just for your pure entertainment. Oscar Wilde once spoke about the macabre beauty of hungry monsters. And in my flashback, I became one. You remember my woman, the writer who flits into and out of my life, pushing me into the friend zone? She’s back in my life. She came over last night, her eyes smudged with mascara. Her angst and tears, about some man who had treated her badly. It always was around 3 a.m. that she would wander over to me, her characteristic black lace shawl thrown around her shoulders. Cups of black coffee, and she looked up at me from her usual place, curled up on my sheepskin bed-throw, the colour of clotted cream. Her lips, bitten in moments of poetic rumination. I leaned over, she looked vulnerable. I took in her scent. There was a hedonistic thrill that shook through me as I leaned in for a taste. And that was it. Like a leopard, she sprang up, wide eyes and wild hair. She ran. She grabbed one of the sets of keys off my teak antique key holder I had bargained off an old man in Nepal.
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bargained
I guess I bargained for everything in my life. My life of the hustle. Before I could get to her, she had fled. I frightened her. She took the Porsche, the one I had driven her to the ocean in when she had arrived from New York. From my Penthouse balcony, I saw the Porsche disappear along the Durban Golden Mile, just as the sun came up on a sane Durban Sunday. This time, I would follow her. And I knew exactly where she was headed. We had been talking about a book she had been reading. “Out of Africa” by Karen Blixen, later made into a movie starring that classy dame, Meryl Streep. She was heading for the wild African bush, and I was going to follow her. For how long would she and I play this cat and mouse game? It needed to end. What better place for things to end and begin, than a luxury Safari Retreat in the heart of the KwaZulu Natal Midlands. The Karkloof Safari Villas and Spa. At the Karkloof Safari Villas, Collin greets me at the tucked away reception lodge. I don’t say much. He says “Villa six for you. She’s in Villa five.” For a split second I suffer separation anxiety when my Maserati is taken away to the parking area, but I recover quickly. She’s at the Spa. My driver Bloom takes me deeper and deeper into the wild. The Spa and the Villas are closeted away from all eyes. You wouldn’t know they were there, they just appear like a mirage before you. My muscles in a knot, I want to ease all my tensions of the drive and this personal roller coaster before I meet her. My massage is sublime, it works every knot in my body. The Spa offers five varieties of authentic Thai massages and various other treatments like manicures, facials, and reflexology. After my Thai massage, I walk over to the indoor pools. She is
