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Friday morning. We’re getting ready to hit the hills outside Port St Johns on the Wild Coast in the Eastern Cape when rain stops play. And work. Literally.
We’re in South Africa’s cannabis capital for a pretty decent gig. Get out of town, hook up with some local herb growers and then write about it.
There are a couple of other deadlines to be met from here, but otherwise it’s weed all the way.
Some would say it’s a job I’ve been training for all my adult life – and most of my teenage years, for that matter.
All I can say is it’s not a bad way to recover from the previous week spent (unsuccessfully) chasing Penny Sparrow up and down the south coast (she was probably in Orania or Cape Town by then) and getting dirty looks from the whites at the Durban Undersea Club for darkening their doorway by turning up alongside Tebza (my partner in crime, shooter Tebogo Letsie).
So we’re all geared up to make a third run into the hills.
It’s taken a couple of days and all my stoner acumen and negotiating skills, along with Tebza’s formidable linguistic abilities, to get us access to a field of weed.
The cat we’re dealing with says it’s his only plantation. He’s clearly lying through his teeth, but I don’t blame him. We’ve only just met after an introduction by a friend of a friend of a friend.
He has no real reason to trust me. Or even talk to me, for that matter. It’s not like he can flush 150 marijuana plants down the toilet or throw them out of the window if I turn up the next day with the local cops in tow to drag him off to jail.
We still need a lot more, so we’re gagging to get moving.
There’s been some steady rain overnight, but we’re still keen to see how far up the mountains we can get in the office’s Ford Figo.
Thursday was a five-hour round trip on murderous gravel with two hours of walking in the bush.
Then this wall of rain hits us from the sea. It’s bouncing off the river like it’s trying to get back into the sky. The stoep’s gutters are spewing out geysers of rain. The Figo’s axle is deep in water in minutes.
After an hour, my phone rings. It’s my contact.
He’s not willing to drive into the hills in his bakkie in this downpour. It’s not about getting wet – it’s about getting dead.
We’re going nowhere.
