MY family has lured me on holiday under false pretences. The quiet retreat to a remote cabin on an undeveloped stretch of coast has not been the soul-soothing experience as detailed in the brochures; the beds are uncomfortable, the insects relentless in that stinging, biting way of theirs, and the locals jeer rudely when I report the power failures.
Worse still, the kids greeted my suggestion that we search the beaches for cocaine with naked hostility.
So far four barrels of raw coke worth an estimated R68-million have been found washed up near Mossel Bay. Where the stuff came from remains a bit of a mystery, but five will get you ten that a smuggling operation has gone horribly wrong. For more than a week now the speedboat types here have been jabbering on about how the ocean seldom reveals its secrets. Some of them have runny noses and are quite shouty, but there could be a perfectly innocent explanation for that.
And that's been about it as far as holiday excitement goes. The internet here is not so much wobbly as drippy. with small, increasingly intermittent bytes of data squeezing through the void much like a camel passing through the eye of a needle.
Which, I'm told, is perhaps not such a bad thing. The news, when it does get through, is grim. Violence in the Central African Republic is escalating, and thousands of children are being recruited as soldiers. Bombs continue to tear Beirut apart. A teenage gang rape victim in India is burnt to death by her attackers.
Closer to home, the murder of the former Rwandan intelligence chief, Patrick Karegeya, in a luxury Johannesburg hotel on New Year's Eve was an ominous start for a year in which the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide is commemorated.