I woke up at 430 AM in Tokyo this morning, thinking about Travel and Life.
And for some reason, as I was trying to get back to sleep, my mind wandered to a fortune telling session I’d had in a luxury spa called Fordoun, one of South Africa’s best, in Kwazulu-Natal at the foot of the Drakensberg Mountains, just eleven months ago.
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30 of my friends and Travelife readers had joined me for a holiday in South Africa’s enigmatic Northern Cape region last May, you see.
And after the trip ended, I decided to stay on for a few more days in South Africa and go on a solo spa holiday to Fordoun, which is about two hours’ drive from the city of Durban.
At Johannesburg airport, we all said goodbye and I jumped on a plane for Durban, where a car and driver were waiting to take me onwards to Fordoun for my private long weekend holiday.
I take a solo holiday somewhere in the world once a year, and it’s usually to a spa.
One morning at Fordoun, living a Travelife, I had an appointment at 9 AM with a traditional South African healer. This was recommended to me by one of the ladies in the spa, and I jumped at the chance at something novel.
I was certainly curious to see what a traditional African therapy session was like.
Dr. Elliot Ndlovu, director of the Spa at Fordoun, took me on a walk around his herbal garden, which is on the Fordoun estate.
Then he went on to analyze my life the traditional South African way — basically with a bag of items that included the head of a statue, some shells and a few bones.
This is what happened: we entered his consultation room, full of animals skins and tribal artifacts, and I sat on a drum across from him.
After I’d blown into the bag, he flung the bag across the floor so that the objects in it scattered across the nguni skin on the floor.
Then he proceeded to tell me about my life, based on how the items in the bag had landed on the floor.
He said: “You have the perfect life. Everything is going well and there is nothing to change. Just keep going in this direction.”
I didn’t know whether he was joking. How many times does someone tell you that you have a perfect life, after all?
So I asked: “You mean there’s nothing wrong with my life? Nothing negative?“
He nodded.
Then he looked more closely at the objects on the floor and said: “There are a couple of people jealous of your life, but it’s nothing you can’t handle.“
Hmmm.
Then he proceeded to give the details of my supposedly lucky life. Unfortunately, I can’t print the rest of our discussions here.
But I left the session in a bit of a disbelief about how someone could tell I had the perfect life from objects strewn across the floor from a cloth bag. I’m sure you can identify with this sentiment.
But when I recounted this to someone at Fordoun later, including the “perfect life” bit, she took everything very matter-of-fact and said: “He’s very good. He was spot on with my life. And you should see how people come from all over the world just to consult with him.“
Oh my goodness.
Maybe I am lucky, after all, in my never-ending, and never-endingly eventful Travelife.
