The BEST Frangipani Hotel

Those who have the most joy win. Robin Wall Kimmerer in The Serviceberry

It was even better in real life and that’s saying a lot because the online dating profile of this happy little beach cottage was superbly presented.

Being a bit bookish and inclined to word mongering, the name, with its echoes of “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” a 2011 British film based on a Deborah Moggach book These Foolish Things, and its sequel (2015) “The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” was the first thing which caught my attention when I was scanning that short term rental website for a beach bivouac in the barefoot capital of the world : “The Second Best Exotic Frangipani Happy Beach Cottage” [Note: hosts have since struck out the word “second” in the listing title, an edit which I thoroughly approve. This cottage is second to none]

Sidebar: Frangipani is what we who are from that part of the world where Frangipani Hotel (uh beach cottage) is found, call Plumeria. I was in the area to celebrate a matriarch who has gone to be an ancestor. She famously loved gardens, flowers, books and movies. I was looking for signs.

Then I looked at the images posted for this beach cottage. (All pictures posted here are my own - as previously mentioned, the hosts do an excellent job of showing their offering). There is a table under a guava tree set in a private, lush subtropical back garden. Signs were sent. A guava tree! Then I looked at who the hosts were and realized I knew them from long ago and far away in the way that librarians in small towns know everyone.

After walking up the frangipani lined driveway, accompanied by the exuberant barking of Charlie the canine Greeter in Chief and Guardian of the Gate, and finding my way, with Charlie’s permission, through a garden gate and down a narrow pathway perfumed with the fragrance of blooming papaya, to the cottage, I found an old tin basin of flowers floating in water. The water is for washing sandy feet after coming off the beach, which is just across the road. The flowers: unanticipated bonus welcome embrace.

The welcome didn’t end there. A mob of meerkat amongst aloes on the little front porch approved my entry.

This cottage isn’t just about beach setting, privacy and garden.

It has been beautifully and lovingly decorated, anchoring it firmly in place and in a curious timelessness of quintessential beach holiday. However, there’s not a shred of formulaic coastal grandma chic here. No cookie cutter generic decor neither, but everywhere an artist’s eye.

If you do have places to be, people to meet, things to do, the kitchen wall clock will let you know where you are in the day.

The postal service in South Africa might be a thing of the past, but some of the textiles in the cottage pay creative tribute to the stunning postage stamps the country was once famous for, while also celebrating its iconic flora. The kitchen tablecloth which I failed to photograph also featured protea. In retrospect I realize I failed to photograph a lot of the beauty in the cottage

Above a bed the size of a small African nation, a vortex of sardines draws one into a happy, dizzy delirium. Was it jet lag or the joy of this cottage, this place, this space, making me feel decidedly dimensionally shifted, but simultaneously wrapped up in a huge welcome home hug?

Fortunately I have yoga to help with waving not drowning in the oceans of cultural and geographical dysphoria which I encountered on this adventure. The cottage contained the perfect space for unrolling my traveling yoga mat.

When I booked this sleeps 3 in two sleeping areas place six months ago I was kinda hoping the Last Emperor might be able to join me for some of the time. This ringside seat on the garden might have been his emporium.

Turned out I had the place all to myself. Sad though I was not to be seeing the Last Emperor, I enjoyed for myself, and for absent ones, the view of so much green and the exquisite vibrancy of So Many Flowers. This journey for me took place at the tail end of a northern Chihuahuan desert winter when vistas are typically a bit sparse: bare, dusty and dry.

This garden is a haven for a myriad birds: Knysna loerie, sunbirds and a million more, their calls and colors so familiar from long ago and far away. This bushshrike, (above) the Southern Boubou was the only one I captured with camera, though I often glimpsed the iridescence of sunbirds in the papaya blossoms, or heard the grunting call of Knysna loerie, and saw their plumage brilliance in the foliage, or heard the a-a-aaaaah of hadeda ibis whom I met each morning going to and fro on my beach walks or food foraging excursions.

My current leitmotif is paradise as a walled garden. At the Best Exotic Frangipani Happy Beach Cottage in Kenton-on-Sea, in the East Cape province of South Africa, I was in paradise.

And that was before I even stepped onto the beach, reunited with the warm waters of the Indian Ocean or tasted the fresh woodfired oven baked sourdough bread which both quickly became part of my daily routine.

I took on the skies and demonic forces of darkness and confinement for three days and nights to get here. After twenty five years of wilderness wandering, and wondering what home means, I found out. For a brief, split second, razor edge sliver of time, I am home. I know where I am from.

Doesn’t mean I’m going to tell every nosy stranger. But I know. And I know that I know. That’s enough for now.

Another sidebar: we never called Kenton by its full fancy “…On Sea” name back then when life was there not elsewhere. Now it even has a tagline Barefoot Capital of the World. The barefoot farm girl thoroughly approves the tagline.