Matthew
Krouse
Guides are compiled for the ignorant, insecure and ambitious. They offer many a safe, easy route to achieving instant credibility. Because there are so many who fit this bill in the lifestyle marketplace, guides have come to occupy the same place as pornography: discreet, and purely for personal gratification.
The easily accessed information in these mini-books keeps wannabe-Joneses abreast of how those in the know spend their spare pennies. Today suburbia’s abundant bookshops are brimming with pocket-sized lists of the best of everything available to consumerist diehards.
Leading the trend are three new guides, offering proof of how the country’s social landscape is fracturing. Nothing today is left unsurveyed, neither gay-friendly bed and breakfasts nor frugal roadside farmstalls.
The Mail & Guardian’s Q Travel Guide to South Africa is a 130-page overview of gay life in 15 of South Africa’s regions, including such backwoods as the Karoo and the Free State. A product of the company’s gay website (www.q.co.za), the Q guide will also be a perfect partner for gay and lesbian revellers who want to celebrate the millennium inside the country.
Useful references include brief histories of each province and maps illustrating the location of main gay and lesbian venues nationwide. Padded with adverts, the listings include gay-friendly restaurants, cruising spots and HIV/Aids advice centres.
The country’s role as a world-class wine producer is summed up in the Platter guide to travelling in Cape Wine Country. Those embarking on a tour of South Africa’s historical wine region will find addresses and maps leading to the best of these estates, as well as details of their unique architectural composition.
But the Platter guide is more about wine than anything else, and it boasts the full range of labels all accompanied by rating stars and pricing scales. For the traveller, accommodation costs are listed along with festivals, tours, trails and hikes, including unique activities like ballooning and short excursions on helicopters and trains.
Finally, there’s the eagerly awaited Wine magazine’s Top 100 Restaurants in South Africa. This one’s for the real snobs, although it parades as the essential tool for those wanting to get the best value for their money. The judging criteria include “what’s in” (a respect for ingredients) and “what’s out” (ill-trained staff, stained menus and holes in tablecloths).
The country’s best eating holes are listed by their provinces and the ratings range from world class to average. Culinary styles are colour coded and prices averaged. For the serious diner, the Top 100 comes to a sound and uncompromising conclusion: “Consumers must learn to complain; must shake underperforming chefs out of their complacency by sending unacceptable food back.”
It’s strange that people need to be told things that should be common sense. One wonders what customers will do if next year’s guide tells them it’s no longer fashionable to complain. Will they shut up and eat what’s on their plates?