by Chris Marais
“Pin a tail on me, call me a weasel,” Jules kept chanting (this, for those who don’t know, is her ‘I’m Very Impressed’ song) as she moved through the charming little traditional cottage. She raved over the succulent garden outside, the massive hearth inside, the quaint family photographs on the walls, the bottles of Voortrekker Inflammation Oil and Cape Dutch Chest Drops, the paraffin storm lanterns and the yellowwood cabinets. From the rafters hung bunches of dried flowers and tumbleweeds and mobiles and decorations made from sea-urchin shells and bits of motherof-pearl. We could picture happy families here, on rainy days, working away at these mobiles.
But why the name, we asked the caretaker, Hentie van Heerden.
“A Mr Van der Westhuizen bought the plot in the old days for next to nothing and built this cottage,” he said. “When his children inherited it, the place was worth a small fortune. They said they had landed ‘with our bums in the butter’. Hence the name.”
The waves at Elands Bay, Hentie said, did more than occasionally cough out tonnes of lobster.
“It’s a great surfing spot. The waves form a left-hand tube that spits you out in the general direction of Lambert’s Bay.” A left-hand tube? Mmm. As opposed to a right-hand pipe? The wondrous world of surf-speak still lay before us like a foreign country.
“How about some snoek, then?” suggested Jules, and off we went to the Elands Bay Hotel. On the porch, two ravenous surfers stood devouring large quantities of sandwiches, chips and coffee, gazing intently out at the waves. That left-hand tube thing again.
The snoek was fresh and firm and very tasty. It has always been my favourite fish, mainly because it has big bones that you can see and extract right away. None of that Sneaky-Pete, barely visible, skinny-bone shit that sticks in your craw and makes you search your own gullet with a mirror and tweezers in the dead of night. Snoek is honest eating. I like snoek.
We had questions for Celeste Kriel at Reception. Firstly, what happened to the tail of the fat hotel dog? Secondly, had she ever seen a snoek run?
“That’s Kisha. We’ve tried to put her on a diet but it doesn’t work. Her tail was bitten off in a fight, back in the days when she still could move around.
“I’ve seen a snoek run, believe me. In August the snoek ran for the first time in many years. You could not believe the excitement. I just had to drop everything and run to the beach and watch. The fishermen were hauling in snoek after snoek, singing and laughing as they worked. It brought tears to my eyes.”
We promised Celeste we’d return that evening for drinks at the bar. Heading out to Leipoldtville for the afternoon, Jules and I came across a couple of Xhosa fishermen and their slim pickings of hotnotsvis. Simon Mxeba and Themba Metu had come here more than 30 years before from the Transkei to fish – and simply stayed. They were far from home. Hentie told us earlier that when the Xhosa workers were first shipped over to the West Coast to begin their new careers as fishermen, they were taught to row the little skiffs in Verloren Vlei. Over the years, they became expert fishermen, plying the Atlantic shoreline off Elands Bay like salty sea dogs.
“For better or for worse, this is now our home,” they said. The West Coast had crept into their souls.
We continued past swathes of potato farms eating up the sandveld (and not in a nice way) into the quiet village of Leipoldtville, named for the father of C Louis Leipoldt, the legendary man of letters. And of cooking, as my travel mentor, the late Lawrence Green, writes. In On Wings of Fire, he says Leipoldt liked to eat hippo meat, dikkop stuffed with orange, breast of flamingo, lizard, squirrel, hedgehog, giraffe tongue and pickled swallow. Regular ‘critter cuisine’. I wonder what he would have thought of Reynold van Wyk’s bokkoms back at the bar in Doring Bay?
Chapter 7: Elands Bay to Paternoster
Home from the Sea
I’m at the top of a hill overlooking the sweep of Elands Bay, a sunset spot of note. I can see a pink mist of flamingos wheeling and turning towards the reed banks of Verloren Vlei, a clutch of surfers catching the last waves of the day and the Piketberg rising in jagged lilac relief on the far horizon. I can even see the Fisheries Compliance Officer in the distance, arriving at his tiny shack. He is probably the most closely-watched person in Elands Bay. Everyone always knows where the Fisheries Man is – at any time of the day or night.
Jules is not far away, deeply involved with a sandveld succulent. We’re going down to have a sundowner shortly, and all is well with our world.
Then my cellphone thrums like a beating heart and an SMS comes streaming through:
“It’s Teazers teazing time @ Teazers nationwide. Free entry 6/10 & 7/10 till 7pm. Book ur table. New girls call 084TEAZERS 2 view. Don’t speed 2 ur nearest branch.”
“Who was that?” asked Jules.
“It’s Teazers. They want me to come over for a lapdance.” I was on their mailing list. Somehow my business card had found its way into one of their clubs. It must have been while I was doing a story or something.
“No titty bars for you, young man. We’re going drinking,” said my stern yet wise wife.
We arrived at the Elands Bay Hotel in the midst of Happy Hour, where a potato farmers’ convention was in full swing. The potato heads all turned and looked at us as we arrived, saw we couldn’t possibly be potato industry inspectors and continued making small potato talk while watching the ubiquitous Paris Hilton on TV with the sound turned off and the Eagles singing ‘Hotel California’ very loudly on the sound system.
“You know, I sometimes worry about Paris,” I told Jules over the din. “When is that girl going to get a real job?”
Unbeknownst to us, there were serious issues at play here among the potato conventioneers.
In some places up here in the semi-desert, the water table had dropped by as much as 14 metres and was below sea level. This meant salt was being drawn through the soil and was turning the borehole water brackish.
In 2005 the Verloren Vlei – the most prominent wetland in the area – was in trouble. Water levels were sinking. The reason? Overextraction of water by the potato farmers.
An interviewee in an article in the Cape Times of May 2005 remarked that it was like “exporting water inside potato peels”.
“Everyone is losing,” said Rina Theron, Potato Farmer of the Year (2000). “The water and the sandveld are vanishing, the farmers are struggling, retailers are forcing us to accept prices below production cost and the middlemen are ripping off consumers.”
Even the potatoes themselves were losing. They had become prey to half a dozen malicious viruses.
“My fellow farmers fail to see the problems for what they are,” Rina continued, when Jules contacted her later. “When the water quality and quantity decline, they just say ‘Next winter the rains will be ample and the boreholes will fill up again.’ It’s gone beyond that now. We need to work on a holistic solution. Farmers need to plant fewer potatoes for a better price.”
No one mentioned the possibility of growing something else. Or doing something with the last vestiges of sandveld magic, which lay in the rearing shadow of the distant Piketberg, the huge blue gums and the old reed-thatched homes, in the tang of the sea overlaying the grace of vlei and water lilies.
After a brace of cold beers and Old Brown sherries served in no-nonsense wine glasses filled to the brim, Jules and I relaxed and became one with the pub. Kurt Petzer, the barman, told us that the locals used to come in here and shoot holes in the wall for target practice. But the pièce de résistance of the Elands Bay Hotel bar (won’t someone please give it a name?) was the prosthetic leg hanging from the ceiling. With a cap belonging to a Cape Stormers fan swinging jauntily from the toe.
“That belonged to a guy who used to drink here,” said Kurt. “He ran a tab at the bar, and if he couldn’t pay up he’d leave his leg behind as surety and take himself home in his wheelchair. Unfortunately he died without settling his tab, so the leg still hangs there. I don’t know what a second-hand false leg is worth these days.”
“One helluva conversation piece,” I said, and snuck in a little shot of Jack while Jules wasn’t looking.
We took the small two-person party back to our lodgings. The next morning I pushed the alarm button instead of the light switch and all hell broke loose in Die Bottergat. Fifteen minutes later we were on the road out of Elands Bay, in disgrace and sucking on tins of iced rooibos tea while nursing industrial-sized headaches. We passed the flamingos of Verloren Vlei amid much bickering, hooting, trumpeting and honking. The birds made a bit of a noise as well.
By mid-morning we were moving through our first densely developed coastal zone, a place called Dwarskersbos. Huge billboards selling dreams off-plan shouted down at us. “Own the Beach” vied with “Have a Whale of a Time” and “So Much to Do and So Much Time”, an interesting deviation from the last words uttered by Cecil John Rhodes on his deathbed.
By lunchtime we were gulping down snoek at the Laaiplek Hotel on the Berg River. I read to Jules from Lawrence Green’s On Wings of Fire, which in turn was quoting from the journal of a German traveller, Dr Martin Lichtenstein, who had discovered his first Bushman woman at the Berg River, skinning a hare:
“The greasy swarthiness of her skin, her clothing of animal hides, as well as the savage wildness of her looks and uncouth manner in which she handled the hare presented altogether a most disgusting spectacle. Now and then she cast a shy leer towards us.”
“Wethinks the man protests too much,” was our consensus of opinion. Perhaps, like many Africa travellers caught lusting after ‘a dusky maiden’, the good doctor had been away from the home fires too long. Besides, no one in living history – or on any of the shows on the Food Channel – has ever managed to skin a hare elegantly. Flaying wabbits is not easy on the eye.
After lunch, we drove over to Harbour Lights, a self-catering establishment owned and run by René Zamudio, whose family line ran rich with legends of the West Coast and beyond. René himself had a colourful sea history. He was regarded as a pioneer in the pelagic-fishing industry, having plied the waters from Guinea Bissau and Morocco to Australia and the North East Atlantic. And now, after three decades at sea, he had come home to Laaiplek. And he didn’t miss his life on the ocean for a moment.
“You must be here for the Stephan story,” said René, a tall man of 70 years, with eyes that constantly scanned the horizon in the way of a retired skipper.
Stephan? At that stage we had no idea what René was talking about. So we sat on the stoep outside our room and talked over a tin of cold rooibos tea. Just in front of us was moored a small lobster boat, with rafts of seabirds lazing on the jetties. Upriver lay the port, with all its fishing boats. Above us the gulls and terns cavorted, while kingfishers hovered on blurred wings over the water. We skipped nearly two centuries back in time, while Oom René read to us from various historical research papers he had collected. Much of the material came from a document called A History of the Stephan Family of the Western Cape, researched and written by iconic travel historian Eric Rosenthal back in 1955.
The Stephan family, originally from Germany, arrived in South Africa in the latter part of the 18th century and soon began trading with the farmers of the desolate West Coast. In exchange for grain and fish, they shipped in all manner of supplies for the isolated farming community. The ocean off the West Coast was a treasury of sea life. In those days, penguin eggs were ‘three bob to the hundred’ and lobster were abundant and used only for bait and feeding the poor. Penguin eggs, you’ll remember, were also the weapons of choice among battling guano hunters of the day.
How tastes had changed. Today, penguin tourism was more lucrative than penguin cuisine. But a lobster was another story, with some upmarket restaurants charging you R200 a tail or more.
René, whose father was also a sea captain in these parts, had been compiling research on the enterprising Stephans. He uncovered some poignant events, which began with the suicide of Captain Johan Daniel Stephan up at Hondeklip Bay.
According to reports, it took the family years to recover from the tragic death of the young skipper.
The most enthralling character in the Stephan clan turned out to be Oom Carel Stephan, born in 1843. As a young buck, he fell in love with Marie Rochier, whose parents farmed near the Berg River. They disapproved of Carel and would not give their permission for a marriage. So, in the true tradition of ‘the old days’, Marie went off and drowned herself in the farm dam. Out here in the Wuthering Heights atmosphere of the sandveld.
On that day, a heartbroken Carel swore he would never marry. He bought a condemned French barque called the Nerie, towed it to the mouth of the Berg River and made it his fortress, warehouse and home. From here he traded and managed the Stephan empire, seldom socialising. He ruled his work-force like the Godfather and called them “my children”.
Oom Carel kept a much-loved parrot up there in his floating quarters, like Captain Hook. Upon the bird’s demise, he went off to the local carpenter and ordered a tiny coffin to be made to fit the parrot. He ordered all his clerks to attend the funeral. The local missionary, who also enjoyed the patronage of Oom Carel, had to read the formal service, almost as though the parrot had been a human family member. But that was the West Coast in those days – you always expected the unexpected.
Oom Carel used a Khoi runner called Piet Danster to relay messages. Piet carried a little whip, which he would use on himself when he felt he was slowing down on the run. He would regularly embark on 80-km runs, cheerfully negotiating the routes between Stompneus Bay, Lambert’s Bay, Hopefield and Saldanha Bay.
Then came the Anglo-Boer War, and Boer general Manie Maritz rampaged up and down the West Coast with his flying commandos. They helped themselves to stores from the French barque, made their way north to Lambert’s Bay and fired a couple of shots at a British gunboat. This was to be the one and only ‘naval engagement’ of the Anglo-Boer War.
At nearby Vredenburg, the Boers looted shops and came away with knives, sweets and savouries. Then they hit the local hotel and one of the commandos got so jolly they had to leave him behind, snoring under the bar counter. He woke up with a special thirst the next morning, presumably surrounded by some very irritated burghers.
The Stephans had a store in Vredenburg. The cash from the store was hidden in a secret hole in the pulpit of the local church. No one thought to look there. Oom Carel, meanwhile, decided to sandbag his ship in anticipation of future attacks. Unfortunately, all that weight broke the old ship’s back, and she sank into shallow mud, scant metres from the hotel where we had enjoyed lunch and Dr Lichtenstein’s racy river memoirs. Oom Carel, one presumes, took up new lodgings on dry ground.
“Goodness,” I exclaimed, just as the sun was setting. “And where does your father fit into all this?”
“He worked for the Stephan brothers and did most of his salvage operations in a boat called the Luna,” said René, whose clan hailed from the French-Spanish border lands.
When a Portuguese mailboat, the Lisboa, went down on 24 October 1910, near Paternoster, it was René’s father and the Luna who went to her rescue. All 250 passengers survived; three crewmen drowned. The cargo consisted of barrels of olive oil, red wine and a number of fighting bulls, destined for the arenas of Lourenço Marques. Even the bulls were brought ashore, and they no doubt strengthened the bovine gene pool of the West Coast over the decades to come.
The wine, however, enjoyed another fate. Paternoster’s Italian fishing community went to ‘check up’ on the wine barrels that had washed ashore. After a week-long absence, their wives went to look for them. The fishermen were found in a cave, having ‘secured’ the casks of hearty Portuguese red. They were reportedly in a sorry, sorry state.
“Now,” René said the next morning. “Would you like to try some bokkoms?”
Jules and I had had a dodgy virgin experience with fish biltong back at Doring Bay, but we were hardy troupers on the road and willing to try again. So off we marched to bokkoms Lane, centre of
the West Coast dried fish industry.
All along the river banks, there were piles of silver harders left to dry on poles after a good soaking in brine. Paul Marais, one of the last bokkoms barons of the river, said the money in his business was lousy. Not like in the past, when everyone on the farms ate bokkoms as part of their rations. Somewhere in the sheds, they were also packing snoek heads, which someone in this world regarded as a delicacy. Thank God no one asked me to snack on a snoek head.
“OK, are we going to do this bokkoms thing?” Jules nudged me in the car. We were driving towards a speciality shop near the harbour. I wasn’t keen at first, but once we’d bought a bag of the stuff and parked where no one could smell us, I tucked in. Unlike the tough little fish from Doring Bay, this lot were fleshy and yielding to a middle-aged tooth.
So there we sat within sight of the sea, eating bokkoms in the correct way by nibbling the flesh from the bone.
In fact, that evening I sat on the porch chatting to René, gamely chomping clumps of bokkoms and washing them down with gulps of Jack Daniels as the cormorants swooped over the boats on their winding way home upriver. Bliss by the water. Then my cellphone called and it was fellow writer, drinking partner and co-conspirator Pat Hopkins, on the line from a disreputable watering-hole in the south of Jo’burg. I told him about the Teazers SMS (just in case he had a moment to rush out and catch the early show) and he told me to go to Paternoster.
“Where you must visit the Panty Bar.”
I promised him that we would waste no time in getting there the next day …
Chapter 8: Velddrif to Cape Town
Going Coastal
I’m sitting on a jetty overlooking the Berg River at Velddrif waiting for the sun and feeling a tad peckish. Last night’s supper of bokkoms and bourbon is but a careless burp in the wind. I would really like Mrs Hildagonda Duckitt to appear live from the pages of Cape history and serve me breakfast. Boy, did this auntie know how to cook.
