So clean it feels like the Eighties
Dateline: Hangklip Road
Hello Lovers,
I’m writing to you from my mother’s tiny desk in her little flat in a retirement village in Pretoria, situated on the same koppie as the Pretoria Botanical Gardens, which I will visit later today, to say hello to my favourite rock fig. (I’ll post a photograph of this incredible creature on Substack Chat later today.)
I arrived yesterday, after a few days in Pringle Bay, which is where I will return to after this visit. This Dateline letter is about where I’ve been, not where I am right now.
Ma has gone off to work – 79 and still not retired, though she only works three days a week now. So I’m alone, apart from the wildlife that half inhabits her space.
There’s Vettie, a chubby lizard, who, according to my mother, recently acquired a partner Ma calls Slinky, and there are three new, as-yet-unnamed, mini lizards.
A mole snake slid in the other day and hissed in the living room. My mother was in the bedroom and thought it sounded very much like a snake, so she came to investigate. She shoo’d him out with a mop.
I have to repeat everything I say to her three times, but a hissy little snake in another room makes her spark. Clearly, her survival instincts are as functional as they have ever been.
There are also two tiny frogs that live under the day bed on the stoep, a resident hadeda she calls Sly (because when there are no crumbs on the lawn, he pauses and gives her a sideways look where she’s having her coffee and her cigarette), and several dassies, that she loves but also hates because they nibble the succulents in her drought-friendly garden.
This is the first week of my … I still don’t know what to call this. It’s not a sabbatical. It’s not a gap year. I’m not a vagabond because I have a house and work. It’s not a pilgrimage. I’m feeling that I may have to adopt Mpush’s word ‘wanderer’ to give shape to things. Anyway, it’s the first week of my thing, and I’m going to start exercising my travel writing muscles.
This way, I can keep a record of the impressions places leave on me and track the mighty and exciting disruptions I have set in motion.
Please send me your tips for the places I visit, or your own stories of these places. I took this Love Letter extra large because of how much I enjoyed the correspondence it unlocked and the conversations it started. So don’t let me travel alone! And tell your restless friends to plug in so they can start visualising their own break-free.
The new pattern now for Love Letter is as follows:
7th day of every month: Dateline
14th day of every month: Love Letter (the OG)
21st day of every month: Dateline
Last Friday of every month: Extra Large Love Letter (the only content currently behind a paywall)
Lots of love,
K
Pringle Bay*
Population 800
Distance from Cape Town: 84km
Arrival date: 1 February 2023
Temp: 24Deg C
It’s very clean here.
Pringle Bay is part of the Kogelberg Biosphere Reserve, which is a UNESCO Heritage Site, but that still doesn’t account for the fact that I have seen hardly any bottles, chip packets, bits of plastic or tangles of fishing line on the shore.
It feels very Eighties.
Sam and I walk on the beach every day, sometimes twice a day.
It’s the same beach, but it’s never the same beach.
*Pringle Bay is a small, affluent coastal village in the Overberg region of the Western Cape, in South Africa. It is situated at the foot of Hangklip, on the opposite side of False Bay from Cape Point. (Source: Wikipedia)
Kleinmond*
Population: 6 600
Distance from Cape Town: 111km
Arrival date: 4 February 2023
Temp: 28Deg C
Ground Central is a coffee shop in 2nd Street in Kleinmond, up from a Saturday pop-up tuisnywerheid called Singletons, where we bought koeksisters. Mili told us this place has a generator, so we can use the wifi during loadshedding, which means we can work. We’ve brought our laptops, and the pancakes we got from the assembly line in the garage at Singletons.
Everyone here looks 60 years old and healthy and relaxed. ‘Everyone’ is all the people sitting at the tables outside. They also all seem to know one another. Bonhomie and easy jokes.
A breakfast run is weaving through the streets of the town. Why aren’t they out on the R44 scaring baboons and mongooses like every other motorbike swarm? Round and around they go, vibrating the cups on the table: single men, men with women on the back, a lone woman on a big black grumbler at the back of the troop.
The grey beard on the Harley revs so hard as he putters towards the stop street six metres away that it feels like an electric lumber puncture has been administered, shooting a charge upwards that splits at the base of my skull to exit my ears, ripping the stereocilia out on the way.
This testosterone display ends with a loud bang that makes everyone here flinch.
The man at the end of our long table says: ‘I had a friend once who was a motorbike mechanic. He told me there was no problem with a motorbike that revving could fix.’
There is no problem with a motorbike that revving can fix.
Under the awning in front of the coffee shop, the proprietor of a farm-to-table outlet has fired up a gas braai and is rolling thin boerewors out of plastic bags. Next, it’s sosaties. Blue smoke billows our way. My eyes burn.
‘Business good?’ says a client as the burly braaier comes by to throw the meat bags into a bin near us. ‘Excellent! In December we could have thrown meat on the floor, and people would have eaten it.’
It’s ten in the morning and loadshedding begins. Ground Central fires up their generator, a new whirring to add to the mix. The bikers are in a street above now, but we can still hear them pointlessly revving. Further away, another level of revving starts up. It’s whinier. ‘What’s that now?’ a woman asks her husband. ‘A boat,’ he says, staring at the sky over the rim of his cup as he takes another sip of his Americano, which here they call an Africano.
The coffee is good, but we’ve done no work. Every sense has been stretched to its limit. We pack up and head back to Pringle with our koeksisters.
Along the way, we go looking for Bass Lake. It’s tucked into a vlei and is surrounded by reeds taller than Sam. It’s perfect. We will come here to swim when I get back from Pretoria.
I like the look of Pringle bay Karin and your ma sounds incredible with her creatures of comfort and company 🦎
Tip for when you are back in Pringle: Koring n Kaf in Betty's Bay. I seldom choose to eat something bready when I go to a restaurant, but a friend and I wanted to check out this new place. The lamb pide and peri-peri chicken roll were absolutely amazing, and the vegetarian pizette very yummy. Everything baked in a wood-fired oven and (I think) everything proper sourdough. Will definitely go back for more when I am in that neck of the woods again.