LIFESTYLE LIFESTYLE For the love of automobiles
MODDERFONTEIN IS STILL AN EXTRAORDINARY PLACE Each week Marie-Lais looks out for the unusual, the unique, the downright quirky or just something or someone we might have had no idea about, even though we live here. We like to travel our own cities and th
Modderfontein is extraordinary. It’s where the old dynamite factory planted all these bluegums around to absorb the impact of its explosions. It’s where Baden-Powell first put into practice his scouts. It’s where 100 000 residents and quite a few wild animals were supposed to be contained in Shanghai Zendai’s “New York of Africa” city before the Chinese owner lost interest in property. It’s where we found La Marina and two Nemos last week and now we are gawping at 300 classic cars with shone metal, variously gleaming, displaying intensely coloured enamels, plus many rusty old versions or just the car parts themselves.
When these cars start, there’s no vroom-vroom. They sort of thrum to life, then, throbbing, make their slow and splendid way along the stony veld and rough roads here in the Piston Ring grounds, the largest car club of its type in South Africa.
“Yirra, I’ve seen it full – but not like this,” mentions one man to another, licking a Softserve.
Another announces mysteriously to his group of frowning moustachioed lickers, “They just think they can take over.”
A line of spectators, paying the R20 entrance fee somehow extends into a queue for the Softserve. Here are maybe a thousand people, mostly pale or sunburnt or booze-burnt males. I notice they all try and have both hands in the pockets of their pants, even in pockets not designed for that. If they don’t have their hands in pockets, they are employed for eating and drinking or gripping car parts.
I’m bewildered by so much automobilia. We meet a man called Gert, selling a car that has, stuck on the car windows, useful diagrams he’s made of his automobile’s mechanical workings.
Just a hunk, a hunk of burning love thunders from the PA, delivered by a not-Elvis and then Baby makes her blue jeans talk.
There are some women around. Later, we come across a comfy group, lunching and knitting, on camp stools, a car for sale behind them.
Most are more moll-style. One leather-jacketed woman totters over uneven ground between sleek Pontiacs, in spike-heeled boots, tight jeans, also wearing a crownless sunhat through which an ash-blonde hairpiece swings.
Leaving, Gert tows the car with the diagrams past and waves. It’s likely a sold car now because he said they sell fast here.
Outside the grounds, a lime green Studebaker throbs down the hill toward us, a late arrival.
The Piston Ring – every 3rd Sunday of the month, Modderfontein