Danie Marais and two friends reconnect in Hondeklipbaai
The first last impression of Hondeklipbaai is that it represents the most naked of West Coast truths. Yet this is where Danie Marais and two old school friends again felt like the funny, happy and carefree guys they once were.
“Where is Hondeklipbaai?” Dries and I asked more or less simultaneously when Wynand told us this was where he’d booked accommodation for us… at the Honne-Pondokkies. Direct translation: Dog Huts.
“On the West Coast,” Wynand replied, and I imagined a place like Paternoster or Jacobsbaai, one of those West Coast villages that look like a Greek version of a Karoo town with rows of little whitewashed houses at the seaside.
When I googled “Hondeklipbaai”, however, I discovered that it’s much farther north on the Namaqualand coast, about 90km via a dirt road northwest of Garies. According to Wikipedia, the National Census of 2001 recorded 468 coloured people, 36 black people and 36 white people in Hondeklipbaai. Of this population, 504 declared that Afrikaans was their mother tongue and only three identified as English-speaking. “Why Hondeklipbaai?” I asked. The idea was, after all, to have a small reunion. Dries and Wynand and I have been good friends since school, but now we’re in our 40s, with children and ex-wives and all sorts of mundane complications. Dries lives in Iceland, and Wynand and I seldom have time to stop and catch our breath – never mind catch up. So the plan was to have an intense get-together and find out how well we still knew one another.
But Hondeklipbaai was starting to seem like a veld school by the sea. What’s more, Wynand is a sworn city boy who tends to get panicky in small towns. Now he wants to go to Hondeklipbaai?
Perhaps a little expedition out of our comfort zone was just what we needed. And Hondeklipbaai seemed like a place way out of any comfort zone.
“Well, I first booked a place near Hermanus,” Wynand said. “But when I told my wife, she was like, ‘I thought you wanted to do a road trip. Something different. Now you want to go eat Woolies food and drink wine in Hermanus. How boring.’”
At first he was annoyed with her, but then he thought she had a point there: perhaps a little expedition out of our comfort zone was just what we needed. And Hondeklipbaai seemed like a place way out of any comfort zone.
When we blew into Hondeklipbaai after 90km of desolate, dusty dirt road, badly corrugated in places, I was apprehensive. The village is a bit like that hardscrabble farm where Luke Skywalker grew up, but with donkey carts instead of fast flying craft and high-mast lights towering above RDP houses that don’t seem any less forlorn than all the other houses that appear to have been deserted. This was a scale model of a colony on Mars, hemmed in by the cold Atlantic Ocean and the restricted areas of two mines. Where you’d expect to find the main beach, there’s a deserted crayfish factory. In Hondeklipbaai, Pam Golding and gentrification are rumours from a different galaxy.
Hondeklipbaai reminds me of one of Dries’s favourite stories. One Sunday morning, on a good party weekend, he walked into a café in Paternoster and asked for the Sunday Times. The oom at the till slid the Rapport across the counter and said, “Sir, here we only sell the truth.”
Hondeklipbaai looks at both first and last glance like the most naked of West Coast truths. In Hondeklipbaai, what you see is what you get… but exactly what you get from a small town washed up here on a rocky shore like the fragments of a bleak dream you never had is not entirely clear.
On arrival, the village seems like a story by Dana Snyman that Go! magazine decided not to use. Hondeklipbaai is the last breath of a name breathed over a cold sea. Hondeklipbaai is an ode to nothing and nobody. Hondeklipbaai is not likely to be named the Kwêla Dorp van die Jaar.
In Hondeklipbaai, naturally, there is a rock near the police station that, with a great deal of imagination, looks like a pug-lion resting on its forepaws. In Hondeklipbaai everything is near the police station.
“You shall love your crooked neighbour / With your crooked heart,” the poet William H Auden wrote. In Hondeklipbaai that is all you can do, because here your neighbour verily is your neighbour.
In Hondeklipbaai an amiable oom from Garies who stayed in the chalet next door turned up at our braai fire with his immense paunch, chatting as though we were family. In Hondeklipbaai we could only get hold of crayfish just as we were leaving – the same oom from Garies organised it for us.
YET IN HONDEKLIPBAAI Wynand and Dries and I discovered how much we still had to say to each other. In the Honne-Pondokkies – entirely self-catering wooden chalets with red Webers like tin soldiers in front, keeping watch over the sea and the adjacent restricted area – each one of us was forced to showed his true colours again, just like long ago at veld school or church youth camp or boarding school. It is in such strange spaces that, with the right people, life can turn into a good sitcom.
At the Honne-Pondokkies Wynand and Dries and I could slip into our old roles. And it is in that old role that you feel like the funny, happy and carefree person you once often were. You also realise you can be one of your favourite selves only in the company of certain altogether irreplaceable old friends.
Today I recall, with the kind of unashamed nostalgia usually reserved for memories of youth, our last cup of coffee at an art gallery where, at the entrance, a rusty old bicycle hung over an open toilet used as a planter – succulents grew out of the bowl. On the stoep, next to a red piano, an oom simply sat down next to us and started chatting. His two toy poms settled down next to him on the bench.
The oom with the gentle grey moustache told us he’d retired in Hondeklipbaai because he’d had enough – of scurrying and of crooks and of worrying.
Is Hondeklipbaai then as safe as it is isolated?
“Yes!” said the oom with a smile that said ‘here comes a story’. “Two years ago there was only one burglary in Hondeklipbaai. Then a new police captain took over, a good guy, and as if the devil had a hand in it, there were two burglaries last year. Then the captain had to go and explain in Kimberley why there had been a 100% increase in crime!”
AS WE LOOKED OUT after the laughter, past the pirate flag to beyond the deserted old crayfish factory, we could see Hondeklipbaai through the eyes of the oom. And, just then, three tame alpacas walked towards us – and in the yard of this gallery, a few absurd animals quietly accompanied by a red piano seemed to make absolute sense. In Hondeklipbaai, “An alpaca walks into a coffee shop…” is not the first line of a joke.
“Look, Lama: llamas!” Dries said to me. (Dries happens to be the guy who, late one evening after I had shared some pearls of wisdom, said to me: “You know, after a few drinks you turn into the Danie Lama. And then I cannot take anything you say seriously any longer.”) “They are alpacas,” I corrected him. “Tomaytoes, tomahtoes,” said Dries. “We should take a photo.”
When I look at that photograph now, I’m overcome by precious bits of Hondeklipbaai zen. Wynand’s wife was right. Hermanus is not Hondeklipbaai. Once in a while a get-together in a place far, far away is the only means of remembering who you were and sometimes still can be.
We never met those three English residents. You can’t believe everything you read on Wikipedia.