WEST COAST NATIONAL PARK
The Langebaan Lagoon is the heart of the West Coast National Park, but its soul stretches back to the beginning of humanity. Today, like so long ago, it still provides man with the perfect hideaway.
“It’s no Disney Animal Land, but the more time you spend in the park, the more treasures you’ll discover: rich layers of fynbos, spring flowers, sand dunes, salt marshes, diverse bird species, marine life, scenic beauty, history, and above all, peace and tranquillity.”
There are many special ways to appreciate the magic hour at the end of the day, but this one – on the deck of a houseboat anchored in Kraalbaai – might just take the cake. There are the obvious aesthetic reasons: The houseboat, the Larus, slowly turns on its anchor, so your view of the lagoon constantly changes. Right now I’m facing west, towards the iconic Preekstoel rock, which perches on the beach a few hundred metres away. If I look to the south through my binoculars, I can see a handful of beach cottages at Churchhaven. The Larus rocks gently and revolves imperceptibly. Later, to the north-east, the town of Langebaan’s lights are pinpricks in the gathering dusk.
Seagulls are flapping above our heads, loudly searching for something to scavenge. A daring Hartlaub’s gull darts down, grabs a forgotten Nik Nak off the deck and makes a triumphant dash across the water with four competitors in pursuit.
By the time this mini episode of Survivor Seagull has played out and I’ve had the chance to take another sip of my sundowner, I’m facing the dark mass of Postberg to the north. Earlier in the day, a blanket of cloud covered its summit, but now it’s perfectly silhouetted against the orange glow of the sunset.
“We’ll braai in about half an hour,” my friend Antonie van der Smit says. He takes a stick and pokes at the logs in the braai drum on the rear deck. Sparks fly up into the deepening darkness. It’s hard to imagine a better Sunday evening and a better end to a long weekend in this long-forgotten corner of the West Coast. At least, it’s been long forgotten by me.
The West Coast National Park was only proclaimed in 1985. Before that, when it was just a wilderness, it was one of my favourite holiday destinations. This is where I learnt to sail in a little Optimist dinghy in primary school, graduating to a fast Hobie Cat to explore the lagoon. Holidaymakers would curse the southeaster in summer. Not me.
In later years, my parents retired to Langebaan but I never made the time or effort to visit the park again. It was like the neighbour next door that you acknowledge with a nod of the head, but you don’t bother taking the relationship further.
I did miss the park though, especially after I got Lawrence Green’s classic A Giant in Hiding as a birthday present recently. It’s a biography, and the prolific travel writer’s final book. In it, Green tells the story of his friend and fellow sailor Frank Wightman who was a legendary figure on the West Coast. The story begins when Wightman sails into the Langebaan Lagoon in the 1940s on the Wylo, a yacht that he’d built himself. When he reaches Kraalbaai, he immediately knows this is where he wants to spend the rest of his life.
“The anchor splashed over the bows and his yacht came to rest. The scent of spring flowers wafted off the land, ostriches stood watching from the beach. Frank knew immediately he was falling in love. ‘May I live to be a hundred,’ he prayed. ‘May I always return here. This will be my hiding place from the world.’”
It seems appropriate that my wife Ronel and I, and our friends Antonie and Mari le Grange, are spending our last night in the park in the secluded sweep of Wightman’s beloved Kraalbaai. You, too, will want to follow in Frank’s (and Eve’s) footsteps and explore this ancient treasure chest.
The dawn of time
The West Coast National Park is relatively small (about 32 000 ha) compared to some of our more well-known national parks, and much of it is lagoon. There’s no trace of the Big Five here. The biggest predator is a caracal, and good luck spotting one! I can imagine a foreign tourist driving around the lagoon and back within an hour or two, swerving around an angulate tortoise crossing the road, spending 10 minutes watching an ostrich mindlessly pecking away at the ground and then seeing the rump of an eland disappearing into a bush in the distance. As he drives through the exit, he’ll turn to his wife and say: “Brümilda, was ist das?”
Yes, it’s no Disney Animal Land, but the more time you spend in the park, the more treasures you’ll discover: rich layers of fynbos, spring flowers, sand dunes, salt marshes, diverse bird species, marine life, scenic beauty, history, and above all, peace and tranquillity. You’ll want to sleep in the park for a weekend, a long weekend or preferably even longer. Frank Wightman stayed for 25 years! Even though you can’t camp in the park, there is a wide variety of self-catering options available – either in SANParks cottages, more luxurious B&Bs at Churchhaven, or the houseboats at Kraalbaai (see page 42).
The West Coast gate into the park is an hour from Cape Town. The turn-off is on the R27, about 11 km north of the Yzerfontein/ Darling intersection, but we chose to drive past and do our last-minute shopping in Langebaan since there are no shops in the park itself. Once you’re done in Langebaan,
it’s a five-minute drive to the Langebaan gate. As soon as you’ve paid your conservation fee and driven into the park proper, you have a choice to make. You can head straight to your overnight spot, unpack and start to unwind, or you can turn right and head up to the viewpoint on top of Seeberg. Rather turn right to Seeberg. It’s a great way to introduce yourself to the park since this is the spot with the best view across the lagoon. Plonk down on the cool, lichen-covered granite dome at the top, take a deep breath, and watch the rock kestrels ride the thermals below your feet.
There’s a restored one-room building on the rock dome, once a cattle herders’ post but now a small museum that uses old photographs and infographics to tell the story of the place and its people.
It’s a history that stretches as far back as
117 000 years, when a young woman took a walk along the shore of the lagoon. Her footsteps in the sand became fossilised over the ages, only to be found in rock at Kraalbaai in 1995. She was dubbed Eve and her footsteps are now part of an exhibit at the Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town. Replicas of her footprints can be seen at the Geelbek Visitor’s Centre in the park.
The first ever Khoi dictionary, 400 words in total, was compiled here in 1648 by Étienne de Flacourt, the director general of the French East India Company. The Frenchman, who named all the islands in the lagoon, was so taken with the place that he wanted the king of France to declare it a French territory. But Louis XIV dawdled and four years later, Jan van Riebeeck claimed the Cape for the Dutch.
Now that you’ve learnt something, you can head to your cottage. We spent our first two nights at SANParks’ Jo-Anne’s B Cottage near Churchhaven (about 31 km from the Langebaan gate). There’s a built-in braai on the stoep with views across the lagoon, which is a two-minute walk from your front door. Once everyone is settled in here, it’s a hard task dislodging them!
Birds for Africa
Since there are no big predators in the park, you can explore much of it on foot or on a bicycle. There are a range of formal hikes (see page 40) or you can just go for a stroll along the lagoon, past the old-worldly beach cottages at Churchhaven and its tiny church, after which this hamlet is named. If you’re keen for a beach walk on the Atlantic side of the park, head to Tsaarsbank in the north-western corner and stroll for 1,8 km to where the cargo ship Pantelis A Lemos ran aground in 1978.
Don’t forget your bicycle! Antonie and I saddled up before sunrise and rode a 30 km mountain-bike trail around Seeberg and up to the old farmstead of Mooimaak in the northeastern corner of the park. It’s a completely different experience to see a herd of enormous eland loom out of the mist from your bike, than watching them in the distance from your car. Once the sun had burnt away the mist, we carried on our ride and visited each of the park’s four famous bird hides. The park is a bird-lover’s dream. The lagoon is a proclaimed Ramsar site where you can see roughly 250 species – about a quarter of South Africa’s total. Everything from waders, seabirds, raptors and endemic species only found in scarce fynbos, strandveld and renosterveld can be seen here. It’s also one of the few places where you’ll see Siberian visitors like red knots, sanderlings and curlew sandpipers.
Postberg is open!
The best time to visit the park is during spring – August and September – when the Postberg section in the north-west is open to the public. If your timing is right and the weather plays along, you’ll be greeted by fields of wildflowers and grazing herds of red hartebeest, bontebok and Cape mountain zebra. The best way to explore this pristine part of the park is on foot. There’s a day trail and an overnight hike, and early booking is essential for both.
Even if you’re not walking, a visit to Plankiesbaai should still be on your agenda.
It’s so named because the bay forms a natural repository for driftwood, deposited by the currents over the years. Look for bits of wood, smoothly polished, on the sand and in between the rocks.
You can have a picnic here, or drive along a gravel road through shoulder-high fynbos to the viewpoint on top of Postberg. Our timing was off when we visited early in August. The mountain was covered in mist and I could hardly see my hand in front of my face. The mist lifted after lunchtime, but by then I was lying in the sun on the houseboat in Kraalbaai with my Lawrence Green book in hand.
“Here the tyranny of time would be annihilated. The sweep of the tides would clean the beaches at the appointed hours but never would the sounds of the lagoon jar on him like a factory hooter. Here he could live by the values of remote ancestors…”
Thank you, Lawrence, for initiating this wonderful reunion.