TO THE DOGS
Nick Yell enjoys tall tales and a frontier aura in rough-and-ready Hondeklipbaai
WHEN John Blades Curry, manager of the Namaqua Copper Mining Company in the mid-1850s, first saw Hondeklipbaai, he was overcome by its desolation, citing it as the most dismal place he’d ever seen.
Yet, this ramshackle collection of “black wooden buildings standing irregularly in a desert of white sand” was then the preferred port through which copper ore, brought down by wagon from the mines near Springbok, was taken to Cape Town and other centres for processing.
Curry also lamented the fresh-water shortages of the time — water had to be shipped in from the Cape — as well as the lack of any sort of “inn, public house or canteen.” He tells us that the smallest quantity of alcohol you could buy in Hondeklipbaai back then was a 16 gallon (60l) cask of Cape brandy. Apparently, locals and visiting wagon-drivers would club together to buy these and then sit on the beach and “drink it out in a few days”.
Clearly the deleterious effects of so much brandy elicited the need for a local “police officer”. Curry tells us that Mr Pillans, customs officer and justice of the peace, one Sunday “issu[ed] from his office and [stuck] up a placard to the effect that the lock-up was full and that any more men arrested would be chained to the jetty”.
My travelling partner, Harvey, and I are spending the night in the very same, albeit somewhat less desolate-looking Hondeklipbaai ahead of a guided 4x4 trail from Koingnaas to Kleinzee the next day.
We’ve travelled nearly 1 000km to get here from Hermanus, predominantly on dirt tracks, on a journey which has taken us through the Tankwa, Ceres and Hantam Karoos. Undoubtedly the best new dirt road we’ve found thus far is the granddaddy of all back roads to Garies — take a right off the R358 to Bitterfontein and head through Ottaspoort (disregard the “Private Road” signs) to the N7 outside Garies; a must-do for all serious back-roaders.
I ask Attie Hough, owner of the Honnehokke self-catering chalets we’re staying at, how the nearby Moordenaarsbaai got its name. “According to local folklore,” he says. “Two friends went fishing there years ago and the one suspected the other of sleeping with his wife. The accuser pushed his friend off a rock and, not seeing him surface, suspected he’d killed him. He then went to the police station in Hondeklipbaai and reported that his friend had fallen off the rock while fishing and had probably drowned. The problem was his ‘dead’ friend, although nursing a broken arm, was very much alive. He walked into the same police station the next day to tell his story.”
On a sunset walk about town before dinner, Harvey and I are met by incongruous sights all over: shacks with new 4x4s parked outside; an attractive house with comfortable furniture on its stoep but what looks like a scrap merchant’s back yard; and then there’s the biggest police station we’ve ever seen — Mr Pillans would have been pleased — isolated out on a point. I get the feeling that things are not always what they appear here. Dark secrets seem to lurk in the wind and in the crevices of the many weather-beaten and furrowed brows on show. Whatever the case, history (or is it folklore?) has shown that facts here are almost always stranger than fiction. — © Nick Yell From “Life and Travels in the Northwest (1850-1899)” by Arne Schaefer (Yoshi Publishing), 2008