CROSSING OVER

CROSSING OVER

Well we’ve left Kleinzee and I’m sure I left a little of my soul behind as well as chunks of my kidneys.  Keith on the other hand also left a part of himself behind over the new years holidays and now his false teeth are floating amongst the crayfish on the ocean floor.  Don’t ask.  I’m not sure why he had his mouth open under the water, its not like there are too many sharks to scream at but anyway he spent new years legless and toothless.

Theo and I were really privileged to spend enough time in Kleinzee to get to know the locals and find out what makes the town tick.  Our hearts went out to Hans and Hanneline whose daughter died in a car accident on her way home from the fishing club 2 days before Xmas. We were invited to spend Xmas day with Karen and Rocky at their beachfront spot, Brazil, with a bunch of other people.  Everyone brought food for the table and we had a good old traditional Xmas, our second one on the road.  Linda, Keith, Jacky, Dodgy and the boys arrived for new year and we finished off working at the Crazy Crayfish diner.  

So now it’s just Theo, me and the heat.  Yesterday it was 47 deg C. We are camping at Vioolsdrift on the Orange River (SA side) for 2 days to try and cool off but it’s not possible.  It’s so hot that pouring water over your head every 10 minutes doesn’t cool you down enough unless you use your ice cold drinking water.   It’s so hot we waited until 10 ‘o clock last night to start the braai fire and then it was still 38 deg frigging Cel.  It’s so hot that during the day you loose your appetite totally and we have a lot of meat to cook up before crossing the border.  And I still have to eat the friggin Hoedia plant before going through customs tomorrow morning.  Woopee. It’s so hot that I don’t even need to pee even though I’m drinking loads of water which sweats out before it reaches my bladder.  It’s so hot that sex is not possible since we would just slide off each other and shoot into different directions. It’s so hot my tan melted off.  It’s so hot I can barely stand the heat from my laptop right now and its sliding off my lap from the sweat on my legs.  It’s so hot that the chickens lay hard boiled eggs around here. Its so hot that the fish Theo tried catching in the Orange river came with slap chips. Its so hot my micro chip has malfunctioned and I can’t think straight anymore.

This could be my last post for a while since I’m not sure how I will be going online in Namibia but hopefully I’ll get access to WIFI and will still be able to blog.     

Anyway its time for me to pour water over my head so cheerio for now.

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THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN WHO SWALLOWED A FLY

THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN WHO SWALLOWED A FLY
Theo and I have put our names down on “the list” so perhaps we can buy cheap property when De Beers sells off the town of Kleinzee. It’s the perfect place for us to some day start up a little pub serving Theo’s nibblies and I could carry on dabbling in my efforts to find different things to do with all the seaweed and salt around here. I’ve smoked chunks of salt rock crystals, for culinary uses not in a roll up. It adds good flavour to food although I hope it’s not enhanced with guano or pickled miggies. I’m drying the Nori seaweed by spreading in out on my hammock in the sun, then roasting it for a few minutes drizzled with peanut and sesame oil. Then you crumble it and add it to your food as you would a spice. It tastes frigging awesome. I’ve made a good soup / seafood stock with fresh chopped Gigartina radula (that’s the stuff which looks like flappy rough riders), a dash of red wine, onions and stock. Yummy. Even Theo is impressed with my experimental dishes lately. I’m not serving him slimy green snot anymore but he draws the line at letting me wrap him in fresh seaweed then making him soak in a bath with lumps of natural salt drifting around blobs of jelly slime. Nor does he like my salted seaweed glycerine soap. It doesn’t lather so he can’t make soapy Mohicans between his nuts in the shower. People pay a fortune to go to health spas for a treatment which I’m offering for free.

One of the planned projects for Kleinzee is a frail care retirement village around the currently deserted little hospital. I fear the grannies who move in might have a hard time adjusting to this wild environment. Besides the confusing lonely robot (traffic light) stuck on the wall outside Spar, they could get blown all the way to the Port if they went for a stroll down to the beach. Dodging the wild ostriches patrolling the dunes in search of shiny things to eat and the odd fat fur seal sunning themselves on the beachfront could line them up for a pacemaker. I’ve never seen or heard of ostrich roadkill but it’s a strong possibility out here in Kleinzee and according to the manne, a true South African man has to eat his roadkill. You are expected to skin it and cook it on a fire right there on the roadside or in the unlikely event that you don’t have a bag of wood in your boot, you have to cook the meat on the cars manifold and eat it later when you arrive at your destination. Trying to wedge a dangly ostrich under your hood could be tricky I reckon.

You might have noticed that I’m becoming a bit blazѐ about hunting, me being a bit of a softie when it comes to cute furry animals and all. Well, truth is, I’ve come to grips with the fact that man is a hunter gatherer by nature. I’ve joined the good natured West coast toppies down at the abattoir for a brandy and coke (strange place for drinks you might think) when they slaughter their meat for the month (the same stuff which you buy in styrofoam bakkies from Pick ‘n Pay) and I haven’t blinked an eyelid. These guys aren’t one bit gungho and don’t swagger around with a rifle over their shoulder proclaiming their manhood. In fact they prefer free range or organic meat as apposed to eating animals penned in a cage the size of its body. Bottom line is I no longer feel like a barbarian devouring flesh when I eat meat.

I’ve really been industrious lately and quite enjoying myself. I’ve made a batch of green fig preserve and green fig jam which is a moerse lot of PT. I’m wondering how many wasps I will be eating as a by-product. The whole wasp fig tree relationship is nogal quite interesting. Did you know that fig trees go back as far as 80 million years ago and that each species (about 750) fig tree only has one species of wasp which is able to pollinate it. They therefore rely on each other for reproduction. Fig trees must have been pretty common back in Adam and Eve’s days cos Adam used a fig leaf as a loin cloth. They probably were originally vegans munching on things like pears and apricots, peaches, melons, basically everything to make a fruit salad except apples until that fateful day. Adam wouldn’t have had any animal skin lying around to cover up his suddenly exposed manhood so a fig leaf had to do. Maybe it was the result of strenuous hard work getting a soap tree to lather up (after eating a Granny Smith) and resulted in more than a hairy Mohican. But I digress from my wasp story. In most cases a female wasp squeezes herself through the tiny hole in the fig, her legs transferring fig pollen to the flowery seeds inside as she squeezes in, leaving a trail of now useless body parts. Her wings and antenna break off, and I bet she gets a tight facelift as she wedges through the tiny opening, then she lays her eggs and dies with a grin from ear to ear so to speak. That’s assuming she chose a male fig tree, otherwise she just dies and you get to eat a mouthful of dried up pregnant wasp on your jam sarmie. If things go well, the eggs hatch, they grow and the wingless males have a good time in the dark fig with all the females then they spend the remainder of their life trying to burrow an escape route for the pollen covered females to bugger off so that they can die in peace while the life of fig trees carry on as they have for millions and millions of years.
Now that the Biology class is over I’m off to swallow a spider to catch a fly and everything else living inside my stomach. I don’t know why.


Miggies- migges / dam nuisance flying bug
Manne – main guys
Toppies – old guys
Moerse – a hell of a lot of
Bakkies - container
Nogal – actually

A SOUTIE IN THE SALT MINE

A SOUTIE IN THE SALT MINE
A day in the salt mines here in Kleinzee is literally going off to pick up your own salt directly from mother earth. How freaking awesome is that!
Today we jumped on the XT for a ride down to the deserted yacht club, accompanied for a kilometre or two by a panic stricken steenbokkie who finally dashed off while 7 ostriches ran alongside us, not even 100m away, in their prehistoric-like gait before disappearing over the dunes. The yacht club dam is no longer in use but instead it’s become a salt bay. We were amazed at the fantastic crystals which had naturally built up over time, caking the whole perimeter. We chopped off a whole bunch of salt rocks to take back and now I’m a regte soutie.
It seems people have been using salt since the late stone age. That’s like a moer of a long time ago that people have been using the stuff to preserve food. Fred Flintsone and his tjomma, Barney, probably stood around the braai as they did most nights and as it should be, cooking their Gemsbok steaks, the home brew or magic mushrooms just kicking in and discussing their kill and how it put hairs on a mans chest, back, face and knuckles. Perhaps Wilma was in the cooking area sharing ideas with her sisters about what to do with the left over pieces of hide after making a karos bedspread. By then they would have already been using salt to season their bulbs or other ratatouli veggie dishes since there would have been natural salt pans to be found and being exploratory entrepreneurs, they would have stock piled the stuff for bartering. Maybe that night things got excited as the men chased the women around the braai, dragged them by the hair, you know, the usual foreplay stuff, and maybe that’s when the salt jug fell over onto the wild boar hindleg which Fred was saving for midnight munchies. No-one would have noticed till the next week, what with the rain and the females excited about the new hide mini skirts they were making and the men off hunting and looking for sharp stones to trim their hairy knuckles and to make goatees. And that leg my friend, lying in a salt puddle, could have been the first Parmaham eaten by Neolithic man.
These days salt has got many more functions that just preserving fish, meat and vegetables. For instance it’s used in many descriptive phrases in the Oxford dictionary and the Bible. “The salt of the earth” is a term used to describe these West Coast people. Taken with “a pinch of salt” is probably how you could interpret the story of Little Lotta when she turned back to look at her sinful orgy city and next moment she turned into a pillar of salt.

More salt is used to make pulp, paper, soap, fabric dyes and detergents that actual condiments which only uses 17% of the whole world’s salt. And then its soooo refined and chemically enhanced that it’s hardly of value. Eish now that’s almost like rubbing salt in the wound.
The Chinese were the first recorded people to actually mine the stuff out of the bowels of the Earth. That’s where the really good stuff comes from, deep down, because its been compressed over millions and millions of years and the minerals which salt is made of, being sodium, potassium, magnesium and calcium have had enough time to form magical crystals which are full of transmittable energy. So, if you wear a salt crystal around your neck, not only will you never have to eat bland food again cos you could just use your stone necklace like a salt lick, but you could attract all the dust bunnies in your house like a static feather duster and best of all, if there’s a power failure you might still be able to use your washing machine cos salt is charged with electrolytes. I find these electrolytes quite intriguing although I must say it’s all a bit too scientific for me. I never partook in those school experiments using salt and a battery is probably why I don’t get it. Under normal circumstances I’m quite electrically charged. I use to hate opening my car door because I knew a shock was waiting to jar me into reality and then when I got to work another one would be lined up when I closed my car door. Sometimes I tried to avoid the electric surge by shutting the door with my elbow pressed against the window but the charge would remain in my body and catch me out when I opened the toilet door. These days I don’t drive much but I wonder what would happen if put a few of these salt rocks in my pocket and went to work in the bar with the metal fridge door.

Mmm that could give new meaning to a depth charger. OOhhh the thrills of working a day in the salt mines here in Kleinzee are never ending.


Regte soutie – real English through and through
Moer – heck
Tjomma - friends
Braai - barbeque
Karos – leather patch work throw
Eish – Golly gee whizz

FOOD GLORIOUS FOOD

FOOD GLORIOUS FOOD

This week I ate fresh seaweed which I picked from the sea myself and my taste buds had a few surprises.  It’s been a week of discovery.  I’ve been carting the back page ripped out of a Village Life magazine around with me for the last year.  It had intriguing recipes using seaweed but I never actually got around to trying them, until now.

Wikipedia informed me that seaweed has more nutritional value than many land vegetables and in fact contains Vitamin B12 which is in not found in any land veggie and which is very good for you.  There are different types of seaweed on different coastlines and they can be used in different ways.  Some taste meaty, some are eaten fresh and others are good for sushi.  We’ve bought dried sheets of seaweed from the Chinese food shops before to make sushi but that’s not the same as actually getting the fresh stuff.  I’ve now found out that I’m eating the seaweed called Nori when Theo makes sushi.

Now before you incorrectly assume that I’m a health freak living on nuts and sprouts and analyse everything which I put into my body let me just remind you that living with Theo 24 -7 does not allow for that.  I’m not skinny with pasty skin either, in fact I’m getting rounder by the day. The nuts we eat are in his home baked bread which we snack on with lavishings of butter.  I do make my own sprouts from mung beans which I buy from the Chinese food shops while Theo stocks up on sushi ingredients and other strange things like fermented black eggs or packets of odd looking curly things which we never know what the hell they are since they only have Chinese writing on the packets and the Chinese shop owners don’t speak much English at all.  Nevertheless, Theo loves experimenting with all the exotic things and I make my sprouts to put on cheese sandwiches with lavishings of butter in between eating lots of meat, fried food and Theo’s endless assortment of breads.                       

Theo has also made devine seafood dishes by stuffing sea bamboo with perlemoen (abalone) when it was still legal to collect the gift from the sea gods, or mussels taken out their shells or alikreukel.  You shove them down the bamboo, alternating with a chunk of garlic now and then, and seal the end with a thick piece of rolled up ribbon fronds from the bamboo.  You plonk the bamboo onto the coals and the food steams inside.  We slice the bamboo open but only eat the seafood inside, which has a delicious flavour from the bamboo.  Next time I’m gonna take a bite of the bamboo as well.

I never thought about eating seaweed before.  I mean, jeez the Chinese and Japanese who are healthy, live on the stuff so why the hell shouldn’t I give it a try.  And it’s free, just sitting there on the rocks for the picking.    

So there I was, on the beachfront at Kleinzee, poking around in rock pools looking for Gigartina radula.  It’s brown and covered in knobbly bumps which reminded me of a sheeps tongue but felt like a slab of squeaky rubbery plastic.  I boiled my firm knobbly rubber for 7 minutes as per the recipe by which time the caravan smelt like the depths of the ocean.  Once the stuff is boiled, not too long or it becomes slimy (ah there’s the rub) you can do a whole bunch of things with it.  I tried the first recipe which was fritters.  I dipped the now floppy bright green knobbly leaves in batter and deep fried them.  They tasted awesome.  Not salty or slimy but more meaty and had a good texture.  Theo enjoyed them.  I was keen to try the more healthy ideas, since if you’re gonna eat stuff the colour of grass you might as well go all the way.  The next day I made a egg Tortilla (that’s a fancy name for a Spanish omelette if you didn’t know).  I used some of the bright green chopped gooey leaves which I’d boiled the previous day.  They’d become a bit slimy but I wasn’t going to be put off as I draped the luminous green stuff over the diced potatoes in the pan and added a few cherry tomatoes to balance the brightness of my colourful eggs.  Theo tried a mouthful but made a face saying it was too slimy for him.  He eats snails and oysters so baa, why not my seaweed.  I encouraged him to try more, saying he wasn’t giving it a chance.  Anyway, I endure all his strange concoctions like 100year old fermented eggs and sheeps heads and fish eyes and chilli which makes me dread bowel movements for the next week.  I ate my slimy green eggs (no ham) with a determined grimace as the food slid down my throat.  He could at least pretend.   

Tomorrow he’s getting a vegetable bake with seaweed layers and then I still want to try the yummy sounding tomato soup with floating green bits.  And he better not pull a face otherwise I’m headed back to the rocks in search of the fronzy green lettuce seaweed which you eat raw and I’ll stick it on his cheese sandwich instead of my sprouts which he loves so much.              

Mmmm, maybe that’s why I never get a chance to cook.

THIS TOWN, IS COMING LIKE A GHOST TOWN

THIS TOWN, IS COMING LIKE A GHOST TOWN

All the clubs have closed down.  The pottery club, the photographic club and the sports club are just some of the deserted buildings but Kleinzee is special and I’ve fallen in love with the town.  It’s made up of about 30 or so different types of characters in a ghost town setting.  There used to be about 4 000 or so employees working for De Beers diamond mines but now that they are no longer mining here, the remaining people are finishing things off and there’s big talk of a boom happening in January when De Beers sells off all the vacant houses.  The die hards are patiently waiting as they have been for the last few years.

Simon has already become my favourite customer at the Crazy Crayfish.  He usually blows in to the diner barefoot and in his pyjamas and we discuss important issues about humanity which I never seem to be able to remember much of the next morning.  It could be my brain is so full of information which I’ve been accumulating these last few months or it could be due to Jugermeister which I’ve come to enjoy and which no longer tastes like Vicks Acta Plus.  He often brings his Jack Russel along but when the family of Cape Foxes come around and creep right up to the door for scraps, the dog gets too excited and Simon takes him home.  I’m holding thumbs there’s a litter of Fox pups safely stashed away in a hole somewhere.  Brown Hyenas (Strand Wolfe) roam around here as well but they comb the beach front and the golf course for food.  We nearly bumped right into a little Steenbokkie late one night walking back from the diner.  The poor thing left skid marks in the dust as it dashed round the corner barely a foot away from us.  I got such a skrik I nearly left my own skid marks.     

Miskiet, a Crazy Crayfish regular, has a busy life hunting game on a neighbouring farm or diving for crayfish and fishing and driving his 4x4 to isolated beach front spots or fitting his beach buggie with a moerse V8 or some or other turbo charged engine or buying rounds of Jugermeister. 

Kai is also a regular.  He is Finish and is the local baker. He makes a Pantoffel loaf which is a strange baguette hollowed out in the shape of a stokie slipper and which I think is as odd as his sense of humour. 

Que has a oyster farm which seems to do very well and he has the concession to harvest seaweed which he exports.  He is always rushing around everywhere.  He’s given me some dried seaweed to make jelly which I’m dying to try out.  Mmmm perhaps Tequila shooters.    

Yesterday we explored the surrounding area and met Rocky, Karen and Timo, arty surfers who live on a piece of farm ground on the beach front.  They have the most awesome view of their own private beachfront in a remote setting. Karen & Rocky sailed the world in their yacht for eight years but now it’s moored in Cape Town and they make their living by mining the shoreline for diamonds and ride the waves in their spare time.  They have to wait for the sea to be just right to be able to get their mining pipe down among the rocks so they have loads of free time to catch a wave. 

We visited Noup which is about 40 km out of town and is a remote cluster of authentically restored old diamond divers cottages in a beautiful setting.  Perfect for romantic getaways and when its crayfish season the place is fully booked according to Dudley, the owner.  He liked Theo’s XT Thumper and I liked all his pebbles.  As we stood chatting about the guided 4 x 4 shipwreck tours which he offers, he harry casually scratched around in the pebbles and picked up a tiny fossilized mussel, a petrified piece of wood, a fossilized piece of elephant enamel, and a fossilized fish ear bone.  He blew my mind when he told me they were all 80 million years old.  Wow, to be able to touch something that lived on the earth that long ago is just wow.  Big time wow.  He’s a geologist and has offered to ID my stone collection. Cool, I’ll be back and I’d love to see his prehistoric megalodon sharks teeth which he collected from Hondeklip bay, not too far from here.  That’s what I love about this place, it’s untouched, undiscovered and uninhabited.  Well except for the areas which De Beers have mutilated.  But still, it feels like I’m in virgin country recently pioneered by diamond diggers.

I’ve met a few of the more traditional west coast locals who live here in Kleinzee and they all live up to their name of being friendly. I love the Namakwaland style of putting words together and it has become apparent to me that I’m gonna be doing a lot of kuiering here in Kleinzee and less soul searching.  Finding the meaning of life is hard work with a construction team doing renovations inside your head so I’m up for a bit of partying. Oh hell, life here on the wild front is tough.  

Moerse – very big

skrik  - fright

Miskiet - Misquito

kuiering – party sessions

KLEINZEE NEXT TO THE BIG C

KLEINZEE NEXT TO THE BIG C
We zoomed through busy Springbok asap. We grabbed a bunch of brochures to email our CV’s to guesthouses in hopes of getting a job since our cash was running low, and then we headed into the wild wild west. Theo’s homemade Bokkoms no longer hung at the back of the truck so someone might have got smacked with a flying dead fish on the N7 somewhere between Bitterfontein and Springbok or alternatively we probably had a lot of people confused about road kill in the Namakwaland as 15 fish lay scattered across the tarmac amongst the odd Springbokkie and Bat Eared Fox.
We made a quick stop at the Namakwa National park but I’m afraid to say that all that stood out for me (it was only a 2 hour stop for a little walk about) was their goat biltong which was very tasty. Ja you see a lot of donkeys, goats and dassies out here between the rocks, fynbos and the succulents. The only big 5 is our vyfman Namakwaland doos wyn. You could find Veldkool (Trachyandra cilliata), which grows wild and can be cooked as you would green beans although they look like asparagus heads. That and suurvye (Carpobrotus edulis) (which are lekker to suck when they are nearly dry) are the only edible plants which I’m familiar with out here. I’m still saving the Hoodia gordonii for later – a bit like end of the month crackers.
Our gas bottle ran out on the way to Kleinzee which is 100 km from Springbok so once again we had to work our way through the contents of the freezer. Luckily the funny smelling pork chops or chicken had no side effects. We pickled a lot of the mussels and Theo made crumbed mussels twice a day and devine mussel soup.

Kleinzee is owned by De Beers so you have to get a permit to stay overnight and show your ID at the gates to the town. This is diamond country and they are big on security even though De Beers has sort of finished mining and are now rehabilitating the area. Anyway we had to pay for accommodation for the first time in almost a month since leaving Cape Town but you can’t just sommer stop along the roadside once you enter the area owned by De Beers.
We arranged to stay at Kleinzee caravan park for 2 days and within hours of meeting Charles, owner of the small caravan park and yes another friendly west coast local, he and Theo got chatting over a slet sap (better known as a brutal fruit to everyone else) and next thing we had a job. Turns out Charles needs someone to help him run his restaurant called the Crazy Crayfish since he was off to build a oil rig in some or other African country where the money is good. He is going to arrange a house for us to rent in the deserted Kleinzee mining village.
The small kitchen and busy bar accommodates the 30 locals and apparently lots of 4x4 tourists, surfers and divers who pass through.
Charles doesn’t beat around with words and either calls a spade a spade or a naai. He has a gentle refined side as well since besides being married to a very nice English woman, every night he comes down to the caravan park to tumble dry the cat”s blanket to make sure Asblik sleeps warmly in his cat tree house. Last night he brought us and his friend Jakes each a Gemsbok liver the size of a soccer ball. We might spend a few days with Jakes, who also happens to be a missionary and a very keen fisherman on the Orange River. Sounds like he has been around the block and most of Africa since he has been a builder, a bouncer and after hearing about his drunken past, quite a boxer. He used to think the worm in the bottom of a Tequila bottle was for girls so he and die manne used a scorpion or even a Puff Adder instead.
We will go back to help Charles at the Cazy Crayfish in October but in the meantime we want to explore Port Nolloth where the real diamond cowboys are at and then next week hopefully off to the Orange River with Jakes and his Bible.

Footnote: If you made rollmops as per my previous blog they will flop since I forgot to mention you should salt your bokkom fillets first and you might want to water your vinegar down a bit.

Bokkoms – dried fish, salty as hell, best eaten with a cold beer
Dassie – Hyrax (the biggest, common, most spotted mammal in the Cape)
vyfman Namaqualand doos wyn – 5 Litre box wine
lekker - yummy
Sommer – just like that, If not why not
slet sap – slut juice
naai – f*cker, idiot, arsehole – depends on your mood or how much slet sap you’ve had
die manne – the tough guys