17 minute read
PEOPLE OF THE MILNERTON MARKET
THIS MARKET HAS SOME OF THE QUIRKIEST, MOST UNIQUE ITEMS TO BE FOUND ANYWHERE IN CAPE TOWN, AND BROWSING ITS BRIC-A-BRAC, ARTEFACTS AND ANTIQUES IS A FAVOURITE WAY TO SPEND A WEEKEND MORNING. BUT EVEN MORE INTERESTING THAN THE STALLS ARE THE PEOPLE WHO OWN THEM. BY SUSAN HAYDEN
TONY CHATTY Tall, reticent and softly spoken Tony Chatty sits amid a veritable treasure trove of old and interesting things. His sprawling ‘Aladdin’s Cave’ of unusual antique items that he has collected over the years contains old brass artefacts, knives in ornate casings, antique dolls and submarine portholes, to name a few. When asked how he came across such unusual items, he says that the trick is to have a good eye for the things that are unique and of value when you shop in second-hand stores. He took many of the items off a collector who couldn’t take his precious cargo with him overseas, and plenty of his buyers are people who shop for items for movie sets. It’s a fascinating stall, and definitely worth a browse.
RICHARD MILLER Using pine off-cuts from the saw mill, Richard Miller has been making hand-painted wooden signs and selling them on the market for 25 years. ‘It started with just a handful, and it grew from there,’ he says. He sits at a table at the market and paints them by hand: ‘Friends are welcome, family by appointment’ and ‘The more I meet people, the more I love my dog’ are among his more popular signs.
JOHAN DE MEYER After working for De Beers mining company for 44 years, retired Johan got involved in charity work, travelling to the Northern Cape where unemployment rates in some regions are as high as 99% and people, as Johan says, ‘have nothing’. He would go to places such as Britstown, Upington and Augrabies distributing shoes, clothes and food. ‘But the people there don’t like getting something without giving back,’ explains Johan. ‘When they realised I’m interested in crystals and precious stones, they would repay me in stones. If you walk around in the area between the Orange River and Upington, you’ll find amazing stones.’ Once, on his travels in Burma with De Beers, he found a ruby the size of a golf ball, but he couldn’t get it out so he dug a hole in the ground and buried it. He says maybe one day he’ll go back and get it.
MARIO WROBLEWSKI Pretty much everyone knows 85-year-old Mario, or ‘Papa’ as he is fondly called. Mario has been trading on the Milnerton market for 20 years, and you can tell this master smoker nothing about mackerel, snoek, kabiljou, red roman, angelfish or hake. Originally from Poland, Papa spent many years of his life working as a ship’s engineer on the northern seas, basing himself in Sweden in the late 1950s. He knows the ocean like the back of his hand, and he knows fish. He married too hungry to take it home, R20 buys you a delicious fresh bread roll with smoked snoek and mayonnaise.
BRUCE TAIT Nobody passes by Bruce Tait’s sizeable jar of false teeth without stopping in horror and amusement. ‘One day an old lady came to me and said, “I’ve got a whole bag of false teeth – would you like them?” Now, my teeth have become legendary, and are known far and wide,’ Bruce, who’s also an antique specialist, explains. ‘There was an old lady, Aunty Joan, who visited a stall opposite me every Sunday and who was fascinated by the teeth – so much so that she left me her false teeth in her will.’ Bruce goes on to
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FOR A WHISTLESTOP TOUR OF THE MILNERTON FLEA MARKET
tell the story of a handsome, toothless surfer who showed up one day at his stall and asked if his teeth had been found out back, on the beach. He lost them while surfing and had been looking for them ever since. Everyone wants to know if people actually try the teeth on. The answer, says Bruce, is yes! When he’s not at the market, Bruce is running his shop, Antiques On Kloof, at the top of Kloof Street in the CBD.
an ‘English rose’, as he calls her, and lived in the United Kingdom before eventually relocating to South Africa for the sunshine. His expertly smoked angel fish, snoek and mackerel are inexpensive, healthy and delicious. If you’re
SALIOS TIGERE You can’t help smiling when you see the gorgeous garden art that Salios from Zimbabwe has fashioned from old pots. There are egrets, flamingos, pelicans, ducks, owls, cats and sunbirds as water feeders. Salios’ grandfather was a talented woodcarver, and his grandson has clearly inherited his skills. Salios was working as a welder when he decided to start making garden art as a hobby. His creations gained in popularity and sold well, and today he has a degree in marketing and a workshop in Lansdowne where he employs six people. ‘I have a talent for making other people happy,’ he says, ‘and, I like birds.’
ANNALISE DU TOIT* Life hasn’t been easy for 56 year-old Annalise du Toit*. Her little stall consists of toys she has beautifully knitted herself and odd items that have been donated by friends and family. She has had no income since 2007 and is currently homeless. She lives, washes and sleeps in the confines of her small car, which is packed to the rafters with everything she owns. There isn’t much extra room. She parks it outside an old-age home at night where, she says, she is less likely to be harassed by the cops. But, they still come. Her blue eyes fill with tears when she tells of her partner who died in August of kidney failure. He was only 48 years old. He had the same model of car in a different colour, and they would park side by side, putting their stuff in one car and sleeping in the other. The money she makes at the market is just enough for food for the week. She is waiting for something to happen, for her luck to turn. In the meantime, she says, ‘The people at the market are my friends and family.’
(*Not her real name. She asked not to be photographed or identified.)
DESMOND AND VALERIE ENGELBRECHT With a twinkle in his eye, Desmond will tell you that his wife invented the ‘Flip and Braai, but the Heavenly Father was the main engineer’. At the age of 60, Desmond found himself out of work, so he decided to make something he could sell. The ‘Flip and Braai’ is clever, indeed. No tongs required, it’s big enough for a snoek and it’s light enough that anyone can flip it. It comes in three sizes (‘like the three little bears’) and you can choose between mild steel and stainless steel.
MAKE hAY WhILE ThE sUn shInEs
COCK-A-DOODLE-DOOOO! A BATTLE CRY, TELLING US HE’S ALIVE AND READY FOR THE DAY, AND THAT THE REST OF US MUST GET MOVING, TOO, BECAUSE THERE’S WORK TO BE DONE. THOUGH, IF YOU STAY AT ONE OF THESE FIVE WORKING FARMS, YOU WON’T HAVE TO LIFT A FINGER. ETHAN PITT HEADS TO THE FARM FOR A HAYCATION
COUNT SHEEP AT WOLWEKRAAL ‘Farming isn’t a soft life,’ says Berlinda Nel, who left the city 20 years ago with her husband to start a new life at Wolwekraal, a sheep farm in the Karoo. Although just 10 km from Prince Albert, once you head down the last 2 km of dirt road into the 4 000 ha farm, you feel as if you’re in the middle of nowhere.
It hasn’t been easy, but the Nels have never looked back.
‘We didn’t have a clue. Along with the farm, we got 300 merino sheep, but we knew nothing about wool and had nowhere to shear them. So we sold them and got dorpers, which we raise for their meat, instead.’ Not that farming ever gets any easier.
‘A really tough day,’ Berlinda says, ‘is when you go out into the veld and see that four, five, maybe six lambs have been half eaten by jackals and are still alive. So you have to slaughter them. That is not nice. And the drought has been terrible; we haven’t had rain for six years. But we go on because the rewards are many.’
Despite the harsh summer heat and the dry earth, Berlinda says her life here is privileged. ‘It’s so tranquil. And so wonderful not having to be at work at a certain time; rather, I get up early to watch the sunrise from a koppie. That’s something priceless. This place lets you know that you are free.’
To share this freedom with folks in need of some wide-open space, the Nels built four guest cottages. Echoing the Karoo’s unfettered simplicity, they’re decorated with unpretentious antiques and vintage pieces that Berlinda picked up in Prince Albert. They’re equipped for selfcatering, and there’s a shop on the farm where you can buy lamb chops, wors and braaibroodjies. There’s a swimming pool, chickens foraging in the earth, and trails for you to ride your mountain bike.
On long walks, you’ll bump into the small herd of sheep that graze on the herbaceous Anker karoo (Pentzia incana) that gives their meat its characteristic flavour. If there are lambs, you can help with bottle feeding, too.
Mostly, though, coming here is about finding solitude. ‘It’s a place of healing,’ says Berlinda. ‘If you’re stressed, burnt out, or just sick of being cooped up, this is a place to unwind. You can find yourself here. You can talk to yourself, too, or to the rocks and stones. Nothing and nobody will disturb you.’ wolvekraal.co.za
DO NOTHING AT HALFAAMPIESKRAAL While there are interactive ‘touch farms’ where guests have the opportunity to get involved with farming activities, ride horses, or milk cows, a healthy respect for the realities of agriculture is one of the reasons most farm stays don’t invite guests to get too actively involved in farming activity. Tending animals, harvesting crops and shearing sheep aren’t in fact recreational activities. Most of those jobs need to be left to people who know what they’re doing.
‘There’s no entertainment, and guests mustn’t expect to “help out”,’ says Jan-Georg Solms, owner of Halfaampieskraal, a guest farm in the Overberg.
For city folk, though, merely being in this environment has a way of affecting you quite deeply… Whether it’s because of JanGeorg’s excellent eye for detail evident in the outbuildings renovated into quirkily styled accommodations, or because of the legendary meals that enable you to taste the goodness of the land. Or maybe it’s simply thanks to the restfulness you savour here, whether lounging on the veranda or walking across the land. No one can be sure. Perhaps it’s just the realisation that your eggs were collected shortly before breakfast, or that your duvet inners were supplied by the squabbling ducks roaming the farmyard.
Whatever it is, with more than a thousand merino sheep and arable land planted with wheat, canola, and barley, Halfaampieskraal is the real deal, stacking up all sorts of opportunities to cultivate stillness. ‘People mainly come here to relax and do nothing at all,’ says Jan-Georg. ‘What people see taking place will depend on the seasons. There’s sheep shearing every eight months, and during planting season, there are big planters working through the night, and you will be aware of them. During lambing season, there will be lambs skipping about. But we don’t let guests sit on the harvesters or go traipsing through the shearing shed. No. Things carry on as usual – as they have for a few hundred years.’ kraal.biz
TIME TRAVEL AT BARTHOLOMEUS KLIP There’s a tremendous sense of stepping back in time at Bartholomeus Klip, part of a wheat and sheep farm attached to a 4 000 ha nature reserve where you might spot bat-eared foxes, blue cranes, a variety of antelope, or one of the super-rare geometric tortoises.
Situated near the tiny hamlet of Hermon in a valley known for its grapes, olives and wheat, just 25 minutes from Riebeek Kasteel, the farm has two family-sized self-catering cottages plus five bedrooms in its original 1906 farmstead, now restored and furnished in mood-evoking period style. While many of the enticements of another age exist in physical form, it’s not just the bricksand-mortar nostalgia that takes you back in time. It’s the atmosphere, the way staffers treat guests, the way the food tastes, the ritual of high tea.
And of course much of the spirit of the place is linked with the seasonality of life represented by the clichéd images of farm life that keep cropping up: chickens pecking the ground, sheepdogs rounding on large herds, tractors trekking back and forth, barn owls nesting in the silo, the harvest, sheep being shorn and the lambs frolicking when their time comes. There are around 2 000 newborn merinos each lambing season.
There’s plenty to do beyond the farmyard, including spending time at the dam and exploring the nature reserve. And, if you want to delve into a different sort of time travel, this was also one of the locations for the long-running Quagga Project, which has been attempting to re-establish a quagga population using selective breeding of zebras. A few years back it achieved its first goal of breeding 12 animals that exhibited the same aesthetic features as the extinct quagga – striping that stops on the mid-body and very brown in colour. bartholomeusklip.com
WATCH THE GRASS GROW AT OAKHURST ‘I love what I do,’ says Jake Crowther. ‘I love working outdoors. I love farm life. I love improving the land in a sustainable way. My children are also the sixth generation on the farm.’
Jake’s family’s dairy farm is surrounded by the Outeniqua Mountains and indigenous forest. It is in one of the more remote bits of the Garden Route – in the vicinity of Hoekwil along the Seven Passes Road, which runs inland between George and Knysna. In other words, pure bliss.
By ‘improving the land’, Jake means regenerative farming, an approach that involves sequestering carbon in the soil by letting his pastured-raised cows fertilise and replenish the earth using their own manure and their hooves.
Jake says the thing he does best though is growing grass. ‘It’s what we do. Our business is completely dependent on healthy, happy cows who need lush, fresh grass 24/7. It sounds easy but each cow grazes about 13 kg of grass a day. So we need to produce at least 16 tons of grass daily.’
Which kind of makes your head spin, even if it doesn’t sound especially thrilling. But it does put you in awe of farmers such as Jake who get up each morning to help make the world a better place.
‘Most fulfilling,’ Jake says, ‘is when you see the cows sleek and healthy and producing lots
of fresh, creamy milk and all the calves are happy and growing up in open fields with space and living completely free range.’
The sight of these happy cows alone is reason enough to hit the Garden Route to help Jake watch the grass grow. Fortunately, there are self-catering cottages and glampingstyle tents to put you right in the middle of this wondrous grass-growing project. The three-bedroom cottages are along the edge of the forest and very private – and if they are chic, cosy and comfy inside, the world beyond their walls is a blissful slice of oldfashioned country living.
Visits to the dairy are a treat: Aside from seeing cows being milked, you witness their personalities in full flight. ‘Like humans, you get naughty cows, bullies, quiet cows, and mostly easy-going happy-go-lucky cows,’ says Jake. ‘Every day they surprise you with some drama or unique behaviour.’
The best moments though, Jake says, are when you catch the cows when they are full of grass, content and suddenly deeply interested in humans. ‘In these moments, in a shady field, away from the world, you can sit still and have a bunch of cows come up to you and sniff you and lick you.’ oakhurst.co.za
UNPLUG AT DANIELSKRAAL It’s remarkable just how quickly a cellphone becomes an annoyance when you’re in a place with a life and energy all of its own. Besides, there’s precious little you can do about ‘urgent’ calls when you’re dodging cowpats or running the gauntlet of furious geese.
Not that you need to worry about such farmyard obstacles at Danielskraal, which – despite being just 10 minutes from the Port-producing town of Calitzdorp – is also bereft of humans.
Swimming kaalgat is just one benefit of the farm’s next-level isolation. There’s an utterly uncommercial aura about the place that enables total, unconstrained freedom.
The four-bedroom house – with its thick walls, deep veranda and thatch roof – dates back to the mid 1830s. A chic renovation has imbued it with a quintessential parallel-universe personality (original fireplaces, plush sofas, old books, rich fabrics, found trinkets, bric-a-brac, vintage this and that) and it has everything you and your family (or skinny-dipping friends) could need to stay for a weekend or a week. It’s surrounded by what Rosheen refers to as ‘undulating views of velvet hills that stretch to eternity’, plus there’s 25 ha of carrots, onion seeds, lucerne … and 350 mohair goats roaming around the rest of the 2 300-hectare wilderness.
Venture away from the farm to set off on long walks through abundant nature, taking stock, cherishing the oxygen, recuperating from life’s niggles, listening to twittering birdlife. It’s a subtle landscape where you learn to appreciate the tiniest wonders, from rare succulents to scattered fossils.
The other pleasure of being in this rural oasis is of course the readily available fresh produce. ‘We find the tastiest things to eat and drink here,’ says Rosheen. ‘Fresh milk, free-range eggs, the local sourdough bread, home-made rusks and apricot jams, olive oils and tapenade…’
Tuck in, drink a toast and then be sure to gaze upwards and be awed by the kaleidoscopic starscape in a sky unblemished by light pollution. You won’t for a moment regret the lack of a cellphone signal (although you might want to turn off your WiFi, because the farm is now connected). danielskraalfarm.co.za
