Friday, 25 July 1986: Heading to Hartenbos – a Scenic but Deserted Indian Ocean Resort

I’m on the Port Elizabeth-Cape Town train bound for Hartenbos, a seaside resort where I plan to spend the night before continuing on to Cape Town tomorrow.   I get up before 7 hoping to get some sunrise photos, but it’s rather cloudy today.  The landscape is very dry here in the Olifants river valley east of Oudtshoorn.  Given the shitty light, it’s hardly worth wasting the celluloid on landscape photos.  There is considerable irrigated agriculture in this valley.  Most of the water must come from bore hole (wells) because the river is almost dry.  I notice a number of sheep and ostrich farms as well.  To the north and south of the valley are rugged, bush-covered mountains with grey or red rock outcrops.   The mountains tower about 2500 feet above the valley.  As we leave the station at Stompdrift, a crazy ostrich decides to chase us.  He keeps up for several hundred yards moving along at a good 25 mph.  As we get close to Oudtshoorn, the mountains are further away.

A herd of ostriches holds up traffic in Oudtshoorn

 

There are a number of young South African soldiers on my train.  They are heading for a large training base in Oudtshoorn.  I strike up a conversation with Corporal Fowler, a 20-year-old white English-speaking chap.  He tells me that all white males have to do two years active duty.  Afterword, they have a three-month call up every year for the next 12 years.  How can a guy hold down a job under these circumstances?  Fowler says you can’t get sacked from your job because of military call-ups, and you get paid by your employer while you’re on active duty. 

We discuss the End Conscription Campaign.  Fowler says it’s not a very big movement except on a few liberal university campuses like Witts, UCT (University of Cape Town), and Rhodes.  He doesn’t think the ECC does much good.  You say, “I don’t want to go,” but after finishing at the university, you go anyway or you go to jail.  It’s worse being a conscientious objector because you wind up doing five years of shit work. Fowler has decided that army life isn’t all that bad.  After all, they pay you and they feed you. 

Fowler is an avid paddle skier (riding waves in a “surfer’s kayak”).  He talks about the “lekker” (Afrikaans for “outasight”) waves in Cape Town.   There are wave reports on the radio every morning, so you go to whichever beach has the largest waves.  The Cape Peninsula is good for surfing and paddle skiing on both sides.  Fowler tells me there are streakers at Sandy Bay beach on the Atlantic side in the summer.

Just a parenthetical note on South Africans’ pride in their country.  Many people here, like those railway policemen on the East London – Port Elizabeth train the other night, claim to love their country.   Yet two minutes after they tell you how beautiful South Africa is, they are chucking beer cans and plastic bags out the window.  The South African countryside is filthy, and you can’t blame all this litter on the blacks.  

The train arrives on time in Oudtshoorn at 10 AM.  It’s a gray, yucky day.  As we ride further west in the Cape Province, I’m noticing more coloured faces and fewer black ones.  I photograph another “whites/blankes” restroom sign at the station.  There must be thousands of them all over the country. 

I’m ready to puke as I keep hearing racial slurs.  As a result, I’m losing any respect I might have had for the white people here.  Admittedly, as with white American Southerners, they’re not all racist assholes, but I’m developing a prejudice against them.  I can’t stand people who tell kaffir (nigger) jokes.  Should have known I’d feel negative about white people here because of their overt racism. 

After leaving Oudtshoorn, the train turns south toward Montagu Pass, George, and the Indian Ocean.  We meet the east-bound passenger train at the Camfer station.  I notice they have several second class coaches jammed to the gills with coloureds on one side of the catering (snack bar) car.  The second class coaches on the other side have a few white passengers but no one else.  So non-whites can now ride second class, but they put them in separate cars. 

The route through the mountains from Montagu Pass to the small city of George is incredible.  The track is on a narrow ledge carved into sheet cliffs.  I find myself looking down two to three hundred foot drops.  The train snakes its way through seven tunnels and around numerous curves.  Highly recommend would be to catch the east-bound train from George on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or Saturday morning at 10:26.  Get off at the top of Montagu Pass (Topping “station”).  Enjoy the view or have a quick picnic lunch before flagging down the west-bound train about 30 minutes later arriving back in George at 1:30. [28 April 1987 note:  probably no longer possible due to a cutback in the frequency of trains last November].  Too bad it’s so cloudy today.  I’m missing some great photo opportunities.  These look like great mountains for hiking.  As we get closer to the ocean, the train descends through impressive pine forests.  George appears to be a lumbering center.

My train descending the steep grade on the south side of Montagu Pass, north of the town of George.  It’s a cloudy day – not the best for scenic photos.

 

My coach is nearly empty now, the army boys got off at Oudtshoorn.  I’m somewhat tired as I never sleep very well on trains.  We’ll be in Hartenbos in less than two hours.  Time for a relaxing 24 hours on the beach.

 

7:45PM, Hartenbos, restaurant at the ARKV Holiday Resort (affiliated with an Afrikaans language and cultural organization) 

I have a cheap little rondoval (a round African cabin) right next to the beach.  The beach is beautiful – big breakers and mostly white sand with a few big rocks here and there.

Earlier, I drank some red wine, then walked along the beach playing chicken with the waves.  I walked up to a point where a salt “river” “flows” into the sea.  Actually, the river and the sea were separated by a strip of sandy beach.  Suddenly, a big wave carried the sea water over the sand and into the brackish river on either side.  Then the little streams disappeared just as rapidly as they had come to life.  All that remained was foam and muddy sand.  I scampered back to high ground having enjoyed a mini-lesson in coastal geomorphology.

It was dark as I made my way back to this restaurant.  It was open but totally deserted.  Hmm.  Was this a bad omen about the quality of the food?  I headed off to see if Hartenbos had other offerings.  An Afrikaner chap in some sort of uniform directed me to the Riviera Resort down the road a ways.  I was having a fantasy about running into a carload of beautiful 30-year-old divorced nymphomaniacs from Cape Town over here for a weekend of partying on the beach.  No such luck.  All I found at the Riviera were a middle aged couple eating in the semi-posh restaurant, an old guy at the bar, and high prices.  No nymphos tonight – I guess when it’s off-season here, it’s really off season. 

I settle for a mediocre fish dinner here at the AKTV restaurant and drink more wine.  As I walk back to my rondoval at 8:45, I see the lights of Mossel Bay (population about 25,000) a couple miles to the south.  Perhaps there would be night life there on a Friday, but I doubt it.  You don’t find much off-season fun at a resort in a country starved for foreign tourists because it’s on the verge of some sort of long-term revolution.  Guess I should have headed straight for Cape Town but now I know.  Still, I can hear the Indian Ocean waves crashing a couple hundred feet from my door.  The clouds have lifted, and it’s a starry night.  The moon will be up in a couple hours.  A gentle breeze is blowing and the temperature is around 55-60°F.  Too bad there’s no one here to share this lovely but lonely beach with me.