Monday, 28 July 1986: Meeting a Distinguished & Entertaining Afrikaner Poet

After a long evening of beer guzzling with a group of South Korean sailors at a Cape Town dive, I awoke on Monday morning with a pounding brain which felt about three sizes too big for my skull.  Needless to say, I accomplished little that day other than doing my laundry and cashing some traveler’s checks.  I did visit the local tourist bureau and learned that there was no public transportation down to the tip of the Cape of Good Hope.  If I wanted to see much of the Cape peninsula, my choice would be to rent a car or take a tour bus.  As much as I don’t like tours, the bus was cheaper.  Since my trip to the Cape Town was a reconnaissance, the tour could provide me with a quick overview.  I could figure out the most appealing areas of the cape and spend more time at them on a subsequent trip.  So I planned on doing the tour the following day.

Cape Town is jam-packed with examples of classic Cape architecture such as Tuynhuys, which houses the South African State President’s offices.

 

Around 6:00PM my hangover had mostly subsided so I decided to phone Barend Toerein, a friend of Helize, the Afrikaans professor from Durban.  When I had met Helize on a mountain club trip back in April, she told me I must look up Barend when I got to Cape Town.  Helize described him as a 65-year-old “5-star” person; an Afrikaner who had lived a number of years in the States.  She also noted that Barend was a writer, poet, and avid mountaineer, so he seemed like a potentially worthwhile acquaintance.

When I reached Barend, I learned that he was going to the Cape Town Symphony concert that evening and had an extra ticket.  Would I like to go along?  Since the featured piece would be Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse.  Barend turned out to be a charming, eccentric and distinguished-looking older chap with a large nose.  He was full of interesting gab.  He may have been an aging Afrikaner but he was certainly no Platteland Boer.  He wrote literary reviews for an Afrikaans newspaper and had worked in New York for several years as a librarian at the U.N.  We seemed to hit it off quite well.

Barend Toerien, a crusty and brain-stimulating South African poet.  Photo source: https://versindaba.co.za/2010/09/16/herman-toerien-barend-j-toerien-n-jaar-later/

 

The old concert hall was located in the Cape Town City Hall.  It was an attractive room though the acoustics left something to be desired.  Our seats in the balcony gave a good view of the action on the keyboard.  The young South African pianist had nearly been killed in a traffic accident a year earlier.  Though he still experienced some difficulty walking, his fingers had suffered no lingering effects from the mishap.  He received a standing ovation from the nearly capacity crowd.

After the concert, Barend and I had coffee and cake at a charming café nearby.  He offered to give me a “tour” of Table Mountain, the awesome 3000-foot high backdrop to the city of Cape Town.  He suggested a cable car ride to the top followed by a hike across the top of the “table”, and a descent on foot back to the base of the cable station.  I was planning to take a bus tour to Cape Point the following day, so we agreed to meet early Wednesday morning, the day after.