Cape Town: Beauty and the beast

Africa: Shocked rat jump starts holiday prep

For the next few weeks I'm blogging about our African trip. We travelled with our niece and nephew Tasha & Karoma Kimani - their company African Touch  specialises in 27-day trips through East Africa (Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania finishing at Zanzibar) for 'people of a certain age'. Our adventure was a one-off through Namibia, Botswana to Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. Then a handful of us travelled - at speed - through Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania to Karoma & Tasha's camping ground near Lake Nakuru in Kenya.

The farmer and I had no idea what overlanding and camping through Africa would bring, but we tried our best to prepare. When a rat killed itself and our living area lights by gnawing a cable, we wore headlamps in the evenings and scuttled around like glow worms. Then the electrician did repairs - and disconnected power to the bathroom. This kicked off renovations which meant showering elsewhere.

Thus prepared for ‘roughing it’, we visited Cape Town before flying to Windhoek in Namibia where we joined a trip with African Touch, owned by our niece Tasha and her Kenyan husband Karoma Kimani.

After Namibia, we were to check out Botswana and Victoria Falls, then a few of us planned to drive through Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania to Kenya where Karoma and Tasha are establishing a camping ground (now finished and fabulous).

Headlamps and decamping for showers hadn’t prepared us for one of our first Cape Town sights -miles of shanties that compose the ‘township’ of Khayelitsha, populated by about a million people. Nor, after daylight suddenly snapped out, was I prepared to be led by a guard to our fortified lodge. It was along the road from the backpackers and not set prettily in its garden as I had invented.

We went through a locked gate, a locked wrought iron door, a locked door and a locked bedroom door before meeting a long-awaited bed - and a locked safe for valuables. I didn’t need to be warned twice not to walk anywhere at night.

Friends took us for a drive and to lunch where the farmer had his first African animal experience – he found springbok carpaccio tasty. 

During the next few days, we visited the wine country, rode the cable car up Table Mountain, jaunted to the Cape of Good Hope, and sauntered around the jazzed-up harbourside. We were charmed by baboons near the Cape, despite that they would have nicked my handbag had I not left it in the vehicle. Finding no food they’d likely have tossed it over a cliff.  

The Dutch/German influence was evident in the cutesy villages in the winelands where, to reintroduce zebra, wildebeest, springbok and Eland, the largest of the antelope, farmers graze them with cattle. At a cheetah park, Anatolian Shepherd dogs are being bred. They live with sheep and goat herds, frightening away endangered cheetahs and thus preventing farmers shooting or trapping them.

We walked to a shopping mall while I clutched my handbag as if it contained my entire blood supply. Of course we experienced not the faintest safety threat. The most aggressive assaults came from assertive shop assistants. “Try them on,” one snapped as I vacillated over track pants. I just wanted them to sleep in, having left my sweatpant/pyjamas fluttering on the line at home. Turning down bossy boots was a cheap thrill - until the only other contenders were in a pricey sporting shop.

My new trackies were so fleecy and heavy I felt sure I’d roast - but that turned out to be another expectation shot down in flames.

Bulls at gates - when I'm the gate

As there has to be truth in the age old saying ‘to charge like a bull at a gate’ it’s no wonder I get nervous when I’m the ‘gate’ and bulls are involved.

Recently when we were separating some steers and bulls, the farmer shouted, “Just stand there” while indicating the gateway, then he rocketed down a sludgy slope in a manner which showed he hadn’t taken notes at the FarmSafe course we attended.

My job was to stop the bulls from running out of the gate while letting the steers exit to their new paddock. Pretty soon all the steers had bolted except Mr Hereford who played fast and loose until he got the concept.

Then we were off to get a bull out of a neighbour’s heifer paddock. The neighbour had asked the farmer to do the job having deemed the bull “a bit of an insistent sort of fellow”.

Once again I was left standing at the gate to stop the heifers leaving while the farmer separated the bull. If this task was left to me, the bull and the heifers would have lived a long and happy life together. This is, of course, why I’m not a farmer; if insistent bulls were to their own devices there’d be rogue bulls everywhere.

It was pleasant standing in the sun watching a fantail ducking and diving under a cabbage tree until the bull ambled from the paddock followed by the farmer on the quad. He (the farmer not the bull) wore the adrenalin-charged maniacal grin which always indicates a close call. “He nearly got me,” he said, “but I remembered some moves from my rugby days.”

Then I was a gate again. Two bulls had got tangled with about 20 yearlings because the farmer had cleverly left a gate open. Tony, who helps out, and Rex rounded them up while I stood ankle-deep in mud in the gateway. The yearlings circled, making it clear they wanted to go through the gate - they know that’s what gates are for. Only me and my madly flapping arms stopped them.

I couldn’t imagine how the farmer and Tony would separate the bulls from the mob - and said so until I remembered all the good reasons why I was a lowly gate and promptly shut up. What I lacked, I decided, were rugby skills.

Then, like magic, the two bulls stepped towards the gate, I sidestepped at the crucial second (picture a forward dodging the defence while going for the try line) and they were through.

Pot Shots at Morning Tea

Farming has undergone a revolution during the past few decades, but one tradition remains unchanged: if you’re a woman who’s not a shearer or shed hand, you feed the shearers. In our case the catering usually only involves morning tea as we don’t farm many sheep and they’re usually shorn in small mobs.

The time for morning tea is always specific - it was originally set at 9.30am then, after Tony our shearer had consulted with the farmer a second time, it was changed to 9.45am. 

The specificity seems odd because although sheep remind me of fussy old women with bad perms, they don’t wear watches or make appointments to be shorn. Some people would say that’s because they’re too stupid, but I beg to differ. At sunset our pet lambs could wriggle out their pen on the lawn and return to their night quarters in the laundry, another couple escaped from every paddock we put them in and commandeered the day bed on the terrace.

Anyway, good shearers are precious, so I’m always prompt. But without fail, I’ll stand around while Tony and whoever else is shearing squeeze in another few sheep. It’s as if the prospect of a break challenges them to push on for a while longer.

If you’re wondering what the farmer does, he’s propped on the end of a broom with which he makes perfunctory flicks at the wool as it’s peeled off. To be fair, he packs the bales and has good excuses:  he’s never been any good at shearing (his words) which wrecks his back.

The last shearers’ morning tea took an interesting turn when I told a joke - a blonde tells a ventriloquist she’s annoyed with him for making blonde jokes. When he apologises she tells him to butt out - her tirade isn’t directed at him, she’s talking to the little guy on his knee.

Our laughter disturbed a possum which emerged from his cosy corner in the wool shed and incited boyish exhilaration; he’d been seen before but no-one knew where he was hiding.

I fetched a gun and, while Rex took aim, there was an air of competitive tension. Would he miss or get it in one shot? The first shot was a hit that made the possum attempt to run for cover, the second was a miss and the third was a close up to get the creature out of its misery.  It was messy - and loud. Our dogs Kate and Floss were found hiding in my car.

Then everyone lolled about for a while longer while, as farmers’ wives have done since Kiwis started farming sheep, I gathered up the remains of morning tea - and the gun.

From farmeress to fryer

For about four months, including the Christmas season, Mary and I (committee members) cooked three nights a week and catered for events at the Maungaturoto Country Club.

Within an hour or so of my first session as a volunteer cook I’d started two fat fires and cut my thumb. The fires (small) happened when I was filling the fryers with new fat. Tip: melt some in a saucepan first and pour it into the fryers before you turn them on, hence fat won’t drip onto hot elements and ignite. (I know you’ve always wanted to learn this.)

As the first cooking day loomed I mentioned to Rex that I should get new trou so I didn’t wreck my good ones and he suggested chef’s pants. I ordered black and white checked jobs from aptly-named Black & White Trading and when they arrived learned Rex had said ‘cheap pants’. Me and my dodgy hearing! But never mind, our baggy (and daggy) creations are cool and comfy.

As I write this we’ve had no disasters. Came close when we ran out of chips, but as my catering partner Mary said, it would only have been a disaster if we’d had no spuds to make more chips with.

This reminded me of my stint as a chalet girl at Madonna di Campiglio, a ski resort in Italy, and my most embarrassing cooking experience (and it wasn’t even my fault) which surely could never be surpassed.

Three of us and an Italian-speaking liaison person ran a chalet for 30 guests. Each day we’d each make starter, main or dessert, divide it in thirds and have a ‘dinner party’ for 10 on each of the three floors.

Guests stayed a week or two then left en masse. When each busload rolled up we’d serve LO Soup made of whizzed up, jazzed up leftovers. If it came out a dark colour, we’d slosh in red wine. Pale soup got white wine. LO Soup was best eaten at 1am after you’d endured a flight from London and a gruelling seven-hour bus trip into the mountains.

Actually, it was tasty and we never had a complaint - until Julia arrived. Even though the ‘can you cook’ test wasn’t rigorous, Julia appeared to have used other talents to get the job. In fact, we had bets about who she’d ‘hit it off with’ each week. Sometimes we all won. No . . . just kidding. Anyway, Julia whizzed up chicken without removing the bones (amazing but true!). We discovered this when guests started picking bits of chicken bone out of their teeth. We didn’t let Julia near LO Soup again and put her under strict surveillance.

As I’m not thinking much about farming at the mo, my dog Floss is confused. Three nights a week I leave home as a human and, her top-to-toe sniff confirms, return as a massive French fry.

It’s such a busy time that one morning we couldn’t find some cattle that had should have been moved to a new paddock the evening before . . . until we noticed half a dozen heads peeking round a bluff. They’d got fed up waiting and had taken off in an unexpected direction.

Not unlike me and the deep fryer – it’s a really unexpected direction.