On The Beach

The beach was everything we expected it to be.

White sand, warm water, palm trees.

Palm trees are so symbolic for me, Treasure Island, Peter Pan, desert islands from comic books I read as a child; they smack of adventure. If I think about it they aren't really trees, not like any other kind of tree. Then they have nuts, coconuts, what a great word!

The nuts are not nuts but stone fruit, like peaches and plums. I always thought that these nuts were covered in that thick matted husk so that they could float but apparently this padding is protection against rocks and other hard landings, when the coconuts eventually drop. Human heads are one of the hard landings that they can encounter.

The fact that the coconuts are protected gives some insurance to the humans too. A friend was once wondering, drunkenly, through a palm planation in Mozambique when a coconut dropped and struck him on the head. He was concussed and woke up later with two reasons for a swore head. Had the coconut been less protected he most likely would not have woken up at all.

On that subject, so many alcoholic spirits and cocktails have relied on coconuts (and palm trees) for their marketing appeal I remember a TV commercial in my youth that went:- " you can stay as you are for the rest of your life, or, you can change to Mainstay" 🌴 palm trees, beach, yacht , coconuts. Looking back at that now I wonder if there was a sub-conscious sense of humour at play in those days. What other reason could there be for branding a bottle of cane spirit Mainstay, apart from the obvious nautical reference?

Getting inside a coconut was something that my children, like many other novices, found challenging. Nature has designed them to be resilient for the above reasons and so they don’t get eaten. Although they are stone fruit they don’t have the same objective as a peach or apple. With these fruits it is part of the plan that we and other creatures eat the fruit and disperse the seed in the process. With a coconut the seed, or embryo, resides in the white flesh that we want to get our teeth into, the biological name for this is the endosperm. The embryo sits in this at the top of the shell where the three eyes give the hairy shell a surprised look, as the children observed. The secret of how to get this far is having the right tool which turned out to be a sharp panga.

The manager of Goody Villas is a kind and very friendly man called Sam .He made our stay such a pleasant and relaxing time, with his friendly everything is possible attitude. We were welcome to as many coconuts as we wished for and with coconut palms all around us, they went from an exotic find to everyday existence in no time at all. With Sam's alarming sharp panga, used deftly, the husks were hacked off with surprising ease, giving up the hidden nuts in their hairy shells. I could imagine how someone’s fingers could follow a similar fate, so we left the hacking to Sam.

When one is on holiday food seems to be the main event, here we were on the edge of the sea, so naturally sea food was going to have top-billing. We didn’t have to wait long before it arrived in the form of a man on a motorbike, riding up and down the beach, with the catch of the day.

Mussel crackers, a resplendent pink, fresh from the sea was our first entry. The next day it was parrot fish. So beautiful, even in death, that I had to pass on the experience, although Catherine was up for it. We had a convenient braai device at our campsite, that was almost like a brazziere with one side removed. I saw this as the Portugese influence that pops up time and again in this far away place. Far from Portugal, the former colonial influencer. A huge bag of charcoal appeared as soon as we asked what fuel went into the braai, a young man coming with it, happy to assist me in lighting up. We were soon discussing spear fishing and how he swam out to the reef and then dived while holding his breath for up to five minutes. I’m sure that is what he said. It was such a holistic experience to be hearing the challenges of trying to spear the very fish that we were about to put on the fire that we were making together.

And thus, the days passed at Goody Villas, different fish each day and lulas on a few occasions. Squid is the English word for lulas, the Portuguese version is so much better, in my view, they almost own them. The word camaroes, the same argument, in the case of prawns. Doesn’t camaroes grelhados sound delicious?

We wake up among the coconut palms with the sea breeze and the waves, it’s warm, the sea is warm. It’s a Golilocks kind of life and living is easy. The days slip by, some days the sea is choppy, others it’s flat and calm. The sun sets, the stars come out, it’s warm.

The children are collecting shells and coconuts. We swim in the warm, gentle sea, occasionally helping with a pull in of the fishing nets that are being cast and retrieved, throughout the day, by the local fisherfolk. Often all they have for their efforts is a catch of tiny fingerling fish and the odd crab. Undaunted, they load the nets back into the boat and go through the whole process again.

The contrast between our holiday and their reality is difficult to qualify. It is entirely subjective, but ultimately the word poverty comes to my mind. Time is one thing that is here in abundance, and it is a warm time.

Then almost suddenly our time is up, and we start to contemplate the journey home, back down the same potholed roads and we are absolutely sure that it was worth it and

we would do it again. In fact, we will.

The possible advantage we have with the return journey is we are familiar with what the journey will be like, albeit in reverse. We set off at dawn, with the border in our sights, if we can get over the border we can camp over night at La Rochelle where we and enjoyed the camping on our way out, but hadn’t really had time to explore.

The hours clock by and the road seems to be better in the daylight. We come to the “super pot-hole” that we had seen on our way in. On that occasion the headlights had lit up a branch that had been stuck in the hole with various objects hanging from the branch. The same arrangement is still in place but now there is a large truck that has driven into the bush as a result of avoiding this arrangment. My guess is the driver was moving through the dark at some speed when the apparition appeared in his headlights and he swerved to avoid hitting, what he may have perceived to be a person in the road.

We were stopped at various roadblocks along the way without incident until we reached the Save River. Here there was a more dedicated officer who decided to check my trailer’s registration number against the temporary import documents and insurance issued by customs. A routine check that returned the news that the number plate on my trailer did not match the documents. I was genuinely surprised and joined him to confirm what he said was true. This fact was not going to go unrewarded, and the police officer was looking very pleased with the situation. For my part I was trying to understand for how long I had been driving around with a trailer with the wrong number plate. To add some detail, I have a collection of trailers with a few different number plates. What was confusing me was the number plate on the trailer was not the one that was supposed to be there. My main concern was not this conversation with the traffic officer, which was easily resolved with a donation, but the border crossing that we were to attempt later in the day.

It seemed to me that I had had the wrong number plate on my trailer for several border crossings and nobody, including myself, had bothered to check. If our luck continued that would be fine, but now I was aware of the fact and it was something to think about. One option would be to just take the offending number plate off and say the correct number plate, which I didn’t have, had fallen off. The downside of that might be that no number plate might attract more attention.

By the time we finally reached the border it was dark and I decided to ride my luck and retain the wrong number plate hoping for the best. As we drove towards the exit boom after completing all the necessary procedures, I saw a brand-new SUV parked with a well dressed individual standing next to it. I had the feeling my luck had just run out. This gentleman was probably part of the new effort to improve systems at our border posts. He strolled over to us and asked for the paperwork, then walked around the car to check the car registration. This did not bode well for me, on previous occasions the contents of the trailer had been the focus, not registration numbers. After the car his attention was turned to the trailer and as we walked around to the back of the trailer I suggested he might like to have a look inside. He said he first wanted to check the registration and I accepted my fate.

On the documents the trailer had a Cape Town plate while the trailer was sporting a Joburg one, this was an immediate problem. I then suggested that if he checked the chasis number stamped on the trailer we would find that this number was correct to the papers and the number plate was just something I had got mixed up. He agreed that the chasis number was the main event and the number plate was more a traffic department thing. He produced his phone and took a photo of the chasis number, and we both compared it to the number on the documents. They were not the same. The case was closed. We would have to leave the trailer in his custody and continue our journey without it. At this point Catherine joined the conversation and explained to this gentleman that our tent, our kitchen and our food was in the trailer, and we would be needing all of it at La Rochelle in half an hour when we reached our campsite. He could see her point of view but there was just this fact that the trailer was not the trailer that the paperwork said it was. We argued that although that was true, it was still our trailer, and we needed it to get through the night.

Once again, in Africa, we were able to find a solution, with three children who needed to get to bed. We would be allowed to take the trailer as long as I promised to bring it back in the morning and the gentleman would keep the paperwork just to make sure I did. No money changed hands. At dawn the next morning I left the sleeping camp and headed back to the border with the trailer, after a night of contemplation as to how to get out of this predicament. As part of the explanation to how I got into this situation, I would like to say that trailers are not that important, in the normal course of things. They are viewed as extensions of the vehicle that is pulling them and not an entity in their own right, although on paper they obviously are, if one wants to be pedantic. We had driven from Swellendam in the Cape to this border post before anyone noticed anything and this meant that we had already imported the wrong trailer into Zimbabwe, exported it to Mozambique and now we weren’t allowed to re-import it.

 I parked outside the border post and walked in armed with a photograph of the trailer taken five years previously with the children in frame and the Joburg number plate in view. The trailer had been improved since the photo and was now an enclosed box, while back then it had been what I call a sheep trailer. Sheep trailer because the Karoo sheep farmers use them to cart their sheep around. By now the gentleman and his SUV were no longer there and my paperwork was inside with the day shift of the regular team of border officers. They knew about my trailer problem, and I produced the photo as proof of the fact that I was the owner and the trailer was not stolen. I then pointed out that the reason I was trying to enter the country with the wrong trailer was due to the fact that customs, at their other border post with South Africa, had let me enter the country with the wrong trailer in the first place. The trailer in the photo was less impressive than the trailer outside the border post and I started to get the feeling that these officers were more interested in just letting this problem go, especially when there was the question of how the trailer came to be here in the first place. The ball was in their court and after a few hours of contemplation they decided the best solution was for me to take the wrong trailer back to where it came from. They handed me the papers and wished me a safe journey.

Before

After...with the wrong number plate

Delighted with this reprieve I set off to tell the campers that our problem of the previous night no longer existed. On the way I thought I would drop into Mutare and buy some supplies, little did I know the Sheriff of Mutare and his men were waiting for me. With a trailer in tow parking was not easy. I parked in a bay outside a shop with my trailer stick out and as I climbed out of the car some people warned me that the municipality would have a problem with my parking and they were around. So, I got back in the car and moved on looking for another option. Every time I stopped people told me that I should not stop as stopping without parking was a problem and there was a threat of some kind, they whoever they were, were around. Eventually I gave up on the supplies and settled on buying some fruit from a street vendor. Suddenly out of nowhere a pick-up truck pulled up next to me with the municipal crest of Mutare emblazoned on the door. Six men leapt out of the back with a large yellow metal contraption and started trying to attach it to my front wheel. The motor was running so I slammed the car in reverse sending part of their device up into the wheel arch while the rest of it fell on the road. They started shouting at me that I was illegally parked and needed to be clamped while I argued that I was not parked at all as my motor was still running. The sheriff emerged from the cab and informed that my release would require a payment of $ 30. I argued that as I had not been successfully clamped, because I was not parked. I could pay $ 10. This led to a howl of dissent from the mob that were his clamping team. So, I gave them their loot, drove forward so the missing part of their clamp reappeared from my wheel arch and drove off. All along the street were knowing looks from the bystanders, they had warned me, but I had not listened.

When I arrive back at La Rochelle with the trailer still in tow, the family were having tea and scones on the veranda. After our adventures the furnishings of this former home seem worlds away from where we have been, the old-world opulence in stark contrast to the poverty, if that is the right word. The word poverty somehow implies suffering while everywhere we had been there was a feeling of quiet acceptance of this is how it is; then a feeling that it might get better. You never know you might be one of the lucky ones.