Spring in Paternoster: book now!

Two years in a row my mother and I drove up the West Coast of South Africa to look at the spring flowers. In 2006 we stopped over at Paternoster. And it was not until I looked at the picture below, taken then, of the dawn over the sea, and wondered why on earth I was awake at that time of day, that I rembemered that I did not get a wink of sleep back then, either! In a guest house...

A cupboard door in our bedroom kept opening mysteriously in the middle of the night. I would close it, it would swing open again, no matter how firmly I shut it. I decided it was a spook.

Something about the place...

If you love flowers, a trip to South Africa in the spring time, in late August through September, is something you should consider putting on your Must Do Before I Die list. It is unforgettably beautiful and it is unique.

A slideshow in my side bar covers the last flower trip I took with my mom, in 2007 (double click on it and it will become full page), but I did not have a blog when we took the first trip in 2006, so I may post the pictures in time for any flower lovers with the means to make travel plans for this September. The single most expensive item, of course, will be the airfare. But I cannot stress enough how worth it it would be, even if you save for a while and go another year.

There are so many places and landscapes to see that even one visit will but scratch the bejewelled surface.

But anyhow, this was our first stop on my fly-by-night visit. I think I was in and out of the country within seven days. Not long enough by any means but all the time I had. (And the airfare a generous gift, or it would never have happened.)

On a granite island in the sand of the Cape Columbine Nature Reserve we stopped for a typical Viljoen picnic of cold white wine, a confit of duck and more that I cannot remember.

The little grey backed gulls ate their cousins the ducks in confit form.

These lachenaleas were scattered as thickly as gems in a pirate's casket. I think they are L. mutabilis, growing out of nothing.

And that was just the start.

Night in Paternoster

This is a long post, born of fear. Skip to the next one for happy stuff.

As it grew dark and our three little gas lights started to blind us if we looked at them, and the lighthouse became a symbol of safety, I started to feel a bone marrow chill. The boom over the entrance to the reserve had been lifted after hours, and this made me nervous. Obviously it allowed campers in and out: there were a few tents much farther down, at Titiesbaai. But the lovely privacy of our little bay started to feel like accessible isolation in a bad way.

We were now on the outskirts of a town. Not in the middle of nowhere. A town where poverty and wealth co-existed. We were close to people, now.

Here's the contradiction.

In Cape Town this is the drill at night, in a brick and mortar house: lock the doors. The front door gets a deadbolt plus another lock. It faces the street - a cul de sac, and is so visible that I think it is very safe. The front of my parents' house has no fence or wall, and may be the only suburban house in South Africa to be so. Two other doors, to the garden and kitchen, have metal gates that are pulled across and locked at night, too, or during the day with the door open, if someone is alone in the house. Two doors that lead to the garage area of the house from the herb garden and street are also double locked with metal gates at night. All the windows have burglar proofing. I lock my bedroom door at night. There are panic buttons in the house that send silent signals to a private security company. And two light switches are actually alarms that sound sirens somewhere in the roof. There are floodlights onto the garden. The house is armed. I hate handguns.

That's the drill and I slip into that mode naturally when I go home. If I come home late at night I drive around the cul de sac once with my beams on bright to check the driveway and the bushes in the neighbours' gardens. As I pull into the garage I click the automatic garage door shut as the car is still moving in so that I can't be hjacked while I am in the garage with the door open.

Is it overkill? It may be. We will never, I hope, know. The razor wire over the low fence at the bottom of the garden was snipped one night and persons crossed the garden in the dark - the garden where we eat at night - to scale the neighbour's wall while we slept. Dogs barked. Lights came on. Nothing happened. My brother's wife woke to armed men climbing the stairs in their house one night last year. Downstairs they had jammed the safe. She woke in time to lock the bedroom doors and call the security company and police. They have no burglar bars, and the electronic alarm system was off. A few streets away people have been hijacked in their driveways. And shot dead.

None of this happens often. It is not the norm. But it does happen and it creates fear.

And here we were. Hours from Cape Town in a cloth tent.

I heard a car idling in the night. Like deep in the night. Idling for a long time, above us on the sand road. Why? It seemed so sinister. Earlier a sketchy man had been driving slowly from site to site in a pick up truck. Why? Were the lone crayfisherman with their inner tubes and nets and knowledge of the coves a threat, or just fishermen? Was I being paranoid? And because I had never camped before I didn't know the territory. Was I being ridiculous? Is this why people congregated when camping?

I worked myself into a state of suppressed terror. The whole of my country's sorry history came crashing into our little tent.

Vince got up, dressed, and spent the entire night outside, standing guard for me. If it were possible, I fell in love even more. This was the man I had been looking for all my life. Whether he thought Iwas being ridiculous or not, he spent the night, in chill mist and rain, patrolling the perimeter.

I got some sleep. Prepared, in the jumpy recesses of my mind, to jump up and fight.

What's up on the terrace?

I'm taking bets: this thing, is it, or is it not, dead? Clue, it was one of my favourite terrace plants last year, attracting many bees. Its leaves were intensely perfumed.

It was...Calamintha nepeta. And you know what? I saw signs of life. Little green bits at the very base. It doesn't look good, and it may be too far gone. But I'm waiting to see. It has also self- seeded rather freely.


My idea of masses of Japanese ribbon grass (Hakonechloa macra) for a small greenroof that will be planted beneath a water tower on one of Mr Cooper's terraces was based entirely on my one-plant experience, as well as knowing how well the striped varieties do in semi-shady situations. Mine looked like attractive straw the winter through, and after cutting it back I wondered; but here are the new shoots. I prefer the species, plain green, which also seems to have a slightly more upright habit than the weeping-flowing golden ones...

Violets, or weeds? These were volunteers from the gravel on my terrace floor, and I moved them to a rose pot. They have taken root and made new leaves.

Veronica "Waterperry". These challenged little plants, hardy as hell, made it through the winter in terra cotta pots 5" across.

The chive dilemma. Eat, or admire?

Yes, I sold out and planted some violas, leftovers fron work. I think they are adorable.

Spring in New York

The Liz Christie community garden on East Houston and the Bowery. At first I thought winter jasmine. But is it a cunningly pruned forsythia? If it is, it's only the second time I have appreciated the overplanted highway shrub.

Prunus subhirtella "Autumnalis Rosea"...

And my old friend, the amelanchier, whose berries will be ripe in June. Beneath the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, in what must be the noisiest park on the planet. BECAUSE OF THE TRAINS ON THE MANHATTAN BRIDGE!

Feedback

The Pro's:

The travel website southafricato has chosen 66 Square Feet as the best of all the blogs in the best Travel Blog Category for the SA Blog Awards.

Yay!

Their feedback and analyses are actually very helpful. Thank you, Rob.

I first came across this travel blog when Rob linked to a snippy post I wrote about Delta's last-minute flight cancellations in South Africa and Stateside.

Now how does a blog about a small New York terrace get nominated for a travel award?

Well it's a small terrace: one needs to get out sometimes...See below.

Then the Con's:

Mr Ackerman is angry.

He feels that it is odd that a blog about "urban container gardening" gets nominated for best travel blog. Well, that was my first reaction too. Then again, many of my posts are about travel. Says so in my manifesto...weary smile. Count the posts, Kurt.

He feels it is all fluff and fraud and that serious stats are not taken into account. Does that mean the blog with the most hits is the best blog? Do hits = quality?

Is he right?

Mushrooms a la Grecque

Inspired by Jennifer Hess' mushroom ragu, I bought a mess of mushrooms at the Green Pea on Atlantic. They keep changing their name. I hope they are the Green Pea. I shop there. Day in, day out.

I came home with button mushrooms, mini portobellos and giant oyster mushrooms, all stem and no cap. Reminds me of some humans. The shitakes looked a little the worse for wear, or I would have added some of those, too.

What defines a la Grecque? For me, lemon juice, olive oil, fennel and coriander. Without those it would not taste right. I start with about a cup of water in large pan, to which I add a celery stalk, fennel fronds, about 20 peppercorns, ditto coriander seeds (or powdered, about a teaspoon), 2 bayleaves, some parsley stalks, a sprig of thyme, salt, some sugar (that is important), about a cup of white wine. Bring to a boil, then add enough cleaned mushrooms to feed yourself or some friends (usually I use just button mushrooms).

At first it will be a tight fit, but as they cook they lose a lot of liquid. Cook until juice starts to appear in their own caps, and then flip them, all the while simmering. When they have cooked and the sauce is about halved, add a generous amount of olive oil while the liquid is bubbling - this will cause it to emulsify. A generous amount is about a 1/4 cup. Cook off a little more. Taste. The result should be salty/sweet/sour in delicious proportions.

Eat on their own with a spoon for the sauce or with buttered toast or hot baguette. You can also eat them cold for a lunch/dinner appetizer. They improve overnight.

Paternoster and Cape Columbine: day

After our sketchy experience with the Lambert's Bay camping site, we were thinking to stop down the coast at Paternoster, at Cape Columbine, and to book straight into a B&B. But first we would investigate the nature reserve to see what the camping areas looked like.

Tietiesbaai is legendary and I had seen it in azure perfection some springs before (September in South Africa) while driving with my mom to see flowers up and down that coast. It was misty and cool on this summer day and the colours were muted under a fog bank. We drove out through the white-washed town of fishing cottages and self consciously pseudo-fishing cottages and found the reserve at the end of the road, paid our fee and meandered down the sand tracks in the 4 x 4. Tietiesbaai lay near the end, and was as you see, below...pretty, a bite of sea in the sand.

But we had already seen our spot. It was one of the first camping areas - defined by a tap - on its own little bite of kelp- and shell-filled salt water, with the granite rocks domed and lichened about us; private and impossibly clean and peaceful. No B&B for us. We would have a house by the sea.

We drove back to town on a kreef-buying expedition, and stopped first for lunch and a bottle of local bubbly to welcome us back to civilization.

I asked the waitress about the guys selling kreef on the streets. They hang out on corners with plastic bags and wiggle their hands at you meaning, We've got crayfish. She said to make sure the crayfish were wiggling. Well, I knew that. I asked her how much we should reasonably expect to pay, and she said R60 for a big one.

After lunch we drove past the wiggle-handed sellers and headed straight for the beach. I could see some little boats coming in and thought maybe we could just buy straight from them. The first boat was full of kreef, but the boss man said I should wait for the second boat, want hulle't groottes (because they have big ones).

It's funny: on this whole trip, from start to finish, I was immersed in Afrikaans. More so, I think, than at any other time in my life. And most of the people speaking Afrikaans to me were black or brown. All the way up the West Coast and into Namibia.It felt good.

Sure enough, the second boat yielded two huge crayfish. As big as the ones an archaeologist from university days used to drop off at my house after diving them from a secret place near Hout Bay in Cape Town.

We loaded them up, paid R60, which is what they asked for, and headed back to set up camp.

The way out of town towards the Cape Columbine Nature Reserve passes agreeably through a mixed neighbourhood which seems to be equally well-heeled and very modest. Poor and affluent seem to be side by side. Of course the whole little town's architectural cue is taken, famously, from the existing fishers' cottages, and it's a style that pleases me, though it has almost gone too far now. As ugly as Lamberts Bay is, Paternoster is uber cute. The houses top and below are the real thing.

We found our little bay muffled in the salty mist.

But this did not deter spiderman, who seemed to be missing the Alps.

A walk into the rocks above the camp site showed many types of lichen, always a sign, I thought, of clean air.

Right in the rocks a stunning pelargonium. Pelargonium fulgidum - rooimalva.

The beaches in all the linked coves were of large-crushed shell, many feet thick.

Looking back at our little site.

Getting later and we headed back while it was still light (you learn this fast when camping) to start supper preparations. I decided to make potbread again. The tailgate was my prep station. I never thought I'd love a car this much. Faithful Landcruiser.

Dough was mixed and resting, and the crayfish cleaned and gutted. Not fun.

I packed stones around the fireplace to blunt the breeze off the sea.

Fire. One of the best parts of the day, always. Still using super-dry camelthorn wood from Namibia.

My darling dinner companion chillin' after setting up the tent.

Poor kreefies. They were so big that I had to grill them one by one. In the pot? Butter, garlic and lemon juice. But of course.

And when the coals glowed, they were ready for the potbread.

What better? Food? Company? View? Wine? This was very special. And yes, you can drink pinotage with crayfish.

Bread's ready.

The lighthouse came to life.

The beam passed over our heads again and again in a noiseless arc.

The night was drawing in...