The Village that Time Forgot

Still Bay - off www.stilbaaitourism.co.za

Holidays are always fun, especially if it includes flying, seaside views, playing with little hermit crabs and feeling the cold hand of death brush my shoulder on a zigzagging dirt road. This holiday took me to my teenage-hood holiday destination - Still Bay (or more commonly known as Stilbaai) in the Western Cape about an hour and a half (due to roadwords) from George.


Travelling with my mother and boyfriend, the holiday started with waking up at the crack of sparrow farts - also known as 3 - 4 am), travelling to the long-term airport parking, lugging our bags and my mother's cat onto a bus, off a bus and, finally, into the terminal.

A blissful 2 hour trip, with a bumpy landing, later, we arrived in George. The trip in the hired Nissan Tiida 5-door hatchback was surprisingly good, with a 3 stops at road blocks due to road maintenance. The smell of heather is the first thing you notice when getting to Stilbaai, it is pungent and aromatic and may remind you of times gone by, when life was simple.

Still Bay is a sleepy little village nestled in a hilly area with a lovely view of the sea. It is a village as by definition a village is a settlement where the tallest building is the steeple of a church (This is the case in Still Bay). Mainly populated by retirees from Gauteng and some parts of the Western Cape, with a few foreign nationals just for something different, it is a rather slow settlement. There are no malls or clubs or any such thing save for a few pubs and one dingy 'disco' called Drie Ankers. The dance style of said disco is Sokkie... turbo-sokkie as it is most often done to the computerised tunes of techno and trance. The language of choice is predominantly Afrikaans - something I have trouble with as my Afrikaans is rather "kak".

The cloudy day.

As this trip was in between the "in" seasons, the population was at its usual 4 to 5,000 permanent residents, which swells to a whopping 35,000 during the December holidays. Anyway, I digress.

We arrived on a cloudy day, with a strong wind - fun times, I thought.

In the passing days the weather went through every season - sunny and hot, cold and raining, windy and cloudy and on one windy Wednesday morning, Gert (Boyfriend) and I went to the river mouth, him to fish and I to read and chill. Some of my time was spent reading whilst the remainder was spent chasing hermit crabs, finding shells and taking pictures of Gert's fish - Garrick is the species - 6 pictures but 10 fish in total.

le Garrick!

Believe it or not but these are
ALL hermit crabs

Molluscs on
driftwood

Ok so that little black thing you see in the
water is actually a seal!

A wee Blue Crayfish!
(Can't really see the colouring)

I nearly managed to change a tyre - who knew 3 little thorns could do so much damage - Gert arrived to help before I could prove my prowess with a jack and spanner - though I managed to get a sunburn in the 30 min it took him to walk back from the fishing spot.

One-legged seagull

With slow walks on the beach and staring out the windows in the mornings we managed to see more animals than you would see anywhere on the coast - a little bokkie, a stork, a ferret, snails, crabs, a seal, a Cape Robin and other such creatures - including the most graceful seagull I have ever seen (which happened to have one leg). The days were slow, filled with chatting, laughing, eating, going fishing with Gert and pottering around (also a bit of studying - both Gert and I - though more him).

As there was no television we spent the nights playing board games - like Balderdash, reading, talking or getting an early night. Was all in all it was one of the most enjoyable holidays I have had. Good company, good food and good fun!