Christmas In Nam

I have a complicated relationship with Christmas, I have long ceased to believe in Jesus, virgin birth, wise men (we’re all damn fools), or even that religion is necessarily a force for good, but despite myself the first time I hear the strains of ‘Silent Night’ in November, my heart lifts for a very brief moment.  It wears off pretty fast, there are very few Christmas carols that I actually like, Silent Night’ is the only one I can think of right now, and the extreme carols bombardment we are subjected to pisses me off so completely that I avoid shops as much as possible and leave the car radio switched off until January, when the horror of it has passed. I loathe the waste that Christmas insists on, the buying and giving of kitsch, useless things manufactured specifically to go into landfills. Now that I no longer have small children to share this festival with I am generally able to ignore it, nonetheless somewhere in my make-up there is a vestigial stump of Christmas spirit, a hankering for the magic and wonder I once felt, so many years ago.

Being a bit of a control freak, just a tiny bit, as people I live with will eventually admit if you pushed them hard enough, I had phoned ahead and made a booking for Christmas lunch. Not having a clue as to where would be good, I had initially tried the yacht club in the belief that all yacht clubs across the globe would be serving a passable Christmas lunch, but found that this particular yacht club was closed for Christmas. They referred me to The Raft, in the words of Sean Penn in I am Sam, ‘an excellent choice’. What a stunning place! It is instantly my favourite restaurant in the whole wide world. Built on stilts, close to the mouth of the Walvis Bay Lagoon, it has a bit of a Kevin Costner, Waterworld feel to it. The food is pretty good, but the attraction is the location, utterly awesome! Where else can you eat a meal watching the antics of pelicans, flamingos, busy little terns and graceful seagulls, not to mention the occasional dolphin and Cape fur seal? Today they offer a variation on the traditional Christmas fare with roast lamb and roast pork in addition to their standard menu. I opt for the trio of fish from the standard menu, ‘Fillets of Kingklip, Monkfish and Butterfish all simply coated in seasoned flour and flash-fried in palm nut oil’ they serve this with chips and crisply cooked fresh vegetables. Pretty damn good, way better than oily or bone dry turkey with cranberry jelly that half the rest of the world are stuffing themselves with today.

 The Raft Restaurant - new favorite... ever! 

My daughter, Therese, Christmas lunch at The Raft

Busy little tern, from the window of The Raft

There is an item on the menu that is a little beyond belief -‘BUSHMAN PLATTER; brochette of flame-grilled Oryx Sirloin, Beef Fillet, Kudu Sirloin, BBQ Pork Spare Ribs and Cajun Chicken Strips, served with mushroom sauce, pepper gravy and sweet & sour sauce, accompanied by your choice of Asian fried Rice, shoestring French fries, baked potato, vegetable couscous or basil mashed potato and a garnish salad.’ Holy smoke, if I ate all of that I think I would fall down next to the table and go into spasms for a few hours. We live in a world of excess, unless you happen to be one of the unlucky majority that can barely scrape enough calories to make it through the day. Oh well let’s leave this rant for another day, it’s Christmas, I’m with my sister and daughter and having a really great time.

I recall that Walvis Bay had exactly one restaurant way back when. Café something or other, typical of what was on offer in any small town in Southern Africa in the sixties and seventies, chrome and Formica tables and chairs, almost certainly owned and operated by a Cypriot, not licenced to serve alcohol, but would do a katemba (1 part cheap red wine and 1 part Coke, served in a pint beer glass with ice) at a price. The menu consisted of various pies with gravy and limp salad, tenderized steak and mash potato, and the pièce de résistance, ‘le mixed grill’, in some ways a little like the ‘BUSHMAN PLATTER’ I suppose, a piece of tenderized steak, grilled Russian sausage, fried onions, lamb chop, fried slice of calf’s liver, fried egg, fried tomato, toast and limp salad. For dessert you could tuck into a hefty slice of Madera cake with custard and/or ice cream. For your unwilling soldier that had been subsisting on the awfulness that was usual fare served at Rooikop, this was as close to heaven as it got. Things certainly have changed around here, there seems to be a restaurant of some description on every corner, though the café I once knew is nowhere to be found.

After lunch we take a walk, traditional attempt to walk off the Christmas lunch traditional excess, even though the wind is starting to pick up, vaguely I remember that afternoon wind is a feature of this area. We pass the public swimming pool and picnic area and peek over the fence, lots of people are having lots of fun in a non-Eurocentric way.

A peek over the fence at the 'other' half

Around the corner we discover the Walvis Bay Waterfront, more Kevin Costner Waterworld, utterly charming, but I predict will all too soon be bulldozed and replaced by some awful generic mall thing, maybe in fake Tuscan or Greek Isle motif. I know, I’m a cynical bastard, still I am going to enjoy this exactly the way it is with no thought for the future. Except for the very near future and make note of a few establishments that serve seafood or can take you on an excursion, a harbour cruise seems interesting and as far as I can tell relatively inexpensive.

 Walvis Bay Waterfront

We make it back to the car, having walked off a few of the lunch calories, actually as I had salad for a starter, fish and only a very small dessert, I’m feeling fine, virtuous almost. We decide on a drive rather than head to the guest house and lie down on our beds. We take a route south past a new and very swanky residential area, not really knowing where we are going, but destination does not matter. We go past a resort with chalets right on the beach, I remember the name, I’d tried to book in there, but they had been fully booked, pity it looks nice. Soon we leave the town behind, dunes to the left, bay to the right and salt pans ahead, this is a paradise for flamingos and artists, colours and contrasts are utterly amazing, whoever would have thought that salt pans were so interesting? Salt is apparently the most important export of the area, I thought it was uranium, or at least fish, well there you are, better than guano (bird shit) as it once was not that long ago.  Before the invention of the Ostwald and the Haber–Bosch processes, barely a hundred years ago, bird shit was the principle source of nitrogen for explosives and fertilizer, it was known as ‘white gold’ and the Skeleton Coast had many little islands that were covered in layers of the stuff, several metres thick. No guano to harvest here though there are birds aplenty, flamingos poop into the water, which is perhaps one reason that waters of Walvis Bay are so rich in marine life.

Colours and contrasts on the way to Pelican Point, salt making in progress

There are two species of Flamingos that inhabit the area, the Greater Flamingo and the Lesser Flamingo, apparently they are easy to tell apart, but my birding eyes are out of practice and I’m not exactly sure which are which, they often flock together. Both species wade in shallow water, the Greater eats shrimp and the Lesser eats blue-green algae, the Greater is less pink with solid red on the wing tips and the Lesser is pink over the whole body with some red speckles on the wings. The beaks are the easiest way to tell them apart, the Lesser flamingo has a darker beak whilst the Greaters’ beak has only a dark tip. When flamingos fly and especially when they land, is a study of skill and grace with the oddest of equipment, like a flying hockey stick, long neck stretched out in front and equally long legs behind, in the middle are the wings and a very slender body. We stop and watch them in the bay, they work their legs backwards and forwards as if in time to bebop, they do this to agitate the mud to get at the shrimp. It’s just a wonderful sight, made even more magical by the appearance of three pelicans that glide in and land on the water like 747’s  The wind is blowing strongly now, but the birds don’t seem to notice, neither in flight nor on the water.

Group of Lesser Flamingos

Mixed group... see if you can spot the difference. My photos don't do them justice, they flock in vast, and I mean vast numbers. 

Pelican in Flight 

I switch on roaming data on my phone and the GPS/map feature to figure out where we are heading. I have learned to do this very judiciously as the roaming package was outrageously expensive for the smallest amount of data imaginable. It turns out that we are on our way to Pelican Point, going along a narrow spit of land that forms the southern end of the bay. I believe there is a lodge at the end of it, but we don’t manage to get there, the condition of the road gets worse and less than half way to the point I turn back, the VW Polo is at the limit of its rough road ability. On the way back we stop to get some pictures of a strange green and purple grass that grows next to the road and discover, on closer inspection, it’s not a grass at all, but a succulent.

Purple and green 'grass'

I had some misgivings about selecting Nambia for this holiday, but it is turning out to be such a fascinating and very different place. My sister has spotted a town called Solitaire on the map, so our next excursion will be Solitaire by way of Dune Seven, a true mountain of shifting whispering sand – eat your heart out Johnny Cash.