12 Things The West Coast Taught Us

Sophia van Taak and Toast Coetzer travelled 3 840 km along the back roads of the West Coast to film the latest series of Weg Agterpaaie. Along the way they also turned inland to explore the Cederberg, the Knersvlakte, Namaqualand, the Richtersveld and Bushmanland. Here’s what they learnt.

- Sophia Van Taak & Toast Coetzer

1 Always carry a pocketknife

It’s good to be prepared. If you have a pocketknife at hand, you can join in the conversation when someone like Duncan Theart gives you a bundle of bokkems and shows you how to skin them right there in the restaurant of the Laaiplek Hotel.

Sulene Archer from Taaibos Farm Restaurant on Pedroskloof Guest Farm near Kamieskroon also showed us how to cook a sheep’s head. You can use your pocketknife to scrape the head clean and to cut juicy strips of meat from the lower jaw.

2 Someone was here before you

It’s a privilege to see a new destination through the eyes of the people who have lived there for generations. They know which wind brings rain, which gulley is home to the most fish, whose grandfather saw which ship run aground. Stories and traditions keep the history of a community alive.

We also got to see many rock paintings as we travelled – the diaries of people who lived here centuries ago. At Baboon Point in Elands Bay (bottom left), we stood before a wall full of waving red handprints and wondered about life under this overhang. On Steenbokfontein farm near Lambert’s Bay, archaeologists from UCT are still discovering artefacts left behind by people who listened to buffalo snorting outside their cave, as they planned how they were going to collect mussels the next morning. Long before C Louis Leipoldt was buried under an overhang on the Pakhuis Pass, a red ochre elephant cow and her calf made a home there. And to the east of the pass, at the Sevilla rock art sites (below), hunters ran with their bows and arrows raised and carried prey over their shoulders.

3 “If you wait long enough, the train will come”