Retired & Roaming

Kalk Bay

For our time in South Africa we rented an apartment in Kalk Bay, one of the string of small towns running along the eastern side of the Cape Peninsula and looking out onto False Bay. This is a huge bay some 32km across and a great place for whale spotting in the latter part of the year.

Being all of 50 metres from the shore where most of the time the waves come crashing in, the apartment more than satisfied our desire to be by the sea. We just ignored the rather noisy main road and railway line in between.
Kalk Bay town is a sweet little place with a colonnaded main street of art, antique, clothing and bric-a-brac shops together with numerous coffee shops and restaurants. It has  a great, retro, laid-back atmosphere and is full of great, retro, laid-back people. Its bohemian reputation is particularly noticeable among the ladies of the town, some of whom seem to follow the dress code of shutting their eyes and reaching into the dressing-up box every morning.

There is a substantial harbour formed by two large sea walls that not only protect a small fishing fleet, but also attract large numbers of anglers and on-lookers. Five restaurants on the harbour walls add to the attractiveness of the place, as do regular visitors Rosie the seal and her friends who perform for anyone kind enough to throw them fish…

Bric-a-Brac
The shops of Kalk Bay attract visitors from far and wide, their reputation maintained by wide coverage in guidebooks and magazines. At weekends in the summer, the main street through the town is packed with people drifting from one little gem to another. Among the antique/bric-a-brac shops the quality of the contents seems to vary widely, from interesting ornaments and object d’arts to piles of junk. I suppose it all depends on what takes your interest. If it’s Beano annuals from the 1960s, you’ll be in luck; if it’s that rare little silver object an uninformed shop owner has put on sale for a trifle, you’ll probably be disappointed. However, there’s much to browse and an afternoon can easily be spent happily wandering.

Anthology

While all the shops are rather quirky; some are outright eccentric. For me, the pick of the bunch is ‘Anthology’, a single-storey structure standing in glorious isolation on its own land next to the railway line just beyond Brad’s Bistro. Under its pink and white striped awning, Anthology describes itself as ‘Dolly Dinkle – Simply Charming’. On sale are, well, pink things. All very strange.

Brad’s Bistro itself is not so much quirky as suffering from an identity crisis. Not content with being a restaurant – in fact given its unpredictable opening hours, reluctance appears to have replaced any contentment it might have had in serving food – it attempts to fuse a bizarre mixture of grocer’s shop, clothing store, second-hand book store and flower shop.

Between ‘Anthology’ and the railway station are The Railway House Furniture Shop and the Kalk Bay Trading Post, both of them businesses shops that take the term bric-a-brac very seriously. I even found ancient Giles annuals there!

Theatre
Opposite ‘Anthology’ is the Kalk Bay Theatre, home of a group that puts on a variety of ‘alternative’ productions. It has a tiny auditorium with 88 seats, the auditorium being open to the floor above where punters can enjoy a meal before performances. We went to one show, Rump Steak, a one-man comedy about a gourmet restaurant played out in mime to a clever soundtrack of various kitchen and other noises. It was very funny, although at 25 minutes, rather short, especially when the first five minutes consisted of the actor running on the spot for no apparent reason other than perhaps to warm up for the exertions to follow.

Kalk Bay theatre & Artvark

Just before the theatre is Artvark, an arty shop full of great pictures, sculptures, jewelry, and knick-knacks, pretty much everything being African-made. Secreted in one of the many rooms in Artvark is Lisa’s Wine shop, a separate business that sells local boutique wines at very reasonable prices. OK, all wine in South Africa is very low in price compared with many countries, but Lisa’s are wines you won’t find on the supermarket shelves and they’re still well-priced.

On the other side of the theatre, a series of colonnaded buildings runs along the main street. In the first, the appropriately-named Orange Building, are a couple of art galleries and ‘Mystic Rose’ a dress shop of eclectic fashions and mannequins that seem to wear them all at once. Further on is a lane leading up to Hairven, a hairdressers that shares its premises with a psychic lady who will offer you inner peace and enlightenment. When I turned up there one day to ask about a haircut, she told me the hairdresser was out and the best she could offer was to call up the spirits, but she doubted their ability to wield the scissors. I made an appointment for another day.

Gelati

Kalk Bay Ice Cafe

The stairway to Hairven is just along from the Kalk Bay Ice Cafe, an incredibly popular ice cream shop whose reputation for excellence is well-deserved. Half the visitors to the town seem to be ambling around in various stages of ice cream consumption, so much so that a lot of the antique-a-brac shops have prominently displayed signs banning ice cream on their premises. Too many Roy of the Rovers annuals have obviously been spoiled.

Opposite the Ice Cafe is the Kalk Bay Station, the building dating back to 1883.  Some of the stuff in the nearby shops was probably put on display around the same time. The station also has its quirks: part of the downline side – the side facing the sea – doubles up as the Brass Bell restaurant and there is even an entrance from the platform. The main entrance though is accessed through an underpass next to the station building that, in addition to the Brass Bell, takes you to the water’s edge and a couple of very dodgy-looking tidal pools. Unlike the pools just outside the town, these didn’t seem to attract a lot of bathers.

Revolution

Cape meets Cuba

A little way along from the station towards the harbour is the wonderful Cape to Cuba Bar and Restaurant. This monument to Che Guevara has all the staff dressed like him, although I don’t seem to remember dreadlocks as a revolutionary fashion of the late 50s. The bar sells wicked cocktails, among which Cape & Cuba, Cuban Sunrise and Voodoo are particularly magical, at least after the third one. The bar is an open-fronted, wooden structure that looks onto its own sandy terrace replete with tables, umbrellas and a couple of oil drum fires for cool evenings. The restaurant is totally funky, the decoration being a complete mish-mash of Cuban relics, tasteless glass lights and religious statues. Unfortunately, the food has taken on the quirkiness of the town and is somewhat variable.

F SH

F SH

In total contrast to the slung-together shack and palm tree style of Cape to Cuba, is the ultra-modern F SH restaurant on the opposite side of the main road. F SH sits in front of the Majestic Village, to which it seems to belong, and is a world apart from other eating experiences in Kalk Bay. There is another post describing its culinary delights. The Majestic Village itself is a grand construction, a recent renovation of a series of 19th century buildings. It looks very nice but it does seem rather out of place in a town like Kalk Bay. I can’t imagine the residents, who pay a good premium to stay there, particularly enjoy the extra throb of music pounding across the road from C to C woven into and on top of the normal throb from the traffic and the super-bass speakers of the minibuses.

Moving back along the street from F SH past the new and very well-stocked Kalk Bay Bookshop, you come to Hennies, a sort of supermarket and post office. The supermarket has a classic Eastern European, communist era style and a selection of unlikely items on the shelves to match. The lighting is suitably dim to add to that feeling of oppression. The town winos hang around outside the door, although liquor isn’t sold there – that’s further down the street. Given the limited range of stock to tempt, or rather frustrate, the eager consumer and the fact that it’s incredibly cheap, it’s hard to imagine how a place like Hennies makes money. However, it seems to stagger along and is all part of the Kalk Bay charm.

Olympia

Kalk Bay Modern & Olympia Cafe (street level, to the right)

Closer to the harbour is the best restaurant in town – the Olympia Cafe & Deli – housed in the same building as the Kalk Bay Modern, an art gallery not quite as extensive as the one that presumably inspired its name. Round the corner from the Olympia Cafe is the Olympia Bakery, the retail part being accessed through a red door that looks like the entrance to somebody’s garden shed. Inside, however, is a wide selection of wonderful bakery delights, constantly arriving fresh from the large bakery behind. They also make a mean take-away cappuccino. There are other bakeries in Kalk Bay, but the Olympia takes the biscuit!

Finally along the strip before the harbour is The Outspan Restaurant, a partly open-air braai (bbq) place. Its location in Kalk Bay’s main car park is unfortunate owing to the number of hobos and apparently homeless people who hang out there. Having said that, they don’t seem to bother anyone.

Kalk Bay isn’t just Main Street, but it almost is. There’s one road of houses running parallel to it and above it, while above that is Boyes Drive, a short cut along the hills that avoids St. James and Muizenberg, both traffic congestion spots.

Harbour
Access to the harbour is across the railway line, the trains announcing themselves with a loud siren.  With three or four trains an hour in both directions, the rail traffic seems to be in constant competition with the cars. The harbour is always a hive of activity with fish being sold from the two fleets of boats that come in every day, amateur fishermen casting their lines from the harbour walls in just about all weathers, restaurant-goers heading to and from one of the five restaurants and general sightseers. The busiest of the restaurants, though not the best, is Kalky’s Fish Restaurant which hums and turns all day long.

Being on one of only two roads that serve the rest of the Cape Peninsula, Kalk Bay suffers from a constant stream of traffic which at times is reduced to a crawl through the town. Many of the cars in the Cape Town area seems to be of mature years, while even more seem to delight in announcing themselves with very throaty exhausts. Added to the full volume stereos in cars and private buses, the assault of the ears can be wearing at times. That said, Kalk Bay is a very special town, always on the go, and from our point of view, it was a delightful place in which to spend two months.

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David Cape Town