Off the pier
The sky is blue like a child’s painting. I am at Vetchie’s Pier at Durban’s harbour. I used to hang here with my pa and my boet who would catch baby shark with sardine bait. I’d be on the beach in my black school costume popping blue bottles. Vetchie’s on Sundays was family day with its raggedtooth sharks, superglue salesmen, shad fishermen and tomato-faced alcoholics. We sat soaking up the sun on the grey boulders, gawking at the Bluff, fantasising about our next hit at Sol Kerzner ’s Wild Coast Sun Casino. Years later, everything seems smaller. The cranes have turned Lego, the Bluff has a new sci-fi tower. The past has shrunk. I pop a blue bottle and head for Sunday lunch.
Near Vetchie’s there are a few beachy cafés, and then there’s Moyo. You can choose to eat at the Moyo 150 metres into the sea which is jauntily perched on the end of uShaka Pier, or Moyo on land. Both look out onto the tropical Indian Ocean and the half-moon bay with the Moses Mabhida Stadium highlighted by the glare of the sun in the distance, like Gatsby’s modern-day lighthouse. After a bottle of Springfield Estate Special Cuvée and three lime-green margaritas, the stadium looks like a Japanese schoolgirl bending over flashing her white pleated Issey Miyake under-skirt, her giant Alice band whipped off her head by the wind.
At Moyo you can drink Taittinger Brut Prestige Rosé, Dom Perignon 2000 or Billecart-Salmon Brut with your bunny chow or crocodile carpaccio. Because, as Marlene Dietrich chirped, “Champagne makes you feel like it’s Sunday and better days are just around the corner.” Or you can have Grey Goose Vodka with your orange-blossom baklava. In fact, best you do, as Moyo food is sommer sadly average, but thankfully the wine list is not. I asked to try what they deem ‘unusual varieties’, like the Eventide Viognier from Wellington described as a wine which caresses with ethereal delicacy, lovely orange blossom, dried peach and rose petal notes, which sounded slightly suspicious – like a racy Danielle Steel novel – but none were in stock. What they also didn’t have was Sadie Columella 2004 which, if the Koeberg nuclear plant exploded and one couldn’t escape, this would be the bottle to open. Alas, they had Stellenzicht Shiraz that I last enjoyed while studying elephants at Addo – a great big five sunset pairing. There was nothing on the extensive 22-page wine, cigar and cocktail list that made me weep for Baudelaire. The sign of a good wine list is one that inspires you to reread the great poets and an opportunity to choose a wine that would “sow a thousand sonnets in men’s souls...”
Aside from their admittedly delicious dukkah, the boast is that the “sensory combination of food and wine will appeal to the passion of adventure and transport you into our African fantasy”. Fantasy? Thought we were in Africa? Why the need for protective fantasy when we have the wondrous reality? But then I spy an amaZulu warrior in amaBeshu with groovy buck-skin legwarmers running up uShaka Pier. He was taking a quick break to chill. He sat, legs over the side of the pier gazing out to sea. He was probably daydreaming of one day being a celebrated fashion designer in Berlin married to a foxy blonde Swedish dental nurse, or thinking how he can’t wait to strip off his sweaty animal skins when he gets home, decompress listening to Lady Gaga on his iPod, slipping into his Levis and cracking open a bottle of Columella.
