The Larnies in the Lallies

The first person I met in Pondoland was the last person I expected to find there. Thea Lombard is a single, white, blonde 59-year-old Afrikaans woman. On paper she sounds like she should be running a nice bed and breakfast in Hermanus (and until five years ago, she did), but this is a woman who long since leapt off the page.

"I've nearly had about four head-on collisions here today," laughs Thea, as she steers us up the 1-km dirt track to her house. "I keep thinking this is my drive-way, but it's not, it's actually a road. My poor neighbours," she cackles again, hooting and waving at a neighbour who swerves and waves back.

Five years ago Thea sold up her life in the western Cape and bought a derelict old farm 10km outside Port St Johns. With the help of waifs and strays – who are drawn to her like moths to a flame, myself included – she has created a chill-out lodge/culinary haven called the Wild Coast Kitchen which blows your mind.

There are 11 rooms, and on arrival your pillows are scattered with "Transkei rose petals", ie. fresh marijuana leaves. The bar, lounge and dining room are in a huge thatched central house with glass walls overlooking a misty tropical valley with a river winding through it. Guests are invited to dine together each night and sample Thea's inventive dishes. On our first night she spent three hours nurturing wood coals, and then seared fillet steaks directly on the coals, shaking off hot embers before serving with a yoghurt-based sour lemon and garlic sauce. Truly divine.

We had a free day before the hike began, and Thea piled us into the back of her 4x4, with another wild waif she had just picked up in Port St Johns, stopped to buy four Transkei Dumpies (750ml bottles of Black Label) at the local shebeen, and bounced us down “the worst road in the Transkei” to the village of Umgazana, where she has her own holiday hideaway.

The idea that a white Afrikaans woman had her holiday cottage in the middle of the lallies (adapted from the Xhosa, a rural village) threw me. Most white folk in this country build electric fences to keep the swart gevaar (black danger) out. But it turned out she wasn’t the only one. Umgazana is full of little holiday cottages, right next door to thatched Pondo huts, where white families decamp for the December holidays. Supposedly the whiteys “bought” the land from the local chief years and years ago for a bottle of brandy and a bit of cash. Apartheid, it seemed, was a good idea for most of the year, but not at Christmas. How very Christian.

With democracy, however, these cottages are now on the endangered list. The government has declared it illegal to build within 1000m of the high-water mark, and has already burnt down similar cottages in other Wild Coast villages, only to feel the wrath of the local people. The whites, as it turns out, bring much-needed revenue to these small villages. They pay the ladies to clean and look after their children (nothing has changed there) and they buy their freshly picked mussels, crayfish, oysters etc.

Though it wasn’t always that way. I chatted with Sophelina Mbuzeni, 62, an Umgazana grandmother who cares for a brood of 15. I asked her how things had changed since the end of apartheid. “Things are better now. It used to be difficult to get close to white people. You used to go to their houses to sell them fish from the sea and they didn’t want you to come near them. They believed you were dirty and had lice. That attitude has changed," she said.

This attitude shift certainly made a difference for Thea. She bought her cottage from the whites themselves, a white wife to be exact, after her husband was found enjoying a bit of rumpy-pumpy with his black lady neighbour.