I walked along Kalk Bay Main Road yesterday, bumped and elbowed by foreign and local tourists alike. All were vying for the various attractions Kalk Bay has to offer, mostly commercial. Kalk Bay is a mix of small retail clothing boutiques and touristy knick-knacks, several of them handcrafted by locals from the southern suburbs and further afield.
The first thing you won’t find in Kalk Bay is groceries. There is no grocery shop in Kalk Bay. As Dave Knowall told me — and he’s an expert on matters like this — who wants a grocery store in Kalk Bay anyway? Low margins, and you want to keep away the riffraff starting those little hole-in-the-wall foreign-owned shops that have crowded out Fish Hoek Main Road.
The second thing you won’t find in Kalk Bay is newspapers. The daily newspaper is not to be found anywhere. I looked. Yes, you could say that newspapers aren’t popular today — just look around. In so-called traditional places where newspapers used to be stacked almost a metre high, you’ll now find a pile four or five papers deep, usually in a supermarket. But not in Kalk Bay.
Willie Coetsuur was disappointed that he couldn’t find an Afrikaans newspaper like Die Burger. Sorry, Willie — they don’t sell any newspapers at all. You’ll have to go to Fish Hoek or Muizenberg if you want one. Dave Knowall did tell me, though, that the bookshop in Kalk Bay sells the weekend Financial Times. He can afford it, perhaps, but for others it’s just become too expensive. These days a weekend Financial Times costs R175. Perhaps you could buy half a non-fiction book, or half a novel, for that price.
The third thing you won’t find in Kalk Bay is any franchised takeaway. No pizza joints, no fried chicken outlets, no burger takeaway restaurants. The reason probably is that fast-food franchise chains dare not tread into Kalk Bay because they might be shunned. More likely, the real story is that there’s very little retail space left, and overseas and local tourists aren’t looking for junk food when they come to a scenic place like Kalk Bay. They want something different, something exotic, something they haven’t had before. You can find some of that at the tiny little restaurants along the main road.
Claire Haverway, who’s an expert in many things, pulled up her nose when I told her this. She said, “Oh no, those horrible, disgusting places. Who wants to eat food like that? It’s just junk. It’s bad for you. It would lower the tone of Kalk Bay drastically. Thank goodness there aren’t any of those.”
So all those fast-food places are stuffed into the main road of Fish Hoek, where they’re doing a roaring trade, thank you very much.
Yes, Kalk Bay is different. It’s a tourist destination. Not for the locals — unless you count the coffee shops, where they sit pencilling budgets and quotations, working on laptops in their slops or bare feet. Or walking down the street with yoga mats rolled under their arms and tofu lunch packs tucked into their biodegradable bags.
