Visit Zinkwazi for old-fashioned beaching

Zinkwazi is “the place of the fish eagle” in Zulu and a pleasant 40 minutes’ drive north of King Shaka International Airport. An avenue of coral, fig and acacia trees forms a canopy over the road leading into the village of Zinkwazi Beach, which is surrounded by sugar cane fields with the sea forming its eastern border.

Plants appear "to be stimulated by this climate, and subtropical species cover every centimetre. Euphorbias are particularly comfortable here and purple bougainvillea blooms beside pink and red hibiscus, with the ubiquitous strelitzia providing the background. And every other species imaginable queues up behind them for space. Indigenous milkwoods occupy the less hospitable dunes above the beach. The weather in winter defines temperate.

The Zinkwazi River forms an estuary beside the swimming beach, sometimes after the rains. Otherwise, it is closed off by sand, with the river’s path subterranean. The cottages with the best aspect are situated on an unfenced kikuyu lawn without borders south of the lagoon, though the word “cottage” has become something of a misnomer as these scarce properties are made over in time with the inevitable dance of capitalism. I am not sure how legal title is formally arranged, but the lawn provides an informal common to those whose houses front onto it.

Toddlers roam the sloping grass banks followed closely by tired parents, while children spanning the range wander up and down visiting friends, or just walking to and from the beach. Older parents look on from verandas, thankful that time has passed.

This is a beach village of the old school, started by sugar farmers from the surrounding areas at the beginning of the 20th century and made up primarily of single dwellings. The beachfront is yet to be ruined by rows of high-rise apartment blocks, or shops selling bikinis or craft coffee in strip malls. Neither has it become a suburb of the Umhlanga Ridge CBD, which is the fate of most of the former beach villages south of here. There is none of the uniform architectural style you will find in more fashionable destinations. Nantucket clapboard houses reside happily beside Bali-style shuttered affairs, which neighbour traditional tin-roofed breeze block rectangles and face brick eyesores. This concerns me less than it did. The imperfection is a more accurate reflection of life.

The swimming beach is located across the lagoon. It is manned by ripped professional lifesavers who know their onions. There is a steep shelf running from the beach to the shore break, and an ominous rip waiting to drag unaware swimmers towards big rollers at back line. The sea is warm, and those who require a daily ice bath will need to construct one themselves. People surf, kite surf or stand-up paddle in the waves, though it is not a surf safari destination.

Gewone mense occupy the beach. People with paunches and muffin tops walk happily in their swimming costumes without self-conscious guilt about their calorific choices. Athletes are the exception.

There is a ski-boat club on the beach, which occupies the bow of the municipal life-saving building and serves as a simple restaurant and a bar. Deep-sea fishing is popular, and skilful locals launch ski boats to fish the offshore reefs, and then spend time celebrating the catch in the bar afterwards. A biker gang occupied the club on one of our visits, presumably resting before the ride back to Durbs. They were so unmenacing that for them the word “gang” adopts its least threatening definition. So much so that they have had to print the words “Outlaw” and “Hard-Core” on their cut-off faux leather jackets. Tattoos are popular these days, they can no longer be relied on as the badge of the rebel without a cause.

Some prefer Club Med-style, all-inclusive, catered holidays, curated to allow parents to lie under a palm tree next to a pool with a cocktail while children are outsourced to a hungover kid’s club co-ordinator. I detest buffets and I am comfortable mixing my own drinks. Which is why self-catering works better for us. We enjoy cooking, and the collective effort of the nuclear family helping with the preparation of the meal. It is important to spend individual time with your children while you are relaxed on holiday, so that we can grow to trust each other before they are possessed with the devil of teenagerdom. 

Zinkwazi affords the opportunity for old-fashioned beaching. There are still a few mussels available at low tide for those with the requisite licence. Collecting them is fun, if you can find a firm grip when the inevitable big wave hits during spring low. We even caught a couple of decent garricks in the shore break here a couple of years ago, though I didn’t see evidence of any success this time. The few local fishermen I asked complained about the lack of fish in the sea. They may have taken me for an undercover Parks Board official, or perhaps all our fish really have been netted by Chinese fishing trawlers.

The lagoon provides plenty of entertainment. Paddling canoes is still fun for kids with operational hip-flexors, while water skiing, stand-up paddling and showing off on hydrofoil-powered surf boards are also fun alternatives for those who are able.

Evenings are spent playing charades, cards, board games and even occasional games of darts, or just relaxing and chatting around the braai or sipping on a tall drink while the sun sets in the hills behind us. TV and games on phones are banned.

We left Zinkwazi after a week for a few more days holiday at Umzumbe; another beach village of the old school an hour south of Durban. 

We stopped for padkos at Cindy’s General Store in the village of Umhlali — a couple of quarter mutton bunnies. Cindy’s is an authentic general store, packed with curries, mazavaroos and fresh veggies. The curries are the stuff of legend, and available to take away in a variety of flavours; if you order curry, remember to bring your own pot.

The bunny chow was invented by ingenious indentured Indian labourers on the cane fields of the KwaZulu-Natal coast. The quarter loaf of white bread provided the lunch box for holding the curry and the cutlery for eating it. In retrospect, though it tastes delicious, I don’t recommend it as a meal to be eaten in a car — at least by three kids in a confined space. Pandemonium broke loose within seconds of the first mouthful with one child demanding cold water for chilli burn and all of them simultaneously staining their clothes permanently with turmeric while scrapping with parents for the choice bits.

There was a noticeable deterioration in the infrastructure as we moved south. As if the allocators of capital had decided that only the north would yield dividends. The roads south of Durban were passable, albeit bumpy in patches, and it didn’t look like anyone had spent a rand upgrading the buildings beside the road since 1994. I am not sure if these decisions are political or driven by simple economics, but the contrast to areas north of the airport is marked.

The countryside is much like the north coast, though the rivers appear more frequent. Infrastructural abandonment became more apparent as we left the highway at Hibberdene. The rails on bridges over rivers have eroded or been blasted away altogether by cars meandering off the road at inopportune times. Potholes blight the “R” roads like teenage acne. We turned off at Umzumbe, and emerged into the village’s leafy localised order. The vegetation here is much like Zinkwazi’s, with wild strelitzia and large leaves everywhere in shades of purples and pinks. 

This is another well-ordered village with an energetic ratepayers’ association that has escaped the curse of dated multistorey apartment blocks. It’s an oasis of order amid the chaos of collapsing local infrastructure and the dearth of local government capital expenditure that appears around it.

The weather was perfect, the sea warm, and the Blue Flag beach wonderful for all-round swimming. The surf was large, curling and ridden entertainingly by fantastic surfers, many of whom come from the semirural surrounds. The sardine run was in flow offshore as we sat on our beach chairs watching through binoculars as several species of pelagic birds made hay in marauding groups and thrilling dives while whales, porpoises and game fish joined the multilayered oceanic performance in the background.

We left KwaZulu-Natal refreshed and becalmed after 10 days of surf and turf. We had travelled in search of warmth, adventure, and a change of aspect. But the richness was the time catching up with old friends while repeating the simple rhythms from generations of holidays in the past. The kids loved it. According to them, there is a comfortable familiarity in the repetition. I enjoyed the simplicity. We veer back to the mean over time.