By Roxanne Reid
We pulled up at the Tankwa Padstal in the Karoo. Officially, it’s on the R355 about 70km from Ceres, on the way to Calvinia or the Tankwa Karoo National Park in South Africa. Unofficially, it’s somewhere between nothing and nowhere. Two bikers were switching off their engines and taking off their helmets. We greeted them in Afrikaans and asked how their ride had been. They looked at us as if we were from outer space.
The Tankwa Padstal (farm stall or road-side shop) sells anything from sweets, chips and cold drinks to matches, bug spray, and airtime. There’s also a licensed bar, its décor weird in a way that stops being weird the longer you spend in the Karoo. You can order drinks and snacks and sit inside – or outside under a cover that provides shade but does little to ease the heat that radiates up at you from the ground.
Then the Tankwa’s R355 will go back to being unhurried and lonely, the longest stretch of gravel road in South Africa without a fuel station or Wimpy.
Our first visit to the Tankwa Padstal
On our first visit to the Tankwa Padstal in 2012, only about a year or so after it opened, we loved the shop’s high counters with glass display cases from the olden days. We bought a really good homemade ginger beer and some fudge, and chatted to Susan Lange, who runs the place with her husband Hein, as if we’d known her for years. About the tiny library of Afrikaans light romances and children’s books that she ran from a corner of the shop, about the healing properties of Zambuk ointment, and about the prickly pears they grow on the farm.
Then we were back out in the glare of the sun and on our way again.
Phoenix rises from the ashes
Sadly, the original Tankwa Padstal burnt to the ground in 2014. It was a distressing story of arson and hard feelings that festered in the blistering heat. The flip-side was how people came together to support the owners and help rebuild it. It is, after all, a solid part of the community, a place for those who live in this isolated area to get all the bits and bobs they might need, as well as somewhere to go and kick up their heels without driving to hell-and-gone to do so.
Within ten weeks the Tankwa Padstal was back, bigger and better than ever. That old-fashioned sweetie counter had burnt in the fire, but now there’s a custom-made glass version that does duty in its place. The wind pump blades that formed a wall decoration in the old pub are a thing of the past too. And the little library has gone because a more permanent library has mushroomed nearby.
But you can still see people pull up to do their shopping and socialising in anything from a donkey cart or tractor to a campervan or gyrocopter. You can still buy parts for your primus stove, basic medicines, tobacco, a mish-mash of toys, bicycles and guitars. The shop is painted a violent turquoise, so you can’t miss it as you drive past. It takes up one building and there’s a pub called the Werkswinklel Bar alongside. I love the Saloon Rules posted on a blackboard here, like: leave guns with the bartender, no spitting on the floor, no horses inside, and no pissing in the spittoons.
In between is a shaded area where you can sit at picnic benches and tables to chow down on rooskerkoek, a farmer-sized breakfast or a lunchtime burger. Admire oddments like a giant bellows or rusted sawblades, and signs with pithy comments. My favourite is the one that warns of ‘moerse potholes’ – a sign we need in many parts of South Africa. Your kids will work off their energy in the playground nearby so you can rest in peace.
In the surrounding environment, a lot of the craziness of AfricaBurn has seeped into the padstal’s reincarnation. A giant wire knight kneels brandishing his sword at you before you enter the grounds while mosaic mannequins pose on the gateposts to wave you in. A large silver UFO has crashed into a hill nearby, a couple of wire-and-cement aliens soak up the sun, a blue car has nose-dived into the hard, unforgiving earth, while a black one hangs suspended in an unseemly manner from a windpump tripod.
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