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Travel: Double delight in Mossel Bay

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When you bum is blue with cold in your home in the Overberg, the chance of a trip to the “best weather” in South Africa is a heart-warming thought. (Or would that be butt-warming?)

Words & pictures by Richard van Ryneveld

A trip to the harbour town of Mossel Bay – a place with 320 sunny days a year – was just what the doctor ordered.

Snugly ensconced in the cabin of a brand new Renault Kadjar TCE XP, I set out on the 380-odd kilometres from our office in Cape Town to visit Dibiki Holiday Resort and De Bakke Santos. I had heard plenty of “You have to visit Dibiki” on the travellers’ grapevine over the years, and I now had the chance to experience it for myself. And at Dibiki, I was to meet my new home-on-wheels for the trip: a small chap called the Serai Weekender.

I liked Dibiki from the moment I drove through the front gate. Dibiki is small, intimate, neat as a pin, and has really friendly, welcoming staff at reception. I bought a big bag of hardehout and meandered back to the Serai to start the fire, as I was expecting special guests to join me for a braai.

The Serai is the dream-child of Christo Paulse and his wife Tinka, who had actually set up the caravan and an adjoining gazebo tent for me on the grass close to the entrance of the resort. It was they who would be joining me for dinner.

Many good South African stories are told around a braai fire. The story of the Serai is no different.

‘We have always been mad-keen campers’ said Christo, as the fire’s orange glow was reflected in the shiny white fibreglass cocoon behind us. ‘We were living in Wonderboom in Pretoria when we started with a tent, but moved on to a caravan later.’

Tinka added, ‘But we didn’t like the caravan layout. Christo was always thinking of ways to change it.’

They discovered that changing the layout would be quite costly, so the idea was shelved. But Christo still had the dream of building his own small, affordable caravan, and this eventually became possible when the couple moved to a lovely home overlooking the large bay lying at the foot of the town of Mossel Bay.

The design in Christo’s head had to be a simple design, lightweight at under 750 kilograms, towable by a small sedan, needing only a Code B, and it had to fit into a standard garage.

Christo used SketchUp and a pencil to start moving the design in his head onto paper. Meanwhile, Tinka had come up with the name ‘Serai’. The word comes from the travellers and nomads of old, when a caravanserai was a roadside inn where travellers (caravanners) could rest after a hard day on the road.

Sitting around the fi re that night, with the chops sizzling, I learnt that it is a long slog to build a caravan from the ground up. After 6 months of Christo’s work in building the mould, or ‘plug’, it was back to the drawing-board when Tinka said, ‘It’s ‘too square… it looks like a box!’

With tweaks and twists a newer, sleeker caravan with a rounder nosecone finally came out of the workshop in Mossel Bay.

I was getting a couple of days to camp with the product, the Serai Weekender, at the Dibiki Resort in Hartenbos before I moved to the perennially popular, but huge, De Bakke Caravan Park. This is right on the coast overlooking Santos Beach and De Bakke Beach. Both of these superb beaches have Blue Flag status.


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