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And the curtain goes down on the National Arts Festival — and goes up on ... service!
Yes, the people who are hired to make you feel welcome, comfortable and fed.
In Cape Town it is a standard, a science even — there are textbooks and guides and plenty of euros to keep everyone focused on keeping the visitors, the tourists, the travellers, happy.
But here in the Eastern Cape, where we need it in a desperate struggle to survive the intertwined spiral of corruption and poverty, we come to the thorny question of how we treat our paying guests.
I have travelled these past two weeks to Makhanda, Graaff-Reinet, Nieu-Bethesda, Tarkastad, Bedford, Makhanda (again), East London and finally Chintsa.
I have done it on Hetty, the 1200 GSA motorcycle, in cars, and by foot.
I have witnessed and experienced family stays, friend stays, guest houses, backpacker rooms, restaurants, coffee shops, franchise stores, and cunningly avoided my old standard, a tent!
It’s freezing out there. Zero met eish! in the Karoo.
It’s also been sunny, with fields of golden Karoo grass bending like the ballet which returned to the fest.
There have been aloe ferox flowers, smouldering, flaming arrows shot through grey shredded skies.
So weep-worthy, but on a bike all the Bike Prof and I can do is extend a left arm — the right one pins the throttle!
There are no idioms, neologisms, homilies, euphemisms, polished to beaming phrases like “I really must say ...” or “It does not cost an arm and a leg”, or “comes around in swings and roundabouts”.
All we are saying, through gesticulation, is: “Look how amazing and awesome that is! Emoji hands to face, smiling blushing face, man or woman dancing, kapow! etc.”
Nah, we just unfurl and get back to keeping it all together in the cockpit.
My best room, aside from the towering magnificence of the place where I scribble this — peering down on empty lines of surf rolling into Chintsa Bay and gasping and spluttering annoyingly: “Look at that!” and making other surf animal noises — was the most simple.
It was a room in Katrin Alleman’s Outsiders B&B in Nieu-Bethesda.
It was a sublime combination of simple, functional, clean and beautiful.
A large, high-ceiling square with perfect shower tiles and shower head, two hot water bottles, an electric blanket, two wooden pieces of furniture and a big Bethesda-styled poster above the bed.
A stoep with stonewashed table and chairs looking over the leiwater gurgling in the gutter and the main street of the dorp.
Now on to the service review. After some profound contemplation, or reactive grumpiness, here is a list of stuff we encountered which may or may not reflect on our culture of accommodation and tourism.
Please be friendly and approach us, with our bags klonking up the pathway, as weary travellers desperate to be welcomed and re-humanised.
Please do not let us have to ask: “Do you work here?”
If we appear for breakfast with icicles hanging off our beanies, do not let us have to go and find you in the kitchen, parking on a stool, staring at your phone or hanging out and socialising with the other staff.
And definitely just no chewing, on anything.
If the coffee runs out in the breakfast room, bring another pot.
The place is fully booked, the parking is already at a premium and someone in a big car has parked us all in.
Don’t just tell us in a remonstrating kind of tone that we are now going to get the coffee sachets. No, not the sachets, please no ...
And on to pricing. If you are charging a Cape Town price for a meal, don’t give us cheap margarine with our artisanal slice of bread. Nooit mehn.
Even us Eastern Cape rudimentals know the difference between a good plant-based margarine and nuclear waste!
And how about a R25 cup of coffee that is cold?
You can't charge sit-down prices for food for a help-yourself service.
And name tags make it easier for us to not make fools of ourselves as well as some kind of uniform suggesting you are part of the action not the furniture.
I have seen local game reserve employees wearing very sporty and spunky kit. Make it groovy, not slave-like apparel and hopefully we will all love the sense of escalation and importance of occasion.
That said, please know that the staff are not the problem. You, the owner, are the issue for lack of training, and often being MIA.
Nic Lansdell, owner of Nic’s Rest, is a standout.
He seats you, looks after you, and has a great story to tell about why Standard Bank hooked up with him for the festival, and together they did corporate art-styled décor and hospitality branding.
But when it came to the menu, he stuck a donkey hoof in the ground and would not budge on local pricing.
So he did a roaring trade, higher volumes, hopefully made a healthy profit and everybody was happy. Even the vegan in me loved my Buddha bowl, which was generous.
I compare this to a B bowl I had up the road in Bedford where the place was brilliant but the bowl came with a thimble-full of quinoa, which is like having a bowl of samp and beans where someone schnoeped on the samp.
I also loved the combination of the front room of the Albany Club with the Red Cafe operation.
Louise Boy as front of house and chef Morgan Treuernicht seen in action was a lovely duo. The vegetable curry was extraordinary.
Restaurateurs know all about margins on meals, but I am telling you this, I am not going back to that boetie bowl! Less was just useless.
Before I tell you a most sunny tale about service at NAF, let me pass on this story of a fest guest.
Said person was rushing to a show. As she reversed out the electric gate of her guest house the owner’s dogs, a cocker spaniel and Jack Russell, did a door dash and out they went.
In a panic, Ms Festino leapt out, leaving the car running and her handbag on the front seat and gave chase.
Cocker spaniel was loved back into her arms and placed back on the property, but those Jacks, well we know those little jokers.
Off she ran, coaxing and keening, but he was on a mission.
He would come to her, then bolt. Game on! Eventually he ran into a field and common sense told our festino it was time to head back to the idling vehicle with its bag and cash an easy offer for skebengas.
This festino is a crazy cat lady, which extends to all animals. She got into the car and drove to get the little naughty bugger. And nabbed him!
“When I got back to the gate and opened the back door to get him, he jumped in the front seat. When I opened the front door, he did the same thing. I was so exasperated!”
She finally got it all right and with both guest house owner’s dogs safely behind bars rushed to her venue and squeaked in.
She expected to find her friends who were meeting her there, but a quick call revealed they had gone to the wrong venue. So, moral of the story: If you chase a Makhanda guest house owner’s errant dogs down the road, you are still going to make your show.
But why would you have to? After all, accommodation is not cheap.
So there I am, after some persuasion allowing my Samsung to be upgraded to the brand’s One UI 7, watching Chantal Harris’s one-woman stand-up comedy show, ADHD, the bottle and me, at Dicks.
My friend and I somehow got deep into the second row as Chantal got deep into her story about mindless drinking and job-hopping in East London.
It was courageous and hyper local and I was so into it when the Samsung upgrade, which I had put to silent, starting going loud and long: “Vbbbrrr! vbrrr!”.
I whipped it out and hit the power-off button on the side. But thanks to One UI 7, all I got was, in bright neon: “Hi! I am your Gemini assistant! How can I help you?”
You can help me by &^^%$ off, I cursed, holding the button down harder.
What did I get? Ping! Ping! A WhatsApp message from some silly group telling me about second-hand motorcycle gear for sale.
In an ADHD-driven panic, I leapt from my chair, bumbled and bashed my way past the other festinos, said to Chantal’s face I was not walking out on her but this phone would not turn off.
Man, I was so happy to be spat out of that venue, and standing hyperventilating in the foyer, spied none other than NAF CEO Monica Newton heading my way.
She definitely had more important things to do, but crazed journalist in me, I got straight into her grill and blurted out my woes.
She listened, nodded, calmly prised the tech monster from my white-knuckle grip and so help me, I see her asking AI for a solution.
“Just hold the minus volume key and the on-off key down together.” We do it and there is the golden turn-off key.
Thank you Monica!
Now let’s keep moving on bringing back the pizazz to an awesome festival.
I saw festinos have a good time. All we need is a little balance — to bring back more big art.
But for the service sector, as an academic wrote at the end of the undercover Rhodes security police spy’s student essay back in the 80s: “Can do better!”
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