40 January 2014

DAWN BATH. Steam rises from one of the hot pools in the Tugela River. The pools have tarpaulin screens to preserve the modesty of the bathers wallowing within.

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WORDS & PICTURES ERNS GRUNDLING

You pause at the entrance to one of the pools, towel in hand, and ask hesitantly: “Men or women?” It comes out as one, urgent word: “Menorwomen?”

The answer rings from several throats at once, as if those behind the green tarpaulin screen have been waiting for you to ask. If you hear “Women!” and you’re not one yourself, you politely step away and ask the same question at the pool next door. If “Men” is the answer, you get to float in a hot spring in the middle of winter, with other naked campers of the same sex.

Welcome to Shu Shu, an island in the Tugela River barely 5 km as the crow flies from Jacob Zuma’s controversial Nkandla homestead. The island has six shallow pools, each one roughly as big as two pool tables. They’re full

Bare bums in Zululand

Shu Shu is an island and a hot spring in the Tugela River where a select few families have been coming to

camp and bathe every June holiday for more than a hundred years. Here’s your backstage pass to a

unique South African subculture.

42 January 2014

of menorwomen – only after midnight can menandwomen soak together.

You could wear a swimming costume, but you’d feel as out of place as a teenager with his arm in a cast at a school social. So you hang your clothes on a hook and slip into the bubbling water, which varies between 42 °C and 46 °C.

The Tugela murmurs, frogs croak in the back­ground, the air smells of sulphur and the warm water rushes over your body. You lie back and relax. It’s a moment of surrender. You look up at the sky where the Milky Way blinks silently. A shooting star. You want to be nowhere else but here.

Ox-wagons & solar panelsShu Shu has been a holiday spot for more than a century, but there are several theories about who discovered it first. Some say the pools were found by hippo hunters in the late 1800s; others say that three men – Faan Alberts, Adriaan Rall and an anonymous policeman from Kranskop – waded through the river in 1904 when they felt hot water under their feet.

Photographs from the early 1900s show families from Greytown camping at Shu Shu with their ox­wagons. By the 1930s, a few Natal families had become synonymous with the place: Havemann, Heine, Buss, Van Rooyen and Van Zuydam, to name a few.

Back then, every family had their own pool. At first the pools were just holes dug in the sand. Later, cement structures screened with reeds were built. It’s said that donkeys used to eat the reeds during the night and the campers first had to repair the screens in the morning before they could relax in the pools. Shelters made from tarpaulin came later.

Camping at Shu Shu is exclusive. To pitch your tent in one of the 58 campsites on the 20 ha river island, you have to be a member of the Shu Shu Campers Association. The same goes if you want to park your caravan at Kranskop opposite the island. Day visitors are welcome, but they have to pay R80 per person. Inkommers can overnight only if a member invites them.

Shu Shu is only open during the June school holidays, when up to 500 people from across the country will congregate on a busy weekend. During the rest of the year the river is mostly too full and the pools are underwater.

The island is densely forested with stands of tamboti trees, wild fig trees, coral trees and wild olive trees. You almost don’t see the campsites, which are connected by a neat network of footpaths. Besides these footpaths, the island has no other facilities or infrastructure. Campers must erect their own long drops and bring everything they might need. At the end of the holiday, they take everything away again. The use of generators is

forbidden, so solar panels glint in the sunlight. This is Shu Shu’s trump card: Not only is the

scenery so beautiful it should be illegal, but nature is allowed to take its course. The tents might be modern, but a holiday here hasn’t changed much in a hundred years.

For the duration of my visit, I stay in Camp 34a with Hannes and Anna­Marié Loedolff from Mondeor in Joburg. Hannes is the chair of the Shu Shu Campers Association, and since both Loedolffs are retired police officers (many people here are) everyone sticks to the rules.

Loedolff HQ is impressive: huge tents supported by wooden poles, beds, carpets – even a bar. JP the dog and Sasha the cat have also travelled from Mondeor.

Anna­Marié’s family has been coming here since the 1930s. She has a hefty photo album with pictures from the past: her grandparents in front of a laden Morris Minor in 1948; the reed screens being patched with grain bags after a donkey raid… She also keeps a diary. In 1989 she wrote: “We’ll come back every year until we can’t any more – this is our dream holiday.”

Colonial ubuntu Shu Shu means “hot, hot” in Zulu. For the Zulus, this has always been a place of healing – the chiefs used to bathe here during inauguration ceremonies.

The island is still owned by the local community and in earlier years the campers had to buy special permits. These days the association rents the island directly from the local chief, bringing an annual economic injection to the impoverished district.

Every kraal in the area is given a specific camp­site to tend – for the duration of the holiday, people from that kraal work to keep it neat and tidy. This tradition dates back generations and many of the campers speak fluent Zulu.

A week or two before the arrival of the campers, the pools are cleaned and the screens are erected. When the bakkies piled high with gear come over the hill, the hooter system kicks in. Each campsite has its own special “hoot” (three short toots, for example) so the staff will know when their guests have arrived.

According to local custom, the floors of the campsites must be covered with cattle dung every week – a practice called sinda – to prevent them from getting too dusty.

Two of the pools are marked “Locals” in a nod to the first rule of the Shu Shu Campers Association, which is: “Treat the local people with respect.” Separate pools might sound like an embarrassing throwback to a darker time in South Africa’s history, but here on the Tugela a kind of colonial ubuntu reigns. Maybe this is only possible within the Shu Shu bubble, but it seems to work well for both sides.

In the evenings everyone gathers

around the campfires and the smell of tamboti wood, boerewors and cattle dung hangs low over

the river.

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TRAVEL SHU SHU

Joyce Van Rooyen

“I first visited Shu Shu in 1937 on an ox-wagon. My dad used the wagon’s canvas to make a tent. I wouldn’t trade my Shu Shu days for anything else.”

MaRge & DaVe HaVeMann

Dave: “When I walk down the path to our camp, it takes me back to when I was a boy. A year just doesn’t feel right if I don’t spend a few days at Shu Shu.”

Hannes & anna-MaRié LoeDoLff

Anna-Marié: “Shu Shu is like a bug. Once you’ve been bitten, it sticks. You want to come here every year.”

Idleness meets nostalgia So what do the campers do all day? I put this question to Alida Oosthuizen, a judge in the potjiekos competition, and she replies: “You do nothing at all. You rest. Physically and spiritually. You visit your friends and talk.”

The bathing rituals anchor the day. The best time to go is late at night or early in the morning. At night I sit under the stars as the water warms me up for the cold bed in my tent. No matter how late I stay up to chat (no one at Shu Shu goes to bed thirsty) Hannes wakes me at 5.30 am to walk back to the pools.

Sarah Siebrits is the official pool regulator – she moves the sandbags that regulate the flow of water. Her grandfather was the first man to have driven a car (a Model-T Ford) to Shu Shu in the olden days. Sarah takes me on a guided tour of the four pools as she tests the water temperature with a thermometer: Oupa se Bad, Sementbad, Rooibad and Witbad – the most popular pool.

You can also bathe during the day, but that’s when most people prefer to swim in cooler, bigger pools in the river. Fishing is also big around here: The Tugela is full of yellowfish, carp, eels and barbel.

Besides the odd church service, boeresport competition or fishing competition, there aren’t many formal activities on offer. In the evenings everyone gathers around the campfires and the smell of tamboti wood, boerewors and cattle dung hangs low over the river.

It’s telling that so many of the campfire con-versations revolve around previous Shu Shu experiences. People dig up old memories – a bittersweet stew of nostalgia. During my visit, I hear an anecdote about a wooden chest hoisted up into a tree to keep meat cool at least 10 times.

Before solar power came along, camping here used to be a logistical feat. Some people would cook an entire ox beforehand and preserve the meat in fat. Others brought chickens along and slaughtered them as required. Bread was baked in anthills.

In the old days, children held folk dances and played games until late – games like Ludo, snakes and ladders and Piet Swart Vark. The sound of guitars, accordions and harmonicas drifted across the island.

One afternoon during the June visit, the association’s AGM takes place under a thorn tree. About 40 members pull up their camping chairs. First up is a subtle (strategic?) act of vandalism at Oupa se Bad: Someone made a peephole in the screen.

“A cross has been cut into the screen,” my host Hannes says. “We don’t know why, but if we catch the culprit, he should be banned from Shu

Shu.” The people gathered nod their heads in agreement.

Young men who just enter the pools without first asking “Menorwomen” also bother the members, as do people who flaunt the noise regulations. The good news? There won’t be a price increase on firewood supplied by a local farmer. And the chief has already given the green light for June 2014.

A lifelong hold Cupid is unusually busy at Shu Shu, it seems. Viv Heine (85), who is in a wheelchair but bathes in the pools every day, proudly tells me that he’s had “millions” of girlfriends here. All six of his children, who still come to Shu Shu to camp with him, were conceived here.

Hannes’s son, André, tells me how he and his wife Juanita met at Shu Shu: “It was after midnight and the men and women were all in Oupa se Bad. Let’s just say, when my gown hit the ground and she saw my white bum cheeks, the ice was broken.”

André and Juanita married on the island, in a ceremony complete with Zulu bridesmaids in traditional outfits and a praise singer who performed a dance with sticks to drive away evil spirits.

Floods are a favourite Shu Shu subject. Everyone tells me about the “big floods” of 1963, 1987 and 1996. When the river comes down suddenly, the pools disappear and the people on the island are cut off from the outside world.

In 1963 a flood stranded 79 campers for a few days. But they didn’t sit around waiting for help. They set up a cable to the river bank and used a pulley to ferry items across the water, including a three-year-old girl who was delivered by potato sack into the waiting arms of her grandmother.

On my last morning at Shu Shu, I sinda the floor at Camp 34a with Nombusa Mhlongo. Johan Myburgh, a friend of Hannes who has come to camp for the weekend, gives his cellphone a sceptical look.

“Ja-nee, now the e-mails will roll in like impis,” he says. “But I don’t care. It feels like I’ve been on holiday for a month.”

It’s true: A long weekend at Shu Shu feels like a much longer, deeper experience. I think back to what Hannes told me earlier about Shu Shu’s lifelong hold on people. “I drove through to see Oom Boet at the old-age home in Dundee one last time before he passed away,” Hannes said. “He held my hand tightly and all he could say was ‘Fishing. Shu Shu. Shu Shu...’”

For more info about camping at Shu Shu, contact the Shu Shu Campers Association 082 8284 852 (Anna-Marié); loedolffam@telkomsa.net

IN OTHER WORDS

44 January 2014

1 HELP ME HELP YOU. Campers like Dawid van der Merwe from Kriel employ people from the nearby community during their stay at Shu Shu. Each kraal is responsible for a specific campsite. To outsiders it might seem like an awkward, patronising relationship, but the community benefits and so do the campers, many of whom converse with their helpers in fluent Zulu. Popeye the parrot keeps an eye on things.

2 LICENCE TO RELAX. Paul Buss makes no secret of where you’ll find him every June holiday.

3 FROM THE ARCHIVES. In this old snapshot, a certain Mrs S Albers demon­strates how to bake bread in an anthill.

4 STEAMY. Sarah Siebrits, pool regulator at Shu Shu, tests the water temperature every morning and updates the blackboards.

5 WHAT LIES BENEATH. After bathing, fishing is the next most popular activity at Shu Shu. Johan Myburgh and his grandson Ruben try their luck late one afternoon.

6 WRINKLED SKIN. Like the sauna in your local Virgin Active, the hot pool is a place to relax and talk nonsense.

7 MIND YOUR NECK. The hot springs are surrounded by other river pools, where kids swim and play during the warm afternoons.

8 COWADUNGA. Nombusa Mhlongo, who lives close to the river and works for the Shu Shu campers during the June break, spreads cow dung on the camp floor. It’s a traditional Zulu practice called sinda and it prevents the campsites from getting too dusty.

9 HELLO, ALOE. At Shu Shu, nature comes first. The island is full of beautiful trees and aloe bushes and the only infrastructure is a network of footpaths connecting the various campsites. When the campers leave, they take everything away with them.

10 HAPPY DAYS. Jess Dicks and Debbie Dick show off for the camera at the swimming pools at sunset.

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