DEPARTURE LOUNGE // SPRING 2017
WHERE IN THE WORLD?
INSTAMUNCH
PETRA,
JORDAN
@kobusvdmerwe
Kobus van der Merwe didn’t mean to become
the poster boy for the food foraging trend; it
was a happy accident. Seeking a new challenge
he left Cape Town to help his retired parents
run Oep ve Koep, their low-key eatery in
Paternoster along Cape Town’s rugged West
Coast, which explodes with colour as flowers
blossom wildly each Spring.
At his folks’ place the young chef did away
with the old menu of fish, chips and calamari
and began serving diners truly local dishes
using ingredients foraged from the very
coastline they gazed over.
“My grandmother made things with seaweed
and my father farmed in the Kalahari and
we’d spend winter weekends picking wild
cucumbers,” he says of why he was drawn to
forage up and down the Weskus.
So popular was his special flavour of
fresh “Strandveld” food using ingredients
that were either newly discovered or had
been ignored for years, that Van der Merwe
found unexpected culinary fame. He then
collaborated with botanist Rupert Koopman
to produce the cookbook Strandveld
Food and followed up with the opening of
a second restaurant, Wolfgat, in a beach
cottage not far away from the first. From
here he goes out early each day to forage
for ingredients that ensure no two meals he
serves at Wolfgat are ever quite the same.
While diners may not know what form their
dish will take, Van der Merwe is known to
favour a few ingredients. Expect bokkoms, a
salty fish biltong; sea lettuce; soutslaai, leaves
of a succulent plant; and strandsalie, a type
of sage found along the coast.
Or just follow his foraging on Instagram to
see what’s cooking.
10 // MAKE MEMORIES FOR LIFE
Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig
Burckhardt held lofty ambitions of
discovering the source of the River
Niger, but dropped those as soon as he
heard about another European explorer
who had set out for Arabia to find the
lost city of Petra and had been murdered
for his efforts. Intrigued, the 27-year-old
hatched a plan to disguise himself as a
local and go in search of the royal city
rumoured to exist somewhere in the
desert lands south of Nazareth.
He first went to Syria where, while
smoking hubbly-bubblies with his Arab
neighbour, learnt Arabic from him.
The Swiss man also studied the Koran
and Muslim law to pass convincingly
as Sheikh Ibn Abdallah. He tested out
his new identity in Syria, Lebanon and
Palestine before journeying to Cairo
in 1812, where local people told him
about the ruins of an ancient city found
through a narrow mountain pathway.
Burckhardt immediately travelled to
the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and
found the formidable entrance he’d
been told about – a long, narrow slit
carved through the sandstone mountain,
looming 76-metres high and only three
metres wide in some parts. As he
stumbled through the darkness of what
is now called the Siq (“the shaft”) into
the harsh desert sunlight, Burckhardt
may have thought that what lay
before him was a mirage: an elaborate,
monolithic temple carved into the
pink-hued mountainside. He had found
“The Lost City” hidden to the Western
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World for five centuries.
One of the oldest metropolises in the
world, Petra (meaning “rock” in Greek)
is thought to have been established
as early as 312 BC by the nomadic
Nabatean tribe. It’s become the symbol
of Jordan ever since it was declared a
Unesco World Heritage site in 1985, and
is the country’s most-visited tourist
attraction since being named one of the
New7Wonders of the World in 2007.
Also called “The Rose City” for the
rose-coloured sandstone it is carved
out of, Petra extends over 60 square
kilometres and has more than 800
individual monuments, each with its own
story to tell. Like the ruin Burckhardt
first saw as he entered Petra, Al Khazneh
(“the Treasury”), which was really
a mausoleum and crypt - you may
recognise it as the fictional Canyon
of the Crescent Moon from Indiana
Jones and the Last Crusade. But all
this is just the tip of the iceberg, say
archaeologists, who believe they have
uncovered as little as 15% of the city. The
rest is thought to remain underg