Back to Basics

Justin Bonello fuels South African passions for food cooked on the open flame

There’s a very tall glass of water in front of Justin Bonello when our interview commences. This is my first clue that the braai master sitting in the interview has had a bit too big of a reunion with some of his Joburg mates the night before.

With that trademark contagious Bonello laugh, he launches into a tirade about not finding anything other than McDonald’s to eat when he arrived back at his hotel room the night before. If it’s a choice between hangover, and starvation or McDonald’s, Bonello would choose the former every time. His fervent belief in reconnecting with food – with where it comes from and who is farming and producing it – is at the heart of his food philosophy and forms the foundation of both the current TV series and his newly released book Ultimate Braai Master are based.

In the face of what Justin calls “the death of the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker”, he’s bringing food back to the basics and serving up “the braai road trip of a lifetime”. For viewers, he’s offering local reality TV at its best – a cooking show with a healthy dose of pressure from various culinary challenges that has the contestants travelling all over South Africa and cooking in some of the most extraordinary settings. And for readers, he’s offering that shared knowledge seldom passed from generation to generation anymore, via recipes that will inspire and (hopefully) forever outlaw the boring lamb chops and wors braai.

If the TV series is the primer and the book a tome of inspiration and recipes, readers had better brace themselves for some pretty unique combinations. There are recipes like a beautiful fillet stuffed pork belly (one of Justin’s favourites) and then there are the slightly more daring concoctions like beef intestine sosaties and chicken necks (aka poor man’s prawns). Whether we’re talking chicken, beef or seafood, however, there’s one ingredient all the recipes have in common and that is, according to Justin, ‘umami’ – a Japanese term referring to the fifth taste sensation after sweet, sour, salty and bitter.

“A braai imparts a flavour that you can’t get from anything else. When I think about the fire, I think it’s hard-wired into all of us; it’s almost part of our genetic make-up. There is nothing more mesmerising for us as a group of friends than to settle down around a fire, watch the ‘African TV’ and just settle into it.”

One of the biggest surprises for Justin while filming and producing Ultimate Braai Master was the fact that so many contestants hadn’t been to half the places that formed part of the show’s epic 8 000km road trip.

“I’ve done lots of travelling and cooking and eating, and when I started out doing this, I really thought that what I do on the weekends is what every South African is doing,” he muses.

So many of Justin’s childhood memories are connected with food – from diving for his own perlemoen and being out on the Breede River on Sunday afternoons, to the family splitting a rabbit and eating it with avocado and bread – and to a large extent Ultimate Braai Master is encouraging adventures far beyond discovering a new ingredient or technique.

It’s about getting outside, reconnecting with nature, cooking under the stars and spending quality time with friends and family. It’s about going back to the basics from which we’ve all strayed so far.

Justin Bonello's Ultimate Braai Master is published by Penguin Books. Visit www.penguinbooks.co.za for more information.

*Article first published on www.countrylife.co.za. 

Township twitching

Grab your binoculars and let Soweto’s feathered friends show you the sights and sounds

Soweto might only be a short taxi commute away from Johannesburg’s northern suburbs, but birding in the two areas are quite a different experience. There are pockets of peaceful green areas that break away from the dust and daily grind and even though litter and noise can be a challenge in Soweto, the birds and twitchers alike have adapted to their surroundings remarkably well.

My meeting point at Orlando Dam with local bird guide Raymond Rampolokeng is a perfect example. There’s no mistaking that the water birds inhabiting this area rule the roost, but they do so in harmony with the paddlers canoeing past their nests, the bungee jumpers plummeting off the towers behind them and the locals passing by the dam to get from one busy street to the next.

There are over 45 bird species to be spotted in the four sites that Raymond has chosen as his ‘outdoor offices’. Depending on how much time you have, you can do all four sites in a full day, or if you’re pressed for time, you can choose to skip Lenasia Vlei (which is a bit of a further away) and just concentrate on the triangle of Orlando Dam, Moroka Dam and the Klipspruit Wetland, all of which are within close proximity to one another.

Apart from a gentle climb to the top of Enoch Sontonga hills, overlooking Orlando Dam and the iconic colourful Orlando Towers, Raymond’s birding tours exercise only your eyes, so be prepared to spend a lot of time in comfortable silence, appreciating Soweto’s feathered friends through your binoculars.

Four years working for Birdlife SA have made Raymond an extremely knowledgeable bird guide and in the quiet moments, when all of the birds seem to be hiding, he’s an expert at weaving a few pertinent historical and cultural facts into the dialogue. He knows the skies of Soweto as well as the streets he grew up cycling on and for every run of the mill Black duck I spot, Raymond counters with an African Darter, a White-breasted cormorant and a Cattle Egret.

At one point I momentarily convince myself that his trendy red Ray Bans are giving him superpowers, but when that doesn’t fly (forgive the pun) I shift my theory to the fact that my binoculars must surely be broken. Whether you’re an expert twitcher or an amateur, take comfort in the reward at the end of your tour: a shebeen-style buffet lunch at Sakhumzi, an ice cold beer and an entire childhood’s worth of humorous Sowetan anecdotes.

More about Raymond Rampolokeng...

A staunch conservationist, Raymond is constantly seeking balance. When he chose the four birding sites that he would conduct birding tours in, he was very sensitive to the community’s uses of those areas.

Like the African Darters and Egyptian geese that gracefully glide past us, Raymond accepts that there’s never going to be just one thing happening in his birding sites. They are public spaces for everyone to enjoy, and when we get to Moroka Dam

"As a kid, Raymond visited all of the sites he now guides at today."

later that day, he tells me that an average of 10 000 to 15 000 people flock to the Thokosa Park area surrounding the dam on weekends.

Whether it’s picnicking or canoeing, however, Raymond encourages it all, because he says that community reaction to bird species and exposure to conservation is important. “I believe we need to start with the younger generations. Today, young people are fearless and getting into the water and canoeing. That wasn’t the case in 1994, you had to have a licence just to fish here.”

Raymond was born in Senaoane, a township between Chaiwelo and Rockville, but spent his school-going years moving between Senaone, White City and Kensington, where his grandparents lived and worked.

He got to know the streets of Soweto very well , and by default became a tour guide whenever his relatives came to stay. “I always had a spare BMX and started being a tour guide long before I knew anything about birding,” he laughs.

As a kid, Raymond visited all of the sites he now guides at today. “We used to swim at the Klipspruit Wetlands,” he reminisces, “but our canoes were Valiant bonnets, not the canoes we saw this morning." For a man who first visited Sandton only after he had matriculated and earned some spending money during a gap year working at the Rand Show, Raymond is exceptionally comfortable talking to people from all walks of live.

A good percentage of his clientele are overseas guests, and he attributes his confidence to his PR qualification from Wits Technikon, his colourful childhood interacting with Xhosa, Shangaan and Venda neighbours in White City and of course his training with the Wits Bird Club and Birdlife SA, whom he worked for for a few years before starting his own business in 2007.

His family has warmed to the career choice he had made, initially thinking him “crazy for going around showing people birds”, but his passion runs deep, his entrepreneurial spirit is strong and his conservationist’s compass is firmly pointed in the direction of the bigger picture.

 Contact Raymond of Bay of Grace Tours - 072 947 3311

www.bayofgracetours.wozaonline.co.za, bayofgracetours@gmail.com

Soweto Birding Top 10 Check List:

• Orange-breasted Waxbill
• Marsh Owl
• Red-chested Cuckoo
• Cape Long Claw
• Diderick cuckoo
• Tawny-flanked Prinia
• African Sacred Ibis
• Cattle Egret
• African Darter
• White-breasted Cormorant

*Article first published on www.countrylife.co.za.

The Great Greys

Author Gareth Crocker on African adventure stories and the mystique of elephants…

The froth of Gareth Crocker’s cappuccino has barely settled and already the former community newspaper editor has gone straight for the truth without flinching. “Ironically, I cannot stand African adventures stories,” he confesses. “They bore me. I think ten pages describing a tree is too much.”

It’s ironic, because Journey from Darkness is about as great an African adventure as there is: two brothers searching for their roots in Africa and embarking on an epic quest with the ‘Great Grey’ Shawu, a rare desert elephant trekking an ancient ancestral path to Bechuanaland, with the threat of poachers ever in her shadow.

Gareth’s frankness about the genre doesn’t at all detract from his love of the bush, but instead stems from his belief that the “story is king”. He was determined to take a different approach and, at the back of the book, he shares the ten things he’s learned about writing saying, ‘There are too many stories out there that, while written well, should never have been written in the first place.’

Interestingly, the central plot of the book is actually Gareth’s father’s creation. Llewellyn Crocker co-authored the book and Gareth credits much of Journey from Darkness to his father’s “remarkable imagination”. When they were writing the book a few years ago, Llewellyn was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer. Today he’s in remission, but at one stage Gareth says he remembers his father telling him that he could quite happily follow in the character Derek’s footsteps.

“Male elephants are known to roam huge distances, and my dad said he’d love to walk behind one of them until he runs out of juice and just settles under a tree to die. It sounds a bit macabre, but I get it. He’s always had this idea in his head of journeying behind elephants, and that’s really where the story came from.”

Beyond an emotional connection to Shawu’s loss and a more vivid picture of poaching than newspaper statistics could ever hope to mimic, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly why Journey from Darkness truly is like no other African adventure story you’ve ever read. A good way to start would be to take away the setting of the border between South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana and strip the story down to a few core themes like war, poaching, man’s depletion of natural resources and the duality of light and dark within us all. That leaves the magic and mystique behind Shawu and Derek’s quest into the great unknown, which provide for a large part of the book’s charm.

Derek risking death by dehydration and starvation to follow Shawu and see her safely over the border is as crazy as it is incredible. It’s a leap of faith, or “grand gesture”, as Gareth calls it, which the reader quite happily lives through vicariously.

“I suppose I am a ridiculous romantic at heart, but I love grand gestures,” he says. “I love the fact that Derek believes in Shawu’s intuition and believes that she will understand that he’s willing to help her.”

If the late, great Lawrence Anthony’s The Elephant Whisperer was ever converted into a work of fiction, the result would surely be Journey from Darkness. Both works deal with fascinating facts about elephants like their mourning, their ways of communicating with man and one another and their willingness to help other animals in distress, and both pay tribute to the majestic ‘Great Greys’ of the bush that have so much to teach us, if we’re only willing to open our minds and listen.

*First published on www.countrylife.co.za

*Journey from Darkness is published by Penguin Books. Visit www.penguinbooks.co.za for more information.