Maybe I’ve spent too many years going to the big tourist attractions, staying in the successful guest houses and sleeping in the glamorous hotels (hey, I’m a writer – perks of the job), because these days when I do one of those things I kind of get the feeling that I’ve done it before. A honeymoon suite with white percale linen and an exposed-stone wall behind a flat-screen TV? with a soft, downy dressing gown (but nothing else) spread out on the bed? and with twin hand-made glass wash basins in the bathroom (not actually a separate room, you understand – which makes going to the toilet pretty awkward when you’re trying to be romantic)?

Ho hum. Here we are again and – and was this the one I stayed in last week? Or was that the week before? Or was it last night? And why do all the guides you meet when you travel start looking the same?

When are we gonna get to talk to some real, you know, people?

Thank you Jauckie Viljoen and Back Road Safaris for your Meet The People Tour. It’s incredibly refreshing when somebody takes me out of my comfort zone

It’s taken Jauckie 4 years to get me onto one of his tours – I guess because I always thought Meet The People was a township tour (and you know what I think about those). But Back Road Safaris has a different vision – and although we did visit some people in the townships (I hate that word – can’t we find one that’s less euphemistic?), the emphasis was much greater than that:

On our Meet The People Tour we were taken to meet four Mossel Bay-based businesspeople who have interesting stories to tell – and, yes, some of them live and work in the townships. But not all of them.

The result was a snapshot of the lives of ordinary South Africans – and therein, I think, lies this product’s success.

Back Road Safaris draws the stars of its itineraries from something like 25 businesspeople in Mossel Bay and the surrounding villages and countryside – people who range from market gardeners to brick makers, farm shop-keepers, writers, artists and ostrich raisers (yes, someone’s got to do it). Of course you can’t visit every one of them in such a short time, so a typical Meet The People Tour will introduce you to four or five of them.

The tours, by the way, are usually four hours long (Jauckie says that full-day tours of this kind are generally too tiring for his guests; and he calls them ‘guests’ and not ‘pax’ – which should tell you a lot about his standards of service).

On our tour we met Alfred Skoen, a 62-year old Xhosa man who makes thousands of bricks every week – alone and by hand; the Afrikaner Hein Munro, who harvests coastal oysters from the Mossel Bay area (and not “those cultivated things” you get elsewhere); the Coloured Janneman Draai, a carpenter by trade who was confined to a wheelchair after a car crash and now makes awesome leather bags; and the Israeli Baruch of Baruch’s Coffee Roastery (- and listen up, ladies and gentlemen of the tourism trade: Baruch runs a barrista school. And if you don’t know what a barrista is, you shouldn’t be serving whatever it is that you call ‘coffee’).

Oh, and on the way home we stopped in at Tant Pop’s spaza shop because I was starving – and there I bought a snack as well as two boxes of eggs at R7.00 a dozen (if everything in the shop was so cheap, I asked the tante, how did she made a living? But she just smiled. Jauckie later told me that she’s part of a women’s collective that owns a chicken farm – and he also said her sweets were that cheap because she wanted to make sure that the kids of Friemersheim, the old mission station where she lives, could afford the occasional treat. And lord knows they probably need it).

Back Road Safaris has made a real impact on the lives of the people we met: Janneman has overcome a painful shyness; Alfred has been able to contribute to the building of a community centre; Baruch’s coffee sales have increased; and Hein has taught thousands of visitors about eating real coastal oysters.

And although not everyone you’ll meet on one of these tours needs help with growing their business, Jauckie recognised that some of them could benefit from professional input – and thus created up a charitable foundation called Meet The People Cares. Now, for example, if you want to buy some of Alfred’s bricks to donate to the building of a safe haven for battered women and children – Meet The People Cares will accept your money, buy the stock on your behalf and arrange for their safe storage.

So you win, the haven wins and Alfred, of course, wins – because he’s made a sale to someone who wouldn’t normally need his hand-made bricks.

Jauckie has also hooked up with a number of professionals – he’s a medical man himself and still runs a successful sleep clinic in Mossel Bay – who’ve been able to provide probably the most important thing that any small business could want: advice.

If, as Mark Twain said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness,” then the kind of travel that Meet The People tours presents could be a deadly weapon.

Back Road Safaris, Mossel Bay info@backroadsafaris.com

What’s Martin Reading?

  • Doing Business Digitally – Eight Steps to Online Success by Godfrey Parkin – more about it here
  • What’s That Butterfly? by Steve Woodhall – more about it here

… have a GREAT tourism week!