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Every young man should have a bakkie during his formative years, one with which he can go camping with his puppy love. Cyril Klopper remembers his first bakkie.
Young folks need wheels of their own. At school, it’s a bicycle or scooter, and if your parents are well-off, you may get a brand-new car when you leave school to continue your studies.
I’m convinced that your first car should be second-hand though, because an older car has a kind of soul that makes you love it, and that is important. If you form a strong bond with your jalopy, chances are you’ll be an alert driver.
It also fosters an appreciation for your vehicle, because you have to take care of it – you can’t rely on a factory warranty and a service plan.
And maybe, if your car’s soul shines brightly, it’ll earn a nickname, something like Herbie, Shrek or the Mirthmobile.
When I was a student at the University of Stellenbosch, I drove a second-hand Nissan 1 Tonner. My mom bought the bakkie at a bargain price from a family friend and gave it to me, on the provision that I’d be on hand for tasks at short notice, including hauling garden refuse and moving furniture. This arrangement suited me just fine.
The bakkie was a bright red 1986 single cab model, the original Hardbody. I baptised it Big Red, or Red for short. It may not have been the most original nickname, but that bakkie was so red, I couldn’t come up with anything else.
I loved Big Red and took any excuse to get behind the wheel, whether my cargo was black bin bags or a group of rowdy student friends.
Aside from shuttling between classes and student accommodations, my first road trip with Big Red was in 1995 when I took a girl to the Crayfish Festival in Lambert’s Bay on the West Coast.
Lambert’s Bay is about 250 km from Stellenbosch, and good fuel consumption was not one of Red’s strengths. I was practically broke by the time we got to the caravan park in Lambert’s Bay.
That weekend, we frequented the local hotel every night to dance, and afterwards we sat quietly around campfires listening to someone’s collection of Pink Floyd.
When the music stopped, my girlfriend and I crawled under Big Red’s canopy and fell asleep on a mattress. We were both second-year students and had only recently come of age, but we felt immortal and free thanks to the independence that Big Red gave us.
On another occasion my girlfriend and I drove Red to the Strand one Saturday morning. We entered a parking lot near the SuperTubes water slide and parked on a flat sand dune.
After a wonderful day of sunbathing and swimming it was time to go home, but Big Red wouldn’t budge. The sand was barely 10 cm deep, but we could go neither backward nor forward.
Big Red had rear-wheel drive only. There was a diff lock on the rear axle, but it had been dodgy from the start and didn’t want to work on that day. Also, I was a twentysomething city boy who didn’t know much about reducing tyre pressure and other 4x4 tricks.
A gentleman in a Land Rover 90 kindly recovered Big Red. I felt slightly embarrassed, but Red wasn’t to blame.
Then there was the time another girlfriend and I (the previous one left me for a guy on a motorcycle) visited my best friends Jonathan and Susan in Langebaan.
Jonathan’s parents owned a beach house near the yacht club and we visited here regularly when his parents were away.
On the first night, all four of us jumped into Big Red’s single cab to go dancing at the Flamingo’s night club next to the golf course on the outskirts of town.
After a few Monis Esprit drinks and dozens of sokkie treffers we were ready to return home and braai. We weren’t tipsy, but I might have been slightly over the legal limit. Fearing that we would encounter a roadblock, we chose to take a shortcut across Langebaan’s golf course – not over the greens, but along the golf cart path.
The girls stood on the back of Big Red and Jonathan and I loudly played his Now That’s What I Call Music 36 CD on the deck.
By this time, I had Big Red for two years and knew its every mood and whim. I also believed Red and I were the best rally team in the country. What happened next isn’t clear, but I suspect that one of the milkwood trees on the golf course jumped out in front of us.
Big Red straddled a flattened tree. It was easy to reverse off the tree, but the tree wouldn’t get up again. We decided to get rid of the evidence and tied a rope around the trunk.
Red was as strong as an ox – the diff lock surprisingly decided to do its part – and the tree was uprooted. After we concealed the hole as much as we could and wiped away our tracks, we set forth dragging the tree behind us.
But what to do with the incriminating tree? Jonathan had a cunning plan: let’s throw it in Langebaan’s quarry, near the popular time-share resort Club Mykonos.
Unless the golf course manager is reading this column, he probably still wonders what happened to his milkwood tree. Big Red got off lightly – just a small dent in the front bumper and a fist-sized hole in the grille. I later replaced those with second-hand parts.
The following night, unfortunately, we injured Big Red a lot more. We wanted to enjoy sundowners on the beach between Langebaan and Saldanha, and all four of us once more piled into Big Red.
Back then, you could still legally drive on beaches and so we went over a dune behind Club Mykonos onto the beach. The diff lock was engaged, and the tyre pressure lowered – I believe I’d taken every precaution.
But at the beach’s low-water mark, the diff lock decided to disengage, just as I changed up from first to second gear – we instantly got stuck.
Digging didn’t help; we only succeeded in deepening Big Red’s grave in the wet sand. The sun had set and an icy wind rose up. The only provision we had was a bottle of cheap sparkling wine, but there was no cause for cheer.
A bigger concern was the rising tide.
It was low when we got stuck, and after a fruitless effort to free Big Red, the tide had started to come in. When the water came to within a metre of Big Red, I asked Jonathan to fetch help at Club Mykonos.
The resort was about a kilometre behind us, and when he returned about an hour later with two labourers and a small tractor – the kind used for gardening – the sea had already started to lick at Big Red’s chassis.
But the tractor was too weak to extract Big Red and the men went back to fetch Club Mykonos’s groundskeeper. He apparently had a Land Rover.
When the Land Rover finally made its appearance, the waves had started breaking against Big Red’s doors. We used the Land Rover’s winch and the garden tractor to save Red.
With a sigh of relief, I rewarded my rescuers with the only thing of value I had with me: the bottle of cheap sparkling wine.
Back at Jonathan’s house, we thoroughly hosed Big Red down, but I knew rust would one day take its toll… Perhaps it was already eating away at the chassis from the inside.
But I was never given the chance to say goodbye to Big Red…
A few weeks after the Langebaan incident I had to go to Cape Town to do something for my mom in the city centre and I left Big Red in the parking lot on the corner of Buitengracht and Shortmarket streets.
The car guard promised that he would keep an eye on Big Red. After I had completed my errand, I returned to the parking lot… but both Big Red and the car guard had disappeared.
Perhaps you know that sinking feeling when you walk up and down a parking lot searching for your car.
At first, you’re firmly convinced that you merely forgot where you parked it. You even suspect a friend might be pulling a prank on you, but then reality sinks in and you finally admit to yourself that your beloved car has been stolen.
Then you trudge to the Roeland Street police station to report the crime. You get
on a suburban train, call your mother from a phone booth and ask her to fetch you from the station. Your heart is in pieces and you are furious with the degenerate who took what didn’t belong to him.
About a year later, I got a call from the police that brought closure: they had found Big Red’s chassis. It now held up a minibus taxi’s shell, but this taxi crashed into another vehicle in Bhisho in the Eastern Cape.
Red was gone.
I owned several vehicles in the years since Big Red, some were second-hand and others new, but I never named another car again.
