Braving the bokkom

Velddrif, at the mouth of the Berg River, is a place of many smells. There’s the thick salty aroma wafted in from the sea on winter fog; the sulphuric guano stench of thousands of roosting cormorants, and pungent pongs from the mudflats at low tide… On the day I arrived it was the fishy smell of bokkoms.

‘Ours are the best,’ said Bergrivier Tourism manager Yvette Odendaal, by way of introduction. ‘That’s why Velddrif is renowned as the Bokkom Capital of South Africa.’ A bokkom is a dried, salted mullet (small harder) sometimes cut into strips as fishy biltong (and packaged with a breath mint).

You’ll find them in various stages of drying in Bokkomlaan, industry evolved. Several of the original rudimentary (fish houses) are now restaurants or coffee shops, but some are still ‘factories’.