An exquisite house offering self-catering accommodation in Hondeklip Bay. Ideal for groups up to 14 people.
Welcome To The Papierhuisie
Welcome to Die Papierhuisie situated in Hondeklip Bay, Northern Cape. This is a lovely, spacious self catering holiday home ideal for groups or family bookings.
The holiday home has 6 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms which can accommodate up to 14 guests in total. It has a fully equipped kitchen with a stove and oven, microwave, fridge, cutlery and crockery and other basic kitchen equipment and utensils.
The lounge is furnished with comfortable seating and there is a dining area where guests can relax and enjoy a good meal.
Four of the bedrooms are fitted with a double bed and the fifth room has two single beds. Linen will be supplied, however guests are requested to bring along their own towels.
There is a huge area for braai, relaxing and enjoying your time together.
Hondeklip Bay Must Do Activities
Go surfing: The West Coast is rough; don’t let anyone else tell you differently. However, under the right conditions, the waves cannot be beaten, especially for those who have the time to wait for the right wind and tide. A light southeaster usually works well, so grab your board!
Go cycling: I was actually here in Namaqua with the EcoBound team to scout a new cycling route. The coastal section of the Namaqua National Park can work, however, you will have to do it on a ‘fat-bike’. A dinkum fat tyre bike glides over the sand and you can pitch a tent on the coast for an overnight stay.
Drive around: Namaqua National Park offers a wide variety of 4x4 options. The inland section of the Caracal Ecoroute wends its way through melkbos, quiver trees and stony hills, or you can stick to the coast and tackle the sand. The route is relatively tame, as long as you know when to let some air out of your tyres …
Hike the Camino: Clear your head in nature whilst tackling the Namaqua Camino. This 10-day hike covers more than 240 km, mostly within the national park, and most of the work is done for you. You carry your daypack and water – tents, meals and transport are all arranged.
Hondeklip Bay
The Wild West Coast
And there's not much there, except for a few shacks, a lot of shipwrecks, and a rock shaped like a dog ... well, it may look like a dog if you're a little crazed from being too long in the desert, but mostly it's just a normal-looking rock.
By day two you'll be eyeing out those place-to-eat fishers' cottages with lust and intent - much like Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush, when he starts seeing his companion as a delicious chicken, trying to get a cellphone signal to check if you can afford to retire right then and there. It's a bewitching place, where dogs miraculously turn to stones, and vice versa.
Town History
Due to the opening of the copper mines in Namaqualand and their transport route to the sea, Hondeklip Bay had developed from a single trading store, owned by a Mr. Grace, into a ramshackle village with four trading stores and dozens of wooden shacks and a jetty. It was, by all accounts, a horrible place.
Surfing in Hondeklip
It's Very Blue
Yes, it’s very blue. The entire Namaqua National Park is actually one of those ‘buy one, get one free’ parks. On the one side you have the endless Sandveld and Renosterveld plains, and then you peep over the sand dunes and see where terra firma meets the icy Atlantic Ocean.
Platsnoek
Here is the story about a ‘Platsnoek’. Truth be told, it is actually Dudley Wessels from Koiingnaas’s story. When we mentioned around the braai that we planned to surf the break at Hondeklipbaai’s wreck, he laughed. Whilst sipping his red wine, he warned that you could only survive the West Coast’s 8ºC water after a liberal application of said Platsnoek.
An Artist by the Sea
The Villain is a local artist who paints ‘oils, portraits, seascapes, landscapes, flowers, animals, and others’. His real name is Dion and he describes himself as an adrenaline junkie. Unfortunately, this penchant for excitement got him involved in armed robbery and he was sent to jail for 10 years.
Dog Stone in Hondeklip Bay.
Maybe it was the grey, inclement weather, but first impressions of Hondeklip Bay were not good. The sea was angry, the sky was brooding and the ramshackle collection of houses, plonked haphazardly in the sandy plain, were singularly unlovely. But then, the sun came out and the atmospheric surroundings slowly won me over.
Hondeklip Bay (Dog Stone Bay) gets its name from a small, canine-shaped rock that looks out to sea. The ‘ear’ of this formation was chopped off in the 1850s and sent to Cape Town as the emblem of the spurious ‘Dog’s Ear Copper Company’, which only succeeded in fleecing investors of their money before closing down. The rock was further damaged in 1970 when lightning struck off the ‘nose’, leaving behind a rather amorphous blob of gneiss. The rock is situated behind the police station on the edge of town.
Although this was once a bustling copper port, Hondeklip Bay is now a rather desolate place that is notable mainly for its wild, rocky coastline, excellent fishing and rusting shipwrecks that sprawl across the boulders like enormous steel carcasses.
