For a long time, Neels Dreyer has been growing specialty vegetables in the greenhouse on his property; he makes coleslaw, pickles small onions, and delivers baskets full of fresh produce to a home for the elderly.
Whenever he has driven through Damaraland, he unloads sacks of semi-precious stones and sets up the polishing machine.
Then a low hum fills the stone-working room until the most beautiful cut stones lie waiting on the workbench – but Dreyer is in no rush.
In his day, he served as a crew member on the SA Navy submarine Emily Hobhouse, where he served meals to the man who would later become Navy chief Woody Woodburn.
“On one mission, we took the submarine down to a depth of 450 metres. That was a record …”
Dreyer then attended a hotel school and became a widely renowned restaurant manager.
His first hotel job was at the then Safari Hotel in Windhoek, where he worked under the legendary Mr Pimenta.
Old Pimenta was the gentleman manager for the equally well-known Johnny Hamann, who turned Safari into a giant within the Namibian hotel and hospitality industry. They were pioneers in the tourism sector.
Dreyer’s entrepreneurial spirit repeatedly led him down new paths.
He indulged his love for stones and minerals with a prospecting expedition in the mountains of Damaraland – spending six months searching for a mineral “pocket” – before returning to the formal workforce to cater for the miners at Rössing.
From there, he went to Namutoni and later spent time at several of the then Nature Conservation camps, where he trained staff and – at the Hardap resort – met his wife, Megan.
Dreyer began establishing himself in the tourism industry; he managed the rest camp at Khorixas for the First National Development Corporation and started building a network of contacts within the sector.
Alongside his professional duties, he also speculated with cattle.
Then came a call for someone to manage a newly built restaurant – the one at Langstrand, back when the area featured a jetty, campsites and a tidal pool, and consisted of only two houses.
Neels and Megan put up their hands and devised a business plan … and one of the results was Namibia’s famous Jetty steaks and Jetty cordon bleu.
They were delicious and always 100 grams heavier than advertised.
People would drive over from Swakopmund and Walvis Bay just to dine there, and everything clicked perfectly (perhaps there is still a reader out there who owns a Langstrand Jetty Steak T-shirt).
Dreyer wasn’t finished yet.
The entrepreneur in him had awakened. Following South Africa’s withdrawal from the Walvis Bay enclave, he purchased some of the railway houses and turned a profit on them, all while using his tourism expertise to welcome the influx of visitors.
This marked the birth of Mola Mola’s ski-boat tours in the harbour area, followed later by day trips to Sandwich Harbour.
Numbers grew, and the tide of tourism began to swell. Initially, tourists drank coffee in a muisbos (saltbush) shelter just north of the yacht club; the next step was the seafood and steaks of Anchors Restaurant.
The 2020 pandemic brought its own challenges. Dreyer and Megan wanted to retire and travel.
Their daughter began to find her feet in the restaurant industry (at Godenfang restaurant at Walvis Bay), while their son – despite having a sick child at home – moved into the tourism sector and became a rescuer of animals, particularly seals entangled in nets and ropes.
And as for Dreyer and Megan, ask him about a stone, a cut of meat, or Walvis Bay and its people, and you’d have to call the police to get him to stop talking.
The lovely, good-natured Megan dreams of the perfect photo she’ll take next – especially of the Namib landscape – and she complains about the direction photojournalism and copywriting are taking, and how to keep brilliant photographers and copywriters out of the death grip of artificial intelligence.
Dreyer plants pumpkins and cabbages and polishes stones, because somewhere out there lies a “pocket” that has his name on it.
- This article was originally published in Afrikaans on Padlangs and translated to English using Google Translate.
