Happiness and Java in the woods

If you go down to Tokai woods today and walk through the fynbos you’re sure of a big surprise: the Secret Forest Café has popped up during lockdown.

I heard about the cafe when my son came back from a bike ride in Tokai. “My friends have set up this cool coffee takeaway in the middle of the forest,” he told me. “You should go.”

I don’t need much encouragement. Forest coffee combines two of my favourite things: trees and caffeine. Plus we can do the whole physical-distancing thing out in the open.

I rope in my sister-in-law for a secret coffee and arrange to meet her in a small parking area along Spaanschemat River Road (it runs through Tokai forest), masked up.

We amble along the path adjacent to the fynbos, dodging cyclists and small children on those push-bike things, teetering and tottering and supported by enthusiastic parents bent double over their toddlers-on-wheels.

There’s a milling of millennials at the Secret Forest Café, talking through their masks to Olivia Hedley, who’s selling takeaway coffee, cookies and dog biscuits from her mobile coffee stand among the trees.

We order two Dirty Chais (coffee plus chai) and I buy some chunky choc-chip (homemade) biscuits in a brown paper bag.

There’s only one small table because the idea is to keep moving once you’ve got your hot drink so we wander back along the path until we find a small clearing, in dappled shade and furnished with a couple of logs. The logs are the ideal height for sitting and drinking coffee – suitably distanced – and catching up on lockdown life, the sort of things you don’t talk about on Zoom or Whatsapp. We download a month of family dynamics and the intricacies of living in close quarters with our “nearest and dearest” for months on end. But the sun is shining, the dirty chais and choc-chip biscuits are delicious and, for a short while, all is well with the world.

Olivia Hedley put her events business to one side to open the Secret Forest Cafe in Tokai. (Photo: Melanie Farrell)

If you go down to the woods today you could find Bella Whiting serving coffee and cake at Secret Forest Cafe. (Photo: Melanie Farrell)