Back home

Back to green, introspective Cape Town, for a second, interrupting the story of our wide open dusty brown winter trip to the north.

This is the greenbelt on the other side of the garden fence at No. 9. That fence is now completely obscured beneath a tangled hedge of trees, shrubs and climbers, much populated by birdlife.  And on this, public side, these beautiful but exotic poplars crowd the small stream called - optimistically - the Diep River.

This is part of a wide green swathe of grass that runs down several kilometers to the Alphen Hotel (giving what we always called The Bog, the now-grand name of The Alphen Trail). It's really just a glorified dog walking area, filled with invisible heaps of dog merde, so I had to laugh when it featured quite prominently in The Times this year. I was sorry that the author of that article had not been led instead on an indigenous fynbos walk in the mountains just a little higher. This greenbelt is attractive, but stuffed with invasive or exotic plants - loquat, bugweed, morning glory, wild ginger, bamboo, pines and poplars - many of them destructive or obstructive to native plants and their wetland habitat. Sadly, it does not reflect the unique glory that is the Cape's incomparable floral kingdom.

The whole greenbelt underwent some extensive earthworks and native plant habitat restoration many years ago, but it was never maintained. Improvement projects like this, whether in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, or here in Cape Town, amount to nothing unless there is a budget for upkeep.

All of which is my way of saying that Vince is flying back to New York today, and I am very sad.

Tamboti - camp life

The view to the monkey tree hotel from our Tamboti tent (impala beneath it)

It was early afternoon when we arrived at Tamboti, and our half-forgotten camp routine, from trips to Nambia, the eastern Free State  and the Eastern Cape creaked rustily back into action.

I like to unpack what we need from the car in on one sweep so that once we're settled, we're settled: Choose food from one of the big plastic bins in the back of the Landcruiser, take out the Kitchen Basket (enamelled tin plates and shallow bowl [good for salads or a side dish], big sharp knife, small sharp knife, chopping board, cutlery, place mats, kikoi, matches, candles and their chimneys - I believe in ambient lighting and eschew the practical but romance-killing blue-white arc light glare employed by Serious Campers. And next time I'd use a bigger Kitchen Basket and add to it the four staples: olive oil, sherry vinegar, salt and pepper - it was a pain to haul them out of a plastic bin every time); take out the Breakfast Box (Illy coffee, sugar, enamel mugs, teaspoons, rusks). The little Cadac for making coffee in the morning. Plus clothes, toiletries, flashlight.

So that is what we did. We locked the food in its big, monkey-proof cage as instructed, and chilled what we needed in the caged fridge. A bottle of red wine was ready for that night's first sampling of the Karoo lamb chops and boerewors, and then we were ravenously ready for our lunch.

Tomato and cheese sandwiches. As fancy as it got. 

Strange fruit. Hanging in the tree branches above the path to our tent. Probably Cucumis - but what? I didn't know enough about them to taste, and knew that some are poisonous. I was hoping to buy a book in the park about local flora, but Tamboti was too small a camp to have a shop. Now I know that they are Cucumis metuliferous, or horned cucumber, and quite edible. But I did not know that, then. Pity.

Visiting the gone-to-seed wild dagga plants beside our deck were many small sunbirds.

And bees hummed around this sweetly flowering tree, below, beside the braai.

It was a little like hearing a new language and not understanding it. Over the next few days, slowly, as I realized that the bigger camps had names attached to the trees within camp to help identify them, I started to recognize forms and textures, and slowly speak the rudiments of the language of Lowveld plants.

But not a single shop had the sort of serious flora book I was looking for, which was a shame, and a missed opportunity for SAN Parks, which have a captive audience within the park borders. And this country must produce the best botanical books I have ever seen.

On a trip to the ablutions block I passed the daily delivery of fresh towels and linens to the tents.

The small communal kitchen below allowed people to cook on electric stove plates and wash dishes. Vince, the designated dishwasher, met his first campers here - the first of a steady stream of Afrikaans ladies: well built and compact, with short hair often dyed a shade of burgundy.

It's true.

We went for our first sunset drive, still rather road-beaten and travel-shocked from our long trek from Cape Town. Still a little uptight and unrelaxed.

You only take this picture once: wildebeest (or "gnu" as Vince insisted on calling them). It means you're new (gnu?). After that you hardly credit their existence. Poor things. They are the most overlooked animal.

And then the sun went down, at 5pm. And we turned back, to reach camp by gate-closing time, a strict 5.30pm, when the gates are swung shut against the night and its predators and the silent of foot. But not before stopping beside an antique and blue car which looked unhappy. It had a flat tyre and the owner came up to our window (you are not allowed out of your vehicle in the park) and explained in a heavy German accent that he could not change it as he had no tools. There was a pregnant pause, but we failed to offer to fix his wheel for him, but took down his details and promised to notify the park minders, which we did.

Back at our temporary home, we cooked our chops, ate the first of many iceberg salads, and settled in for a long and eventful night.

The Trip so Far:

Day 1 - Cape Town to Bloemfontein
Day 2 - Bloemfontein to Dullstroom
Day 3 - Dullstroom to Tamboti

Dullstroom to Tamboti - pictures while driving

The R532

Cape Town to Kruger Roadtrip, Day 3:

We woke in a dark chilly morning in Dullstroom to discover that our espresso pot was still in Cape Town. Serious business. But after packing up the car again we dropped the house key off at the rental office and queried the availability of such things in a very small town. Luckily, Dullstroom is a holiday destination for city sophisticates (and athletes who train at high altitude), and a coffee shop-slash-bistro called Pickles and Things came to our rescue. A new stovetop Bialetti was soon in our possession, as well as four shots of excellent espresso poured into our coffee flask for the road, along with hot milk. Happy days.

We headed back into the Highlands of Mpumalanga, up to Lydenburg and further north, to skirt the famous Blyde River Canyon - third deepest in the world, and where I would have liked to linger, before turning east to enter the Kruger at Orpen Gate.

Themeda triandra - red grass

Past Lydenburg the landscape and vegetation changed dramatically, with thorn tree savannah appearing and unfamiliar subtropical trees growing tall beside homes, fat pink flowers on their bare branches, roads red with dust. We turned off for a brief look at the canyon, driving higher and higher.

Thanks in part to misdirection from me, and undersignage by the province to this stunning place, we missed the most spectacular view of the deep gorges but these were not too bad.

It was hot - in the car our driving arms became tanned, and outside the air was warm.

A winter flower. No idea.

The scenery became spectacular as we descended from the high plateau to real bushveld. Tumbling water down striated cliffs, the escarpment rearing behind us like that place in Venezuela - Mount Roraima, rising from nothing in one steep ascent.

It was beyond my power to capture on camera, and I hope that the Frenchman fared better than I did. I took remarkably few pictures on this trip, either because I have burned out on photos over the last many book-months, or because we were seldom on foot, in the car, and I felt separate. Or, because the landscape was too big to honour. I can capture the intimate. Vince has the heart required for the epic.

You pick.

Fruit sellers had appeared in wooden shack stalls beside our road. Local avocadoes, sacks of oranges, large pink grapefruit. I decided to wait till we were closer to the park to stock up. This was a big mistake, as our final leg to Orpen Gate had not a single stall on it.

And then we were there, two gates materializing in a line of electrified fence. A uniformed, very dark skinned Tsonga guard attended us. He  scrutinized me with the most direct and penetrating stare I have ever received (as though searching my innermost heart for my intentions regarding rhino horn) and then asked unexpectedly (having found me blameless in the area of horns), How are you? This would set the tone for manners for the rest of our stay. The first thing ever out of anyone's mouth was, How are you? And they meant it.  He checked our reservation papers, and waved us to the next gate, several hundred meters on. We gulped and drove ahead. Within seconds we met our first elephant herd between the gates, and knew that our holiday had begun.

Tamboti is a collection of thirty neat and basic safari tents, each in its own space beneath an enourmous tree, situated above a winter-dry river bed. Ablutions were communal and clean, and we liked the place at once.

Dark fell early, after five, and our supper fire for the lamb chops purchased en route in the Karoo (and kept on ice all the way) was ready after six. A new routine had begun. Unpack fast. Make fire. Cook. To bed early. Up early.

Our tent was opposite a massive tree which was home to a troop of fractious vervet monkeys who howled and bickered strenuously all night. Sometime after midnight the local honey badger arrived, banging his way effortlessly into the honey badger-proof trash can near our braai fire, and digging for pineapple peels inside. For the rest of the night we could hear his progress as he visited each tent, BANG, bang, bang, down the line.

Unusually, we were both pretty sick late that night, around badger time. The Bloemfontein breakfast, the Dullstroom trout or the anti malaria medication? We will never know. But if Vince loves me after that, I think we'll be OK in the future.

'Nuf said.

I would go back to Tamboti in a heartbeat. We only stayed that one night. The tents were perfect - two narrow single beds, clean linen and pillows, a braai area (no camp was without one for each camper), an outdoor fridge and food storage area on the deck within caged doors - because the monkeys raid the food so intelligently - and a green canopy over our heads of a scale I had not really seen before, at least not since Botswana's Okavango, many years ago - the most gorgeous Ficus sycamorus. 

Noises in the dark, bright stars through the blackness of the fig leaves, and a complete lack of accountability.

What the doctor ordered, had he or she been asked.

The Trip so Far:

Day 1 - Cape Town to Bloemfontein
Day 2 - Bloemfontein to Dullstroom

Bloemfontein to Dullstroom

Frost on the Landcruiser's spare wheel

Cape Town to Kruger Roadtrip, Day 2:

We stayed overnight at The City Lodge, a commuter-type hotel in Bloemfontein on the busy and noisy Nelson Mandela Boulevard. We arrived in the early evening after a day on the road, the city where I was born obscured by darkness and tightened by a dry chill in the air quite different from Cape Town's grey dampness. New people, new accents, the bar and dining area filled with a very mixed-race crowd: white and black businesspeople spread evenly, SeSotho and Afrikaans spoken interchangeably - something I would never have seen during my childhood, when races were rigidly separated, and when there was no such thing as a black businessperson.

We breakfasted there the next morning, when the evening's cocktail area was transformed to a morning room, with a buffet spread of fruit - all from cans: pears, guava, peaches, and where we were offered stiff eggs, either scrambled or fried to a crisp, with limp bacon and tired sausages. We were unable to fire up our own espresso maker, for real coffee, which was just as well, because we discovered the next morning that we had left this precious possession in Cape Town.

We drove out of the city early, warming the Landcruiser's engine for a few minutes, first; there was frost on the cars' windscreens and a parking attendant for the hotel went to each one, pouring steaming water over the rimed glass. It seemed a quaint gesture. For South Africa this was serious cold, one or two degrees below freezing.

We eased to our cruising speed of 120km per hour, passing the new suburbs unrecognizable to me, and heading north, further than I had traveled since early childhood. The white grasses and tree-dotted koppies of the winter Free State gave way to flatter fields of parched sunflowers and bleached, shorn corn, and after crossing the broad brown Vaal River we entered Gauteng, the province that contains Johannesburg, Soweto, Pretoria.

The lands on either side of the impeccable freeway were now often blackened by fire, an increasing haze on the horizon spelled massive industry and population. Chimney stacks appeared, leaking smoke, and the brush fires were now sometimes beside the freeway itself, blue smoke blowing the smell of burned veld through the car. Traffic increased, trucks small and large burping black oil smoke became common. Road signs warned of "Hazardous Objects", miles and miles of poverty-stricken accommodation, small square houses in blasted front yards, plastic bags in fences.

The landscape seemed stunned, something from Cormac McCarthy's The Road or J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, post apocalyptic in the sense that The End had been and gone and had been ignored because no one had time to notice.

On the edges of Johannesburg the freeway lanes bloomed into a traffic whose movement and intensity resembled the working of a vast ant empire, every vehicle determined and loaded with goods, no slack given or tolerated, massive mining containers bearing landfill for dumps on the edges of the sprawl roaring beside tiny trucks overbalanced with refrigerators and  personal belongings, our CA-registered 4 x 4 foreign in this swarm of goal-driven GP (Gauteng Province) license plates. We were rare holidaymakers in the working heart of the country, the place that pumps money, without which South Africa's economy would come to a standstill. Traffic police in sleek BMW's attended rare accidents and kept the traffic moving with an efficiency I have never seen in America.

The smoke and the dust lasted for hours more, and eventually we pulled over to refuel at a remarkable gas station that resembled an air traffic control tower. Alzu's parking lot was filled with cars and trucks, their occupants gazing at the rest stop's incongruous collection of actual buffalo, de-horned rhinos and occasional hippopotamus. The bathrooms inside were made of polished concrete and floor to ceiling glass beside the animals, and filled with plush, fresh cut flowers. Outside, a guard in a bullet proof vest and armed with a pump action, sawn off shotgun presided over the carpark.

"We don't have anything like this in Cape Town," I told the guy pumping our gas.

"I hear it is more safe, but that the wind blows there," he replied.

We crossed into Mpumalanga, and arrived in Dullstroom one hour beyond the smoke, into rising and falling hills coated with tall dry grasses and peppered with evergreen trees. In the small town we collected keys for our rental cottage, a house so large it could have contained ten of us with ease, all with bathrooms en suite, for $70. It was beside a small cold lake, stocked with trout. Vince immediately changed and ran up the hill on its other side. I sat in a chair and sipped a gin and tonic, trying not to scratch my eyes out (smoke and contact lenses don't mix well) and watched a man cast for trout.  Then I pulled myself together and drove back into town and to buy four small fresh trout to panfry for supper.

We slept in utter silence and perfect darkness in a deep, cold night. We were at high elevation, and in a different country.

The Roadtrip so Far:

Day 1 - Cape Town to Bloemfontein

Wired up and plugged in

Baobab outside Balule camp

We are back in Cape Town after a two week trip that took us by road from Cape Town - South Africa's Southwestern coastal tip, to Kruger Park, in its Northeastern, Lowveld corner. We traveled from the green wet winter and snowcapped mountains of the Western Cape to the dry blonde grasses and baobab trees of Mpumalanga. We have thousands of dusty kilometers under our belts and feel as though we have been a lifetime away.

Dawn drives and thermoses of coffee, nighttime fires and beds under the tall peaks of thatched rondavels, elephants trumpeting in the bush near our tent, hyenas whickering in the light of our fire, and the comfortable grunt of nocturnal hippos. Freezing nights and summer days, and Karoo lions roaring at sundown.

Where to begin?

Regular blogging will commence soon.

Cape Town to Bloemfontein - pictures while driving

Finishing touches, 6.15 am.

Cape Town to Kruger Roadtrip, Day 1:

Quick pictures posted from Bloemfontein after a long day's drive:

Entering the Huguenot Tunnel.

More rain and many waterfalls.

And snow!

(Welcome to South Africa, in the Hex River Valley...)

We stopped here, several times: snow, turning vines.

And into the Karoo, chased by rainbows.

Good roads. 

And sunset in the province of my birth. Hello, Free State.

...and goodnight. Twelve hours on the road. 

But what a road.

The early bird special

There is a large flock of common waxbills that visits my parents' garden daily. They hang around until the seed appears at their feeding station. 

By the time they appear at their breakfast tray tomorrow, we will have been on the N1, the artery joining Cape Town and Johannesburg, for a couple of hours.

New birds and experiences await.

Breakfast with hornbills, for instance.