Shaking the sand from our shoes

We are back from our trip to the Namib and the Kgalagadi.

Many adventures, more pictures, wonderful memories, new lessons, a love for dry places and an appreciation of rain.

Over a thousand photos later, I will slowly start to sort and sift and process, and hopefully will start posting soon.

There is food, there are flowers - in even the most unlikely places. There are dunes. There is sand and there are camel thorn trees. Bugs. There are bugs. And animals. And glasses of cold things to drink. There are sunsets, and sunrises, and rivers. There is the sea.

Vincent and I celebrate our first anniversary today, and know more about each other than we started.

More to come...

Blog rest

We will be out of cyber contact until late January.

Till then!~

x

Desert-bound

Namibia minus 1 and counting...

We have: a tent and air mattress sleeping bags pillows charcoal for fires a gas cooker food food food for on top of the fires. We have matches.

We have:

polenta basmati smash spaghetti stuff-in-cans-like baked beans peri-peri long life milk Illy coffee small cabbages biltong lamb olive oil parmesan and garlic. And lettuce.

And lemons.

We have water purification tablets that I doubt we'll need mosquito repellant tonic water tot-bags of gin EpiPens First Aid Kit candles binoculars drums of water rusks maps cameras chopper for wood and spade for holes.

We have two cases of wine and Prosecco.

Yes.

Shadow Country and Dreams from my Father to read.

We leave early tomorrow morning, next stop Vioolsdrif on the Orange River and border of South Africa and Namibia. After that Aus in Namibia then Sesriem at Sossusvlei. And after that a night at a guest house outside Grunau, the White House, where we will submerge ourselves in water with soap, and after that...we don't know.

I am discovering some things about myself that are not particlarly flattering. Like c.o.n.t.r.o.l. freak. I have always wanted to take the little side roads that looked interesting, not knowing where they lead, and now I can.

Now we must pack the Landcruiser. Titter. Talk about sardines in a can.

Oh, we also have sardines in a can.

Disa longicornu, Drip Disa

Where clean water clattered in streams from a mossy sandstone overhang along the Aqueduct on Table Mountain, my eye was drawn suddenly to a ghostly blue flower. A disa. But not the red uniflora I have come to expect in late summer along this track. Something more delicate altogether.

After taking pictures of the lovely things, we saw them later, high up on south-facing cliffs, where seepage stained the rocks dark and moss kept their feet cool. Quite inaccessible.

At home, in Prof. Jackson's Wild Flowers of Table Mountain, I read the following:

"This beautiful, pale mauve-blue Disa is rather rare and local, confined to mossy clefts in damp rock faces with dripping water in shady places facing south, from about 500m upwards. ...It was first collected by Thunberg in 1773, who wrote '...with great difficulty and at hazard of my life I got for the first and last time Disa longicornis, which is as beautiful as it is singular in form'.

"...It flowers for Christmas.

"A group of drip disas together [as seen on the cliffs, late]is an arresting sight, not as brilliant as a cluster of red Disas, but somehow more surprizing and poignant [italics my own]".

Of the late Prof. Jackson I can't help thinking of the quote of Petra Muller's that I love, "Ek is 'n man met blombehoeftes."

I am a man with flower-needs.

Olympia Cafe, Kalk Bay

Linguine marinara.

It is very good.

It will take years possibly, to arrive at your able, because the service is usually very very, very slow. Unfunnily slow.

Skeleton Gorge, Aqueduct, Reservoirs, Jeep Track: flora

There is actually plenty to photograph while climbing the stairs, rocks and ladders up Skeleton Gorge, so I'm not sure why I didn't. We saw lots of small pale blue lobelias, a crassula new to me, Crassula pellucida, with pretty pink flowers and a love of damp places, lots of moss and ferns.

Above, the solitary and striking beauty of the mountains, Watsonia tabularis, now coming into bloom. A picture of watsonias photographed by Vince above De Hel in the Little Karoo is in the December issues of Go! and Weg! magazines - last page.

Above, Erica cerinthoides appeared as soon as we entered sunlight from the wooded koof. Also called Fire heath and Rooihartjie (little redhead).

Above. Stumped. Possibly Bobartia indica in the Iridaceae family. Or Moraea virgata? Anyone, anyone?

Below, the very cool parasite Harveya bolusii. It feeds off the roots of other plants, often daisies. Harveyas are named after Dr W. Harvey, "an auditor-accountant who became treasurer general of the Cape Colony" after arriving in the Cape in 1835, "and who became chief author of that master catalogue, the Flora Capensis." [Wild Flowers of Table Mountain, Prof. WPU Jackson; Howard Timmins, Cape Town, 1977]

Another Harveya, H. tubulosa, I think. They are striking because they pop up with none of the preparation or context that leaves seem to provide. I think of them as the Paris Hiltons of the plant world. Lots of splash and zero substance.

Below, a helichrysum?

I would have thought helichrysum but I can't find it. Maybe an everlasting? Its leaves below are large and soft, and it was growing in a healthy clump with stems about 15cm long.

Below, Aristea macrocarpa - with no common name listed, which I find odd. It is a beautiful plant, just past flowering - this one was an anomaly, late for the party but hanging on for me.

They are usually very tall, up to a metre and a half, but this was about half that, possibly because of its windy site.

Lots of lichens and mosses on the rocks. This is where my attention span begins to resemble a flock of white eyes. No ID even attempted. It's just pretty.

One of the plants that seems to define both the Cape and fynbos, a leucadendron, L. coniferum, I think. The Botanical Society's 2006 Wild Flowers of Table Mountain National Park says that the bracts become red with age...so...

Another flower typical of South Africa and the language, a vygie. But which? There are so many. Ruschia, Erepsia or Lampranthus. This is where my ignorance begins to show. I would wing it and say Lampranthus falciformis.

This buchu below, made me very happy. [Ed 02/21/2009: and it makes me unhappy to report that it is not buchu! Also belonging to the family Rutaceae, known as the Citrus Family, also highly aromatic, it is nevertheless: not buchu.] We found several shrubs as we descended from the Aqueduct, beside the clear brown mountain stream to the reservoirs. Buchu is something of a mythical plant in terms of its traditional medicinal properties. I recognized the leaf as I have never seen this flower - about an inch across - before. The leaves are very small and very aromatic. Fresh, they are far more herbal in the culinary rather than medicinal in the cough mixture sense. Adendra villosa - China Flower, Shepherd's Delight. [The species Agathosma claims the buchu name.]

Below, a pretty little tree (shrub, actually), slender and pliant with the wind, Psoralea pinnata, or Bloukeur, dots the landscape all over the mountain. The pea flowers are very blue: Prof. Jackson says they are "extraordinarily difficult to do justice to in a slide." He may have liked digital.

Near the caretaker's house on the Jeep Track there are lots of pincushions, introduced, I suspect, by a gardener, though maybe not. Leucospermum, yes, but for the species I need a different book.

Vince spotted this gorgeous orchid in the dry and undistinguished brush. I would have missed it. Disa cornuta, or Golden orchid.

Each flower painstakingly painted.

Lower on the mountain, above Cecilia, the erica that brushes the slopes pink.

On a rock wall, dripping with seepng water, a colony of sundews, Drosera trinervia. Its flowers are usually white.

And the special disas we saw? Not the D. cornuta above. See next post!

Table Mountain Hike: the walk

We walked from Kirstenbosch, one of the most beautiful gardens in the world, up Skeleton Gorge, along Smuts Track to the Aqueduct, took a left to follow it down what is called on the map the Furrow, but which deserves a more scenic name, down between the Hely-Hutchinson and Woodhead Reservoirs,back round past the Victoria and Albert reservoirs on the Jeep Track, and into Cecilia Plantation to walk back to Kirstenbosch.

The whole thing took a little over six hours with many stops for panting (me), up Skeleton Gorge, photographs and a picnic at my favourite little mossy, sweet water waterfall.

The view from - almost - the top of Skeleton Gorge, just as one emerges from the indigenous kloof forest and sees what has been achieved after the long, shaded slog. Last year in late January we had already seen three disas at this point and this year I found the plants again but it is too early. They have buds, though, and in two weeks will be open.

Below. We were entertained and incredulous again at the complete lack of preparation made by some walkers encountered. The girl in the middle was making it down with slippery flip flops, but she didn't beat last year's blonde in high heels.

The guys surrounding her were resting, one with cramps, not having realized that Skeleteon Gorge goes straight up. They were headed for the Cable Station, without a map, and were under the impression that the mountain is flat at the top. It is not. We found them again at the top of the Gorge, asking how much longer it was and how difficult. I tried to persuade them to go back down Nursery Ravine, an easier walk than the way we'd come up, as two of them were very tired already and had a long way to go. The cable station had in fact been closed early due to wind (news given by other hikers, returning) so they were now planning to walk down Platteklip Gorge on the front face of the mountain. I'd like to know how they fared.

Boring Lecture, if you are reading this and are planning a hike on the tame mountain:

take a map

take water

take a warm/waterproof jacket: the weather at the top is not like the weather at the bottom.

take a high energy snack - local biltong and dried fruit are perfect!

Boring and oft-repeated cautionary tale: Table Mountain claims more lives than Everest.

Above, looking over Cape Town towards False Bay and the mountains to the East, SE.

The path taken. This leads to a sweet little wooden bridge which is perfect for breakfast if you are early. Or lunch if you are late - but we were pressing on a little. It crosses a pool and stream of typical Cape Coca Cola or tea water...something Vince is still uncertain about, coming from his turquoise British Columbian cataracts.

The aqueduct: this beautiful stone course cuts through the wild vegetation, making a lovely horizontal line across the fynbos. This is the place for the red disa, Disa uniflora, known as the pride of Table Mountain. But not yet. Give it another two weeks. Lots of buds.

One of my favourite places, anywhere. A little dripping water fall with ice cold, moss-filtered, clean water. We stopped here for our sandwiches (leftover roast lamb with arugula) and lychee dessert. And saw two very special and unexpected drip disas. Not the red ones. See next post.

Carrying on, the path moves quickly lower between two peaks, Junction and St Michael. The landscape has changed from open and windy to very green gorges, lots of ferns, water beside and below us.

I found buchu here in flower, and crushed its aromatic leaves for Vince to smell. I think it might be nice for cooking. It is drunk as a curative tea and tonic.

Pools formed as we descended, clean and clear and the colour of rooibos tea.

The kloof we'd come down in the background, having leveled out to the reservoirs in the middle of the mountain.

Complete surprise. The Hely Hutchinson Reservoir was empty. Still don't know why. We walked on the Jeep Track that starts between the two reservoirs here, an easy hour or so along it to where its start going down the mountain again. The wind was fairly howling at this point, and the last two reservoirs, quite full, had lapping waves.

Taking the jeep track down, skipping Nursery Ravine, we were now down above Cecilia, a local walk quite close to home, we still had plenty of juice in us to perform acrobatic floral feats.

Six o'clock saw us just entering Kirstenbosch again, with my right knee complaining loudly at all the downhill. Fern Buttress is in the foreground, with Devil's Peak behind.

So, I am in still in awe of this national monument of a mountain. Entirely city-surrounded and quite wild. We will be back, soon.

Next installment: the flowers

For Namib updates, check Vince's blog.