Incredible Rip-offs

Last week Microsoft released Windows 8. That’s not so much a rip-off as a small deception. Many of us started with Windows 3.1, back in about 1990. Windows 95 was really Windows 4; Win 98 was really Win 4.1 and Win XP was version 5. The awful Vista was version 6 ... now here comes the rub. Windows 7 isn’t, it’s really Windows 6.1, and 8 – believe me, it’s there in the works – is actually Windows 6.2.
But that’s not my beef. Last week a prominent computer chainstore sent me a glossy adsheet which announced that I could save an incredible R1800 by buying Windows 8 at the incredible price of R699.95 [= R700, they haven’t heard about 5c pieces yet]. “Limited to one customer; no dealers,” they puffed magnanimously. “Reduced from R2499.95.”
Isn’t that strange? Go to http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/upgrade-to-windows-8 and there you can download the upgrade for $40. That’s R345.60 at today’s exchange rate – or a cool R354.35 less than the incredible offer above. It’s a 2Gb download so it takes a while, but if you have a 4Mbps ADSL line it shouldn’t take more than about 15 minutes. Mine took nearly an hour, but I chose a busy time. If you don’t want to download it you can pay an extra $14.99 and they’ll airmail you a DVD; mine took 5 days to arrive. The total – equal to R475.03 – is still an incredible R224.92 cheaper than the incredible offer above ... and what’s more, you can buy up to 5 licences on this real special offer!
And so to maps. We recommend retail prices to our outlets, but we can’t compel them to charge those prices. We haven’t raised our wholesale prices since 2009, but we recently found that many of our retailers nevertheless put up their prices on a regular basis. How about that! You wonder how many retailers do that for how many other products! You should not pay more than R99.90 for our Table Mountain map – you can get it for that from us online, or for even less at Kirstenbosch or the National Park HQ, but at some retailers the price has crept up to an incredible R150 [of which this Kaartman, who put his heart, soul and effort into making the thing, is lucky to clear a huge R42!] 
Buy online – saves you money, and it’s 100% secure.
My incredible product plug is over, next time I’ll go non-commercial again. All the best.

Kaartman, Oktober 2012

Arguing with the ANC

A large part of politics is all about debate, the cut and thrust of fine arguments, the use of reason tinged with lots of bullshit in attempts to sway your opponent’s beliefs ... 
Years ago the old Nationalist regime ran out of arguments, reason and even bullshit and it became impossible to argue with them. If you tried you were simply dismissed as a Catholic, a Liberal, a Fellow-traveller or a Communist in that order of increasing opprobrium. It’s thus interesting to observe that, now that the African National Congress has happily abandoned any pretence at morality, or the practice of higher forms of thought, or indeed even the operation for which they were elected, viz. basic governance, they too are becoming increasingly difficult to argue with.
In essence, whatever you say, they have three responses, in this order, trotted out without consideration for such silly concepts as relevance ...
1. You’re suggesting that life was better under the previous apartheid regime;
2. You’re suggesting that nothing has been achieved since 1994;
...  and, the ultimate stinger, the thought-killer to tear apart any remaining threads of debate:—
3. You’re a racist.
For my sins I recently entered a mild email debate around the merits of a contention by Howard Zinn, that ‘civil disobedience’ is actually a Good Thing. I wrote:
“I think Mamphela Ramphele got it right when she said that SA’s problem is that the Codesa negotiators never set any sort of civil education in place. None of them ever sat down and said to each other, ‘but SA’s never been a democracy, the people don’t understand democracy.’ They thought it would be enough to put a great constitution in place and use the IEC to teach everyone how to vote. They forgot that very few Africans had been brought up to an understanding of modern democracy or civil rights or civil whatevers. The ‘mixed race’ peoples came from different cultures that had all been strangled during the slavery era, and left with a kind of depauperate Westernism and strongly authoritarian religions in place of those cultures; the Afrikaners came out of a tradition of paternalistic and religious authoritarianism second to none, and the Engelse were by-and-large either descended from the entreprenurial merchant class or from Irish navvies, and either way ‘rights’ were something you had in the home counties and need not worry about here in case the Boers or the Darkies wanted them ...
“That’s why we are ruled by an authoritarian, militaristic ‘liberation movement’ that has no understanding of democratic politics or civil liberties ...” etc etc. 
Well, I had no idea of the politics of my audience until one lady sent this as part of her first reply:
“There is a preoccupation in SA to point fingers especially at the new government and the fallacy that things were better before ...”
ANC Argument #1 ... 
I responded and duly received the following as part of her second reply:
“Are there any achievements and progress in our country? I can clearly see them. Why are they not evident [to you]?”
ANC Argument #2, right on schedule.
It was a bright sunny Sunday afternoon and I decided at that point that I really wasn’t prepared to spoil my day, so I abandoned the debate.
Now I’ll never know if I am a racist or not.
Damn!

– Kaartman, October 2012

G is for Grandparenting

Came across a truly wonderful blog the other day. It’s called C is for Cape Town, written by a young mum, a sunny, creative person who is housebound with her two small childers. It’s full of helpful stuff for young mums – experiences to share, coping with fractious kleintjies, holding birthday parties, getting play-dough out of hair and ears, watching important little people developing and growing up in a world that belongs entirely to them. Nothing mundane about it either – it’s as brightly-lit as its creator, and full of lekker, evocative photos too. C’s observations are more than a guide for parents – there’s a profundity to them, reflections upon life itself, thought-provoking stuff for any age.
C is for Cape Town has two little girls, fivish and two-and-a-halfish, and they are so like the junior generation of Kaartmans that it’s uncanny. She calls her girls Friday and Sunday – I’ll call ours February and September. Because if there can be such creative value in a blog about parenting, then maybe there can be a little in one about grandparenting.

Postman Pat Re-run with two small wrigglies

Not that I have a snowball’s hope of being as creative as C, but I guess a couple of our observations might be useful for those of you planning for your own future tribe of smalls.
Just as one’s own kids did so very long ago, grandchildren start out as warm, immobile little lumps that gaze at your wrinkly old face with slightly glazed eyes, then suddenly crease their sweet little faces into enormous smiles that would turn the hardest of hearts into goo. This is frequently accompanied by a fairly unsubtle sense of dampness and followed almost instantaneously by odours of an indescribable kind.
It’s at moments like these that you gain important insights into why humans are biologically designed to breed while young. The older generation – ourselves – are there to observe and impart wisdom, while the younger are there to change nappies, to suckle, to prepare bottles of milk formula and bowls of unspeakably bland porridges. Quickly, pass the smelly baby to its mum.

As the grandchildren grow older they become rapidly mobile and distinctly noisier. By the age of two they can reach any precious object in your home, no matter how high above the floor it may be, how deep the cupboard recess, how firmly locked the office. They can outrun any grandparent, and they can definitely outconverse them too, albeit sometimes in languages that only they can understand. But if you think that the crying of a newborn is a noise, you ain’t heard nothing yet.

They even boss the boss's dog ....

Mrs K and I played host to Feb and Sept the other day. Mr K – that’s me – is inclined to indulge in a short post-prandial nap in the middle of the day, something that is surely the birthright of any sixty-something. Mrs K also takes to the couch sometimes, but with F n S running around maybe she didn’t. Whatever the case, the girls devised a game involving large empty plastic barrels. Each barrel was loosely filled with small hollow brass spheres, each containing a number of loose steel ball-bearings. Feb and Sept then ran competitive races complete with loud cheers and cries, rolling said barrels up and down the rough-screed concrete stoep immediately outside my bedroom window.
A full description of the effect is beyond my creative powers. I swam up out of the deepest sleep, desperately planning to seize my wallet, back-up harddrive, dog and wife in that order and flee like the wind to higher ground before the origin of the magnitude 10 earthquake impinged on befuddled brain. As I sat up in despair February ran over September’s small bare foot with her plastic motorbike and the resulting shriek, more of anger than of pain, caused twenty-seven hadedas to abandon their systematic stripping of the neighbouring field of endangered frog spawn. They took off on hectic flapping wings but even their uncouth, importunate cries were no match at all for September’s max-decibel wails.

Grandad's boyhood dream; Share my toast, Grandad

I love them. There’s no greater pleasure than indulging in yet another rerun of Postman Pat, with two small wrigglies warmly sharing your space. There’s that small, warm hand in yours as you walk down to the pond to feed the ducks. The gentle touch on your shoulder as you peer myopically at your computer screen, and the soft little voice behind you that says, “Grandad, Granny says you must come for your lunch.”

Dunno why, but Granny has a predilection for gazing
into water (or whales) with the smalls ...

When did someone last bring you your dog’s leash [apart from the dog, of course] and ask, “Grandad, would you like to take a walk?” When did you last finish off the small plastic bowl of luke-warm macaroni cheese, the half a toasted sarmie, the marmite sandwich with the crusts cut off?
I love ’em. And that’s why we have ’em, of course. So’s we can love ’em.
Thank you, C is for Cape Town. Thank you F and S.

Going Abroad

In the bad old days rich young Poms would Go Abroad to Further Their Education. Or so they said. The cynic in me suggests that the most important motive was to reassure themselves that the Colonials were still backward, and the Natives were still firmly In Their Place. Their imperial superiority reaffirmed, the Poms would return home to their Sceptred Isle full of bullshit about lions, elephants, distant drums, unspeakable customs, diseases and decorative body-mutilation, and how you dared not drink the water.
Nowadays everyone who can afford an air ticket can Go Abroad from anywhere, just so long as your papers are in order. Some years ago Mrs Kaartman and I went abroad and were greeted everywhere without let or hindrance. Our pre-1994 Green Mamba passport had morphed into a dark royal blue stamped in gold-leaf with an image of elephant tusks, rock art and a catchy slogan in /Xam which, like Latin, no one can speak any more. Or pronounce.

Staying Abroad ...
Clockwise from top left:
1. Our friend’s modest little shack
2. Another gloomy pile
3. This one is still inhabited!
4. Morning Tea [elevenses] delivery to the SA Embassy: cadre deployment

Then everything changed. Our post-liberation government, bless their cholesterol-laden, overweight little hearts, decided to allow all sorts of forgers, Nigerians, golfing pals of the chief, Islamic Fundamentalists and Friends of the Mafia to make and distribute South African passports to anyone with a fistful of dollars. Without let or hindrance.
The Great Imperial Power lashed back with a vicious spasm of intense, creative bureaucracy, the kind of pen-pushing crap that once greased the wheels of the Victorian Empire and fooled petty potentates, chieftains and thousand-year-old cultures to sign away their rights and possessions in a welter of thumb-prints, crosses and mislaid birth certificates.

The Land of the Fat King: no visa required

Oh, you can still wait for three hours at the Golela Gate before presenting your dark royal blue book to a man with a broken PC and attitude, and with a flick of a rubber stamp he’ll admit you to the rotten fiefdom of a disgustingly overweight sex-maniac who rules his tiny, candle-lit kingdom by Divine Right, with two pink feathers in his hair raised up in a traditional gesture more usually associated with fingers – but if you want to really Go Abroad, to the failing fleshpots of the Great Imperial Power, nowadays you have to get a visa.
You can go online to fill in your visa application – isn’t that great? –  www.visa4uk.fco.gov.uk/ApplyNow.aspx – and after two or three hours of describing everything about yourself, down to the colour of your belly-button lint and which side you fought on in the Anglo-Boer war – you will be asked to pay quite a large amount of cash [they need our rands, after all]. The “fco” in the URL line clearly stands for “f**k colonials”.
But here’s the catch – you have to pay online, immediately, and you have to pay by credit card.
If you keep your money in a box under your bed, you can’t get a visa. If you still pay people with cheques [for the under-thirties: a cheque is a little piece of paper that we used in the old days to pay bills] you can’t get a visa.
And now here’s the next catch. In case you don’t normally buy stuff online you need to know this. Right at the end of your transaction, three hours after you started to fill in your application and you’ve dug your birth certificate, your marriage licence and your Crimean War Medals out of the filing cabinet, your credit card server will ask you to Please Enter Your Secure Code.
When you can’t fill that in because you haven’t got one and nor do you have the faintest idea what it is, try hitting Enter. The entire website, transaction, all those hours of work will disappear in a flash, never to be found again.

But don’t worry, the Poms love animals ...
Clockwise from Top Left:
1. Blue spot: even the pampered sheep have no fleas
2. Pampered UK kitty had tail-graft [but white tails were out of stock]
3. Pampered geese don't have to Keep Off the Grass
4. Pampered Welsh autumn leaves

Before you phone your bank’s helpline [‘please be patient, your call is number 117 in the queue’], read this – the only way to get a Secure Code is to buy something online. Anything except a visa. Just don’t ask why, because nobody knows, not even the banks. Go buy a cheap R20 mouse from an online computer store. You can always use a spare mouse.
Get over all that, do the form again, pay the fee, print out the appointment details from the website and not from the email [why? Only God and the Queen know], discover that if you live in Upington you’re gonna have to go to Cape Town or Pretoria to complete the application, keep the appointment to find that they don’t even look at all the stuff you sent them, get body-searched and thumb-printed, pay more to have your visa couriered to you [only credit cards accepted, hay] ... and three weeks later they will return your life’s documents and your medals in a plastic bag, with your visa.
We haven’t gone Abroad yet, but we’ll revert with further lurid tales sometime in October ...
– Kaartman, Augustus 2012

Dinky stuff to temp you into making that visa application – dinky streets, dinky church, dinky river, dinky view. Lekker hay?

The Clippety-Clop Blog

Mrs Kaartman and I began our married life teaching at Kettley’s Country Day School. I mention that because Kettley’s has not a single entry on Google, and it’s high time it did – anyone who would like to share anything about that extraordinary school can contact me at http://www.slingsbymaps.com/contactus.aspx . 
    This was the only non-racial South African school during the apartheid years of BJ Vorster – and it was, to boot, a private school that uniquely served the economically disadvantaged. It sadly died when a crooked lawyer wrote a crooked constitution for its Board of Governors, and a huge grant of cash that Anglo-American wanted to pump into the place simply withered away ... but I digress. My sole purpose in mentioning Kettley’s was a sneaky way of bringing me to Cape Town High School. 

A Kettley’s kid in the school playground

One of my jobs at Kettley’s was to find high school places for our graduating Standard Fives – usually two or three kids in the early stages of spotty adolescence. There were five of them in that year when all their parents wanted them to move on to Cape Town High School.  I was sent off into the City to see the Principal, hoping to convince him that our Kettley’s kids would be worthy entrants.
        Max Leeuwenburg was the Principal at the time, a tall, rangy man with bushy eyebrows, a ready smile and (so his son Jeff always claimed) a grandfather who had been a Dutch pirate in the Sumatran sea. Before I could put my kiddies’ case to Max he smiled piratically and said, “Tell their parents that they’re all accepted. Would you like a cup of tea?”
    That was that – no entrance tests, no academic records, no nuthin’. “Kettley’s kids are always,” Max explained, “an asset to my school.” Turned out that Kettley’s tiny contribution in numbers had led to a regular stream of Cape Town High head girls and boys over the years; my lot were no exception – two of them went on to become heads of their new school.

Some Kettley’s kids – a couple of future Head Girls and Boys
 amongst them – with some friends. At Toorwater hot springs in
 the Karoo; the two under-dressed little girls flanking the boy
 with the snowball have just come out of the 38°C pool ...

Which was why, a few years later, I went back to Cape Town High with a problem around a child who had reached the registration age for national service in the bad old SADF. The head had changed; Neil Berens was as tall as Max, with a beady eye and a ready smile but (probably) no pirates in his family tree. I put my problem to him: how to register this boy – who might have held foreign citizenship – for National Service. Neil smiled; he winked engagingly and piratically and replied, “What National Service?”
That was about 1979, and I reckon that this singular act of civil defiance might have been the tipping point that eventually led to the collapse of the authoritarian National Party government, also known as the Apartheid Regime.
At about the same time we got to know Neil’s wife Penny – not well, you understand, but through the regular appearance of the Std 5 girls from Micklefield School on an environmental course we ran. Penny was principal of the school, but the girls would be accompanied by June Clark, a most wonderful person who, as the girl’s geography teacher, was constantly embarrassed on these courses because the Micklefield girls were from the only school that regularly got lost. We used to set visiting kids off to find the campsite all by themselves; they had to walk about 3km down a wide-open beach, cross a large, open and shallow pan with no geophysical obstacles, where they would be met by local kids who would guide them the rest of the way (often by actually holding their hands).

Of all the schools who ever came to us, only the Micklefield girls regularly (in fact, on an annual basis) got lost during this challenging endeavour ...
Which is a sneaky way of introducing the very excellent Chris Berens, the son of Neil and Penny, who has made up for the geographical ineptitude of generations of Micklefield Std 5s and his father’s wilful disregard for dictatorial authority by becoming a most estimable mapmaker and artist extraordinaire. With Fiona Berrisford he is the creator of those amazing silver and blue moon and tide charts that you’ve seen in your own and your friends’ houses.
Chris also creates maps, and you can find out more about them at http://www.slingsbymaps.com/clipclop.aspx . He also runs MapLand, a spatial data management consultancy that specialises in a “common sense approach to mapping”. Which is why we asked Chris to produce this superb relief shading for our forthcoming Cederberg Hiking map:

Chris’s work on the left; combined with
our own height shading, on the right ... 

... and here’s a little piece of the final map, to whet your appetite ...

Click on the map sample to enlarge it ...

Chris’s own commercial maps include wall maps of South Africa, the Western Cape and Limpopo, but you should also visit ClipClop’s own site to see the full range of their creative genius: http://clipclop.co.za/index.html . There’s a great glimpse of Fiona’s wonderful mosaics, too. Buy ClipClop products now – they come in neat cardboard tubes and make absolutely fantastic birthday, wedding, Christmas, you-name-it presents, too.
Kom koop!
Kaartman, July 2012

A Bunch of Baboons

“Get Peter Slingsby’s Baviaanskloof map – a Baviaanskloof adventure without it is like a house without a stoep.” So wrote Barnie Louw, Editor of ‘Drive Out’ mag a year or so ago. Clearly ‘Drive Out’s sister mag ‘Weg’ felt that the stoep was big enough for two, and they’ve banged out their own ‘Baviaanskloof’. On the same waterproof paper, too, probably about the same size [I haven’t bought one yet], and R23 or 20% more in price. Oh well, competition’s good for us all, but I couldn’t help feeling that ‘Weg’ might have started off with one of the many areas that desperately needs a map, but hasn’t got a good one yet – like Richtersveld or Magaliesberg or somewhere.

But I’m not here to promote someone else’s stuff, especially if I haven’t seen it yet. Our ‘Baviaanskloof #3’ is about to hit the shelves [Friday 6 July] and it’s a substantive upgrade on edition #2. We never ever ever reprint a map without upgrading, and we’ve had great inputs from Jane Zaayman, o/c of the official Baviaanskloof Tourism in Willowmore, who endorse our map. At the other end of the Kloof some of our best fans are at the famous Tolbos Farm Stall in Patensie; Hetsie Scheepers gave us some good stuff to improve the eastern end. Finally, Dieter van den Broeck and his wife Sylvia Weel of ‘Living Lands’, who have become an integral part of the whole Baviaanskloof community, filled us in on the Presence Learning Village and their other projects.

Click on the sample piece of the map to see an enlargement

Add to that an all-round improvement in colouring, symbolization and GPS info that’s now in line with our other more recent maps, and first class world-class printing by Creda Communications, a great local company – local is lekker, especially local employment [we don’t print at three times the price offshore, in Italy for example ] ... and the price is still the same, R87.50 online, or even less at some retailers, for this superlative, double-sided map.

Entering Baviaanskloof at the Willowmore end: 
Nuwekloof Pass, Die Slot van Baviaanskloof, Rooikuif Rocks

One thing we could not determine – apparently the steeper parts of a couple of the internal passes are being concreted, but no info was available when we went to press, so for safety’s sake we have still characterised those routes as 4x4 recommended. Mind you, raising the Kouga Dam wall is in the pipeline and that’s going to mean the re-routing and rebuilding of at least 12km of the R332 at some future date, but it won’t be for a couple of years yet.

Willowmore cedars; Leguaan; Pelargoniums; one of the
 countless side-ravines for which Baviaanskloof is famous

In the meantime, enjoy the Bavvies with our ever-helpful map; there are 64 places to stay located with their telephone numbers, full GPS info and distances, and a host of activities from hiking to twitching, 4x4 routes, where to eat, where to picnic, all the great stuff I hope you expect from our maps. On 111 gsm waterproof, tear-resistant Duraflex paper, too.

Baviaanskloof people

You can even read it while sipping coffee, on your stoep. Remember – it was the first map, and it’s still the best!

Some of the 64 great places to stay

Witpoortjie; Kouga Dam; Combrink’s Pass

Kaartman, July 2012

Another Universe

Mrs Kaartman and I recently spent most of a week in Heuningvlei, a tiny Cederberg village of just 25 families. We were collecting local place-names for our forthcoming hiking map of the area [more info at http://cederbergmap.blogspot.com]; we so much enjoyed our contact with the friendly and enthusiastic Heuningvleiers and the incredible peace and beauty of the place that we’ve gotta share it. 

Heuningvlei

Heuningvlei is one of the Wupperthal ‘buiteposte’, a scatter of tiny hamlets on the Wupperthal mission lands. They variously house from two to maybe thirty families; most breadwinners are effectively subsistence farmers, growing food crops, rooibos tea, and herding goats, sheep and a few cows. These days they have electricity, telephones and satellite TV, but power in the fields and on the roads is still largely supplied by donkeys and mules. All the buiteposte – the cleanest, most litter-free settlements we’ve ever come across in all of South Africa [without a single exception!] – are situated fifteen kilometres or less from the Wupperthal ‘moederkerk’, and all are reached via a network of [mostly] quite appalling roads.
Don’t let that put you off; the buiteposte are villages from another universe, corners of astonishing beauty that lie like beads on a wire down the eastern boundary of the Cederberg Wilderness, from Heuningvlei in the north to Langkloof in the south. Some years ago Peter Hart and Denis Lejeune, amongst others, established [with commendable foresight, I reckon] the Cederberg Heritage Route, a series of guided, “slack-packing” routes that [at a price of course!]  will take you on foot through the mountains to home-stays and guest houses in the middle of the very buitepos villages themselves [see http://www.cedheroute.co.za].
But you don’t need to spend big bucks to enrich your experience of the Cederberg in these lekker little towns. You can easily hike – free – between various overnighting options, or drive – any high-clearance vehicle is fine, you don’t need a V8 or even a four-by-four. Or, for pretty moderate fees, you can be transported between them in bumpy but exhilarating donkey carts [take your own cushions]. You’ll pump some much-valued income into these needy communities, too, but make sure you have cash – no card facilities here, hay. No EFTs.

Klipspringer on the ‘Noodpad’,
the donkey track from Pakhuis to Heuningvlei

You could start at the summit of the Pakhuis Pass, where you can either hike the 12km to Heuningvlei with a CapeNature permit, or book to go by donkey cart [see numbers below]. That said, you probably and wisely don’t want to leave your car on the Pass for several days, so it might be best to drive to Heuningvlei. It’s a slow road but quite passable, about 1½ to 2 hours from Clanwilliam. At Heuningvlei the old primary school has been converted into a Backpackers’ Lodge. It’s been well done, too. We were there in violently-cold overnight temperatures [knypend, hay] but the thatched building with its efficient fireplace was pretty snug. It’s well-equipped, too – there’s even bedding – but you need to remember to turn off the mains electricity at night. There are very bright outside lights that turn on automatically at sunset – with no override switch – creating a bit of a stalag atmosphere that’s not much good for star-gazing, either.

Heuningvlei Backpackers Lodge

There are some truly great day walks around Heuningvlei; a permit is needed for the Wilderness but not for the network of paths in the Wupperthal commonage. The friendly locals will provide an inexpensive guide to the many peaks, caves, and rock art sites, too.
Down the track lie the settlements of Ghoeboom and Langkuilshoek [one house/two houses] before Witwater. It’s a high-clearance vehicle road, an easy walk or a bumpy donkey-cart ride. Witwater is a village with maybe twelve families; if you’ve never read M. I. Murray’s “Witwater se Mense” do yourself a literary favour – you won’t regret it, it’s a gem of SA Lit that’s not properly recognized. I blame Tafelberg, who never translated it and let it go out of print ...
About 8km from Heuningvlei you climb over Rooihoogte through really rich and beautiful fynbos, wabooms and tolbos and gorgeous silvery paranomus, to reach Brugkraal, a tiny settlement with pretty good self-catering guest house [details below].

Self-catering cottage at Brugkraal – the one
on the right. Note braaiplekkie behind

There is a three kilometre footpath between Brugkraal and Grasvlei, the next settlement on the string. At Grasvlei there is a really remarkable “toolshed” [see pic], and if your permits are in order you should penetrate the Wilderness for a few km on the Boontjieskloof path, to some of the finest swimming holes in the Cederberg. 

Brugkraal toolshed

From Grasvlei you can either take the awful road across the Tra Tra Bridge and past Agterstevlei to the substantial little village of Kleinvlei or, if you’re hiking, the “secret” footpath down the river, passing the Nooiensgat Waterfall before climbing over the nek at Die Punt and down across the Dassiesbos to Kleinvlei.

Beautiful view – awful road; the track past Agterstevlei

It’s worth spending some time at Kleinvlei. Not only is it a charmingly-pretty little place, it’s the trail head for hikes into the ’Berg to Crystal Pool and beyond. There is an impressive day walk to Wupperthal, through Sas se Kloof with its series of cool pools and its spring-loaded “bobbejaan hek” [sorry, you’ll have to go there for an explanation]. 

Pools in Sas se Kloof

        Kleinvlei has a small campsite for tents, with a kookskerm and ablutions – but sadly it has never had any visitors! It’s worthy of better than that; it was constructed in 2011 as a community effort in a beautiful little place that needs – and deserves – your custom. Go there, fans – please.

The Kleinvlei campsite: in the bottom-right corner of the
pic on the left; Right: the Kleinvlei guesthouse

There is also a self-catering guest house that must be booked ahead – see pics above and numbers below.
From Kleinvlei it’s a longish drive to Eselbank, starting with the bad track back all the way to Brugkraal. If you take this option you should visit Heiveldt and Kouberg before plunging down the steep pass into Wupperthal. 

Kouberg settlement, with Wupperthal valley behind

       The Kerskop Pass out on the southern side of Wupps is one helluva road, 11km to Eselbank that will take at least 30 minutes or more to negotiate [high clearance again, 4x4 not necessary]. You could also walk to Eselbank from Kleinvlei, a 6km walk over the Uitkyk nek, a walk that’s a bit dull and dry compared to most of the startling local countryside.

Accomadation sign at Eselbank

There is a self-advertising self-catering “B & B” at Eselbank [see pic], but, more important, there is the Ereboog and the Eselbank Falls, and if you have never seen them before you certainly need to – they are by themselves worth the visit to this lonely outpost.

The extraordinary 25-metre high Eselbank Ereboog;
ask in the village for a guide to this and the Falls

Eselbank is less isolated than it once was, thanks to some improvement of the road south to Matjiesrivier, but it seems to have a less carefree atmosphere than many of the other buiteposte. If you’ve ever wondered where Cederberg names like Filander se Werf, Muller se Water, Asjas se Kloof, Sas se Hoek etc etc come from ... well, those were the names of the subsistence farmers forcibly evicted, with zero compensation of course – what did you expect? – from their long-held lands in the high Cederberg, by the Cape Colonial Government in 1896. Many of them were resettled at Eselbank; their descendants are less than happy that the 1994 Land Restitution process set an historical cut-off date of 1913 for claims. For the Eselbank families that was seventeen years too late ... takes a bit of the gloss off CapeNature’s so-called “wilderness”, somehow.
You could continue from Eselbank to Langkloof, even further south, where there is an overnight home-stay, but I don’t have the details, unfortunately.

The track south out of Eselbank; heading for Matjiesrivier

Below are the contact details you need for days and nights that you will definitely not regret! Make sure that your camera is loaded with plenty of memory, too.


Heuningvlei:
Backpackers, donkey cart rides, trail guides: phone Dalene van der Westhuizen at 027 492 3070
Brugkraal:
Self-catering guest house: phone Evert Manuel at 027 492 3223
Kleinvlei: 
Tent camping and self-catering guest house, donkey cart rides and hiking tours: phone Mary Anne at 027 492 3025
Eselbank: see pic! – self-catering or B&B cottage, phone 021 931 4890


Bly lekker, besoek gerus, keep warm.
Kaartman 9 June 2012

Our Hood

We’re all apparently trending towards living in hoods these days. Back in the day a hood was a shady sort of gangster, or a thing that monks wore to keep their gods in their heads, or the bonnet of a car. These days it’s the area around where you and your neighbours live. It used to be a “neighbour-hood” but in modern cities you don’t know your neighbours, you only know what they look like and what their dogs and kids sound like. The “neighbour-” part has been dropped because it implies that you might be cosy friends with those people behind the vibracrete wall, which most of you are certainly not.
We Kaartmans live in a relatively peaceful yet ‘wild’ corner of Cape Town, with fish eagles and mongooses, the occasional boomslang and even a porcupine or two. We have a lovely if slightly polluted lake and great views of Table Mountain. We have a naval cadet base nearby, a scout camp down the road, and kids on kontiki-rafts enjoying a sort of “anything that floats” amongst the coots, grebes, pelicans and pondweed at least once a year.
It’s the human element that is much more interesting, however, but before I introduce them please note that I recently resolved to try, at least, to abide by one of the precepts that gave my late father a long and happy life.
Dad was always nice to everyone. As he said, you don’t have to like everybody, but you should always be kind, polite, and, if possible, smiley to them. He carried this philosophy to pretty dizzy heights, too – when most of the nation were reeling aghast at the ranting frothies of a fat youth named Julius, my father merely commented, “He’s a good-looking fellow – with an open and an honest face.”
Back to our hood, and my new resolution to be nice. On a rough count our immediate neighbours consist of fourteen adults, fifteen children and fifteen dogs. There are some cats too, and the Nigerians on the corner once had a bullock for a short while.
To the east G and L are saamleefmaats and they each brought three kids into the arrangement. G is a Pink Bulls fan and Saturdays are punctuated by loud roars as G’s hoary favorites decimate teams of feeble Australian and New Zealand wets. G also sings in the shower, “I’m forever blowing bubbles” – I kid you not – in a fairly tuneful baritone. The kids are sweet and usually pretty quiet. Sometimes they play tag on their roof which makes our dogs bark and their grandmothers blanch. I have to say that we like them as neighbours, especially now that they often shut their three very noisy hounds inside at night.
Next to G and L lives M, with tenants in the lower flat, and the only time we notice them at all is when red-wing starlings pinch dates off their palm tree and try to bash them open on our roof – with loud knocking noises that make our dogs bark.
Behind us used to live Tawoo and his big sister – at least it sounded like ‘Tawoo’. Tawoo was very small, four-ish I guess, and Big Sister bossed him unmercifully. She was strongly accented, as in “Deddie, Ta-woo’s takinawf his bayther!” They made lots of noise but we loved ’em even if their dulcet shouts made our dogs bark. They’ve moved away, and we miss the accents.
Across the road lives a family with a lodger and three dogs. These foul mutts bark continuously all day while Mom n Pop are at work; they often make our dogs bark. I’ve learned to ignore them most of the time, and I feel great sympathy for Mom who, whenever we meet her on the lakeside while walking our collection of mutts, is always suffering from some or other dire, life-threatening medical condition. It’s a shame.


Our real challenge, however, lies to the west of us. There’s a mom and three daughters, and I smile and wave at all of them and the mom smiles and waves back. They often lock their dogs outside their back door, where the pooches yap and yap and yap, but I discovered that by sneaking up and popping a blown-up paper bag on our side of the wall I could teach them to shut up. Now if the pups start yapping I merely clap my hands. This also shuts up my dogs and sees off raiding hadedas, who flee our narrow, high-walled garden with frantic clapping wings and raucous cries. Mom, daughters, dogs and hadedas I have learned to live with, and I can be kind and nice to all.
But wait – there is also a son. When he was a small boy we were pretty unaware of him – about once a year he’d kick a soccer ball over the wall and come and ask to retrieve it. Then he turned 14 and discovered pop music.
Now, we too have had our own kids. We survived their adolescence, and doubtless our neighbours also had to put up with smashing pumpkins and counting crows, but we kept them under control when we could. Billy, as I shall call the neighbour’s child, moved smoothly from very-loud abba-abba bubble-gum to very-loud rap. By the time our youngest was trying to swot for his matric we were moved to complain on a regular basis. Billy’s tastes moved into that genre of rap music and heavy-ish metal that tries, in every song, to win the world record for lyrics that squeeze in the most ‘fuck’ words (and all its variants).
The saddest thing about the ‘F’ word is that the only people who are permanently fascinated, amused, aroused, delighted and infatuated with it are all aged 12 to 14. The rest of us just use it or not, as an occasionally-necessary word. We’re irritated when it’s beeped out on TV programmes. We hardly notice it in literature or the Mail & Guardian, though are surprised to read it in the daily press or to hear it on the radio. We prefer not to hear it used by small children and are probably only amused by it when it’s used by 85-year old grannies with blue rinses and smiley wrinkles.
Billy’s family used to have a dog called Frankie; they were all forever beseeching the barking Frankie to desist. They also have a parrot. Frankie died of old age but the parrot lives on, and for years has entertained us with its accurate rendition of “Fuck off, Frankie!”.
Billy reached about 16 after two years of loud “fuck” rap and degenerated into something I think is called Techno. There’s House and Garage and Bathroom too, for all I know. Billy dropped the “fuck” and the rap – indeed, the lyrics altogether – and reverted to a rapid drumbeat that never varied and that he would play for up to four hours without stopping. 
If you’ve ever come across a three-year old with a tin drum you’ll know what I mean. They’ll bang it incessantly with a little wooden drumstick, until you have to smack them to stop. Billy is now about 26 and ten years on the drumbeat still hasn’t varied; nor has Billy developed in any way whatsoever since he was 16. We frequently smell the smoke of burning substances in the middle of the night, and their nature we can only wildly guess at, but I would not have associated these with Billy if his mother hadn’t told us. His hairstyle changes a bit and he’s probably a little taller. After hundreds of complaints his nice mother gave us his cell number; now when we want peace and quiet we merely SMS “shut window please” and the endless, inane drumming stops.
Then came the news that Billy and fam were moving out. Sadly, Billy reacted like any typical three-year old by playing his stuff at full bore. After two hours we sent the SMS. The reply was, well, quite rude; in it I was informed by this 26-year old child, who has never held down a job nor studied anything beyond whatever school Grade nor kept the garden clean for his mother in his endless free time that I am “a waste”. We’re very grateful for this bon mot – it has given the family lexicon a nice new phrase, as in, “Ag, you’re just a waste!”


I’ve got over Billy; my new resolution to be nice has firmly kicked in. As ultimate evidence of my sincerity in this I have decided that, on the day he moves out, I will send Billy a nice, kind SMS. It will say, no more, no less, than simply, “bye bye”.


Kaartman, May 24; happy birthday, Jules!

The Wildlife Blog

Just returned from a great trip to Wildest Afrika. My dear Mama always reckoned that the Bundu starts at Bellville – well, she might have been right, tho’ Barrydale could be a stronger contender these days. 


Whatever, the State of the Roads is probably the best bundu indicator. Before you take up Marthinus van Schalkie’s offer of a great holiday in your own country a brief assessment of the roads in different areas wouldn’t do you any harm. We set off from Ceres [why Ceres? – another story] on a grey chilly morning; at Ashton we took an impetuous decision to take the Klein-Karoo route to PeeEee. A good decision, apparently, when we heard that the N2 was stiff with rygo’s – you know, “Delay: 40 minutes. Thank you for your patience.”

This log was swimming in the St Lucia Estuary ...

You can get an enormous and only partly-digestible vetkoek-and-mince roll at a farmstall near Holgate [dunno if that’s “Holl-gate” as in English, or “hollow holes” as in Afrikaans], just short of the N12/N9 junction, which saves you having to stop in Oudtshoorn. It’s also the last take-away stop until Joubertina, apparently. Or Louterwater. Or Noll’s Halt. Or anywhere.


The roads were great until Misgund, which has nothing to do with manure, but means “begrudged” or “denied”. The reason for the name is impenetrably obscure, but it’s where the Eastern Cape and the slightly-worse roads begin. The Langkloof road steadily deteriorates as the speed-limit drops from 120 to 100 to 80 in inverse proportion to the number of potholes, until at last you emerge onto the N2 and you thank Sanral, toll-roads or not, for relatively decent pothole maintenance.

Top left: Duckface. Top right: Don’t call me ‘Duckface’.
Bottom left: A haunch of camelopard: bad tie-dying
Bottom right: Oxpeckers resting after a rough night out.

Fortunately the N2 neatly bypasses PeeEee; the next destination of choice is the Nanaga interchange [should have a “c”-click in there; it seems to mean something about breast-feeding]. Breast-feeding is not necessary at Nanaga as it’s the site of the famous PIE SHOP. A steady stream of traffic cops, police officers and cabinet ministers of both sexes were seen waddling out of the Pie Shop as we approached, giving rise to a new family expression: “pieman” or “piewoman”, for men and women who, though clearly not breast-feeding, might well be several months pregnant. With sextuplets.

Clockwise from top left:
Crowned crane, Wakkerstroom; Grey heron, St Lucia;
Pale chanting goshawk, Graaf-Reinet;
Trumpetter hornbill, Cape Vidal

Fortunately the N2 neatly bypasses Grahamstown: happily, you catch scarcely a glimpse of those ancient spires. Up the hill, past the enormous township, you reach the turn-off to Fort England, and here’s a tip you should take to heart. There are two ways to Kokstad from here: the N2, which fortunately neatly bypasses East London but goes right through the middle of Butterworth, and other unmentionable rubbish dumps, before zipping past Chez Madiba and descending deeply into Mthatha. From here it’s a constipated choke of too many goats and endless rygo’s.


The other way – Fort England/Queenstown/Lady Frere [don’t take the Dordrecht loop – turn right to Lady F] and on to Ugie, Maclear, Matatiele is only 25km further to Kokstad than the N2, and mebbe 30 minutes longer depending on the rygo’s and the goats. It’s a spectacularly beautiful road, mostly in good shape excepting about 10km near Lady Frere, with no huge trucks and hardly any cars [or even taxis] at all.

As above:
Portrait of a Lady: a white rhino ...
Gnus don’t have walls to bang their heads against, so ...
Zebras are reactionary ...
Warthogs are darn scary, specially redheads ...

And then you reach the South Coast, happily bypassed in its entirety by the N2. Fortunately the N2 also neatly bypasses Durban, but enters a region of successive toll-plazas, each one more expensive than the last. After three days on the road you reach Mtubatuba, which you should definitely avoid at all costs, then turn off to St Lucia, where nirvana awaits you.

You always get the feeling that something’s
watching you, when these guys are around

Well, nirvana would have awaited us if it hadn’t been pouring with rain and the damn hippos hadn’t kept us awake grunting and snarling all night, but the next day the weather cleared and we had a great time, walking beaches, chugging around lagoons in boats, stepping over crocs and generally keeping a weather-eye open for bad-tempered seacows.


On the fifth day we visited Imfolozi Game Reserve, a singularly beautiful bit of Northern KZN which resides down a very bad road from St L. It was here we discovered that KZN has the second-worst roads in RSA, as well as indifferent gate-guards at the reserve. Once in, however, we enjoyed a paradise of rhinos, impalas, giraffes, gnus, warthogs and zebras, but the much-advertised elephants were on leave for the day, resting up in their bushy hollows, so none were seen. Our travelling companions – we’ll call them Jughead and Veronica – were great company and a big help in game-spotting, though Jughead pronounced himself uitgewild by the end of the day and we returned to St L for pizza and a welcome game of cards.

Left: Bad advertising
Top Right: ‘Blacksmith plover, get lost.’
Bottom right: ‘Black-winged plover, get lost.’

There’s a pizza emporium in St L that has a resident live singer/guitar player and he’s pretty good. Humming “Bobby McGee” we set off to Cape Vidal, another lekker plekkie if a bit windy, swarming with waterbuck, baboons, samango monkeys and even a couple of interesting birds. Like plovers.


The road north continued to deteriorate rapidly until we reached the Swaziland border at Golele, where after a brief 1km detour the road became absolutely superb and, with few exceptions, remained that way throughout our stay.

Anyone would’ve thought it was springtime ...
these happy couples were spotted at St Lucia

In Swaziland you are not allowed to say anything nasty about the king. You are not allowed to call him a fat, overweight slug, a philanderer and child-rapist, a megalomaniac dictatorial leech upon the poverty-stricken citizens of his country or anything like that, so I won’t. We bought candles, walked, slept, stroked some lekker Rosecraft mohair – www.rosecraft.net – and took a superb road to Piet Retief, where the roads instantly became the worst of all. It’s in Mpumalanga, you know. One big pothole.


To reach Bethlehem you need to cross from Volksrust to Vrede; inexplicably, the only way to get there is down the worst dirt road you ever, ever saw, and it’s been like that for over forty years. You hope for better things at Vrede, but the Free State has the third-worst roads in RSA, where again the only good ones are Sanral’s.

No essay on Wildlife would be complete without a couple
of primates: clockwise from top left, at
Graaf-Reinet; at St Lucia; at Imfolozi.

From Bethlehem we travelled to Graaf-Reinet, and on via Beaufort-West back to Ceres. From the twilight shadows over the Great-Karoo, the sculpted folds of the hills north of the Camdeboo; the great plains of the Free State and the misty swamps of the Eastern Shores; the green, green slopes of KZN, the white sandstone bluffs of the Winterberg, the dark, lovely valley bushveld and deep winding rivers of the Eastern Cape, and everything you can ever think of in the Western Cape – jissie, maar ons land is asemrowend skoon. Its loveliness just makes you ache all over ...


Kaartman, May 2012