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 

Cashing in on a Name ...

I recently came across this fascinating item on a chat line:


Came across this online article ... Which referenced this website: www.slingsbymaps.com ... claiming to sell maps ‘Firmly based upon Peter Slingsby’s maps of the 1980s’, including for the Drakensberg ... 
However seems they are cashing in on the Slingsby name ...


That’s a first for me – being accused of cashing in on my own name. I confess, I confess, m’lud! Guilty as charged. I guess I’ve been cashing in on it since the day I was born, which means ... well, quite a lot of years now.


Only problem is, ripping oneself off is kinda unsatisfying. It’s hard to build up any steam over it. Being ripped off by someone else is a different story. Then you can really climb in, get up a good head of the hot stuff, throw toys outa cots, all that stuff. My Drakensberg correspondent above is obliquely referring to an outfit called Geomaps, for which I couldn’t find a distinctive Google trace. There’s an outfit with the name that seems to be in Kenya, though why they would make maps of the Drakensberg I dunno. The point is, though, is that after my maps of the Berg went out-of-print someone contracted the said Geomaps to make some new ones. All legit, of course, but to my amusement they copied most of the symbolization I developed, especially the path-junctions, distances, etc etc.

A bit of Geomap ... note those path-junction numbers [G61, G48], little red triangles, 
distances to next junction, etc etc. I wonder whose idea that was?

Back in the 1980s we walked over 2000 km to gather all that data – and of course that need not be redone if you can merely copy someone else’s work. But what no one told Geomaps is that it’s widely regarded as merely polite to acknowledge your sources. If you don’t, it’s called plagiarism. 

A similar bit from my map drawn about 30 years earlier ... sorry, 
the purple lines were management boundaries on this special edition

So there you are. Geomaps never acknowledged their use of my information in any way at all, which makes them plagiarists, and there it is. Cashing in on the Slingsby research, work and creativity, but not the name ... thank goodness!


Geomaps aren’t the only guys to do this. In 1977 we produced a map of the Boland Hiking Trail [Hottentotsholland Section] for the National Hiking Way; it was revised and reissued twice, last in 1983. By 1994 CapeNature had taken over the trail from the Dept of Forestry. Needing new maps, they didn’t contact me; they simply hired a guy called Derek Odendaal of Bergmaps to copy all my data and reissue my map, without any acknowledgment at all. Neither Bergmaps or Derek could be positively identified from Google, so I have to conclude that like Geomaps they’ve long since cut and run ...

A bit of my 1983 map of the Boland Trail ... note those flora notes, 
and those C, D, E, F etc habitat numbers ...

Mind you, I have to admit that CapeNature did acknowledge that I did the line drawings for the map. They reproduced them quite badly and took my initials off them, but they did put in the words in a corner: ‘Illustrations: Peter Slingsby’. Not a word about the map and its origins.

Derek Odendaal’s 1994 copy of my map and published by CapeNature
 – note those flora notes, etc etc

So thanks, CapeNature and your friend Derek, for a pretty hectic bit of plagiarism ... I notice that you copied but didn’t think to acknowledge the flora notes that I wrote myself, either ...


Much more recently – in 2003 – a gentleman named Robin Frandsen produced some maps of the Cape Peninsula. Frandsen’s maps looked an awful lot like my own 2003 map of the Peninsula ... they even used some symbols for which I had done the original artwork [and can prove it!], eg for Curios, Historical Sites, Whale watching, etc., and, remarkably, included all the wrecks I had marked on my map, even a couple I had put in the wrong place by mistake. Errors in some of my footpath info [corrected in my later editions] were faithfully reproduced, as well as as several names I had gleaned off old, long-gone maps. Amusingly, Frandsen’s maps also dutifully repro’d some errors on the official Trig Survey maps.


I wrote to Mr Frandsen, suggesting that he had copied me and infringed my intellectual property rights. He wrote quite an abrupt letter back, informing me that I would never win a case against him, and pointing out that Jacana Publications had lost a case against him in which they alleged that he’d copied their Kruger Park map. The expensive lawyers, he said, would be the only beneficiaries.


I decided that the matter wasn’t worth thousands of bucks getting excited about, as my maps were selling like hot cakes and Frandsen’s maps hadn’t affected that, but I did some research. Of course, if you just copy my map there is not much I can do about it. A map is a picture, after all, of reality; two maps of the same quality are gonna be pretty similar. So how do mapmakers protect themselves? Well, there’s the rub. On every map we produce [and I always do this now!] there is a small, deliberate error, one I have carefully recorded. Even Ordnance Survey in the UK use this form of protection! If you copy all the true stuff on my map I can’t touch you. But if you reproduce my deliberate error – well, how did you do that if you didn’t copy me? Gotcha!

I hope Mr Frandsen can spot my deliberate error on this bit of my Hout Bay map ... can you? Clue: it’s exactly where Frandsen placed something incorrectly on his map, just as I had done by mistake on my original Cape Peninsula map.
Prize: a free copy!


Have a lekker Freedom Day, y’all.
Kaartman 15 April 2012

J.O.S., 5th November 1919 – 13th March 2012

We laid my father to rest yesterday.


My father was a man of Light. He was the most positive person I have ever known. He never, ever grumbled – he was never a grumpy old man – and he seldom spoke ill of anyone at all. He and my Ma raised four kids; we all got married and we all stayed married, and we produced eleven grandchildren for them between us. Ten of those got married too, producing [so far] twelve great-grandchildren and two more buns-in-ovens. My father knew all of them and remembered all of their names, and who belonged to who, and almost to the end he made the littlies wooden toys that one day in the twenty-second century their grandchildren will wonder about.


My father didn’t only build a family – he was a Master Builder all his life, and his company put up many fine buildings and estates in the Cape. Nevertheless, I think his finest monument remains the Sanlam Hall at Kirstenbosch – a lovely old thatched hall overlooking the Gardens; it was the first building my father ever built.


My father encouraged us all to follow where our talents took us. He encouraged me to be a mapmaker; he made my first light-table for me, a contraption of glass that we used in those early days to trace data with draft film and inky pens. He helped to finance the printing of my first map, and he let me make copious draft copies on a huge ammonia-driven plan-copier that he had at his builder’s office. He encouraged me to write; my book, ‘Leopard Boy’ was one of his favourites.


My father and mother were married for more than fifty years, when one day a crippling illness laid her down. My father had cared for her for many years, but after she died he remarried, a sprightly lady we jokingly referred to as our ‘wicked stepmother’. My father was 75 years old then, in his prime, and in his new lease on life he and my stepmother travelled overseas, took boats to St Helena, tripped around RSA, joined Bridge clubs and made wooden toys for the littlies. She cared for him as he aged, and he loved her deeply, and the Light was undimmed.


My father reached the age of 91 and started to slow. At Easter 2011 he and his wife came to lunch at our house. He was cheerful if a little unsteady, but it was to be the last time he left his house. By the end of January 2012 he was bedridden and in much pain.


My youngest son, who is in California as I write and so could not be here for the funeral, saw his Poppa before he left for the USA.
‘I’m going on a long trip, Poppa,’ he said.
‘So am I, my boy,’ Poppa replied. ‘I may not be back when you return.’


My daughter wrote:


I think I said goodbye to my grandfather on Tuesday.
There is no tragedy in this. He is 92 years old and has been astoundingly fit and well for 91 and a half of them. He is ready.
We, of course, are not.
After spending 5 minutes with him, during which he held my hand so tightly and asked, through his morphine haze, so, so sweetly after my husband and girls, after he told me how proud he was of all his grandchildren and their children (he has 11 and 14 respectively) and I kissed his soft cheek and told him I loved him – his wife, my step-grandmother I guess, walked me to my car and said she thinks he’s ‘turned his face to the wall’.
He is ready.
His hand held mine for the rest of the day. Through the traffic and the kids, errands and chores. His hand held mine and I feel it still.
I think I said goodbye to my grandad on Tuesday, but I still feel his strong hand on mine.
I hope to feel it there always.

John Orm Slingsby, 5-11-1919 – 13-03-2012

I saw my father, conscious, for the last time a few days before he died. We made some small talk, then he smiled and made a small, risqué joke which I will not repeat. He chuckled, and the smiley creases around his eyes crinkled and creased and smiled.


Go well, Dad, wherever you have gone, still smiling.


O dis swaar, bitter swaar, swaar om ’n weeskind te wees.


Kaartman, Menseregtedag 2012

The Dog Blog – Smitswinkel Bay

We started spending New Year’s Eve with friends at Smitswinkel Bay a long time ago. Well, about 1995. Or 1998. They have the ultimate cottage at Smits. Not ultimate for its show-off mod cons, but for its position.


Position, position – position is everything, rapacious estate agents will tell you. Our friends’ Smits cottage is right above the beach, an eyrie from which you can watch everything – everything – that transpires below you upon the sands.


There’s plenty of ‘talent’ to be seen from the Eyrie – curvacious, young and sporty – but our early years there became dominated by a spectacle of a different kind. Not attractive in the normal sense of the word, but we eventually had to agree that SuperBoy held us all in thrall. Both husbands and wives, though the real treat was for the wives.


He was probably fifteen or so when it began. He stayed in the J&B House, a ramshackle, verandahed joint so-called for the flag it flies and which, we are reliably informed by our vet [who holidays there], can accommodate up to 55 persons. Sharing, of course.

The J&B House at Smits

SuperBoy cut right across our admiration for the variety of stunning bathing belles in view. He arrived one day and took over the beach. There was nothing he could not do best. He was the best surfer. The best body-surfer. Boogie-boarder. He thrashed all-comers at beach ball. Beach Tennis. He scuba-dived and crayfish dived and reeled in the biggest yellowtail. He swam further out than anyone [that was before Great Whites hit the headlines]. For the next four or five years he was Mister Smits, and no one could best him. 

SuperBoy – his face concealed to protect the innocent

SuperBoy was blonde, well-shaped, tanned, pushing pecks and bulging biceps. For all we know, he was even starting to shave [that’s a low blow, hey]. He had no rivals; even the best of them took to skulking behind the granite boulders. With most of the belles.


But the New Year came when SuperBoy did not return. We [husbands, anyway] heaved a collective sigh of relief. At last the nubile and curvacious could emerge from behind the boulders. And they did, for a year or two .... until a new threat arose.


Dogs.

1. Ten dogs; five people. 2. Six Dogs; two people.
3. Four Dogs; two people. 4. Four dogs; three people.
I rest my case.

Over the 2011/2012 New Year there were more dogs than people at Smits. Hundreds of mutts, large and small. Our attempts to watch the belles were constantly thwarted by canine antics of all kinds. We began to be extremely thankful that there was a high tide every twelve hours or so; beaches can happily be self-cleansing.

And as the dogs took over, guess what happened? O my god, there he was, dominating every four-footed mutt on the beach ... A sort of German Shepherd mixed with something, maybe [from his woolly flanks] a poodle. Or an Irish wolfhound. Or anything. Black body, very pale brown legs. Dominant, I mean dominant. He was the best bumsniffer. The best ball chaser. The best kelp chewer. The best shallow-water romper. He tried everything that was on heat or nearly so ... he marked the most beach-towels and discarded clothing. He barked the loudest and longest; he scared the Rastafarian fishermen more than any other lip-curling pounder. 

He had the deepest snarl and the longest and the whitest teeth. He lorded it over all the other dogs, and the bitches ... He left the most wee-mail; he could lift his leg higher than any ... he was ...

SuperDog.

Kaartman, Feb-inne-Skrikkeljaar

Go waterproof with Duraflex

Yes, that’s Duraflex, with an ‘afl’ in the middle [which I mention because I have several rude friends]; it’s a fully-waterproof, plasticized material that doesn’t tear easily [unless you split it]. It is damaged by hydrocarbons like petrol, paraffin and [surprise surprise] sun-tan lotion.



Been so busy with mapping the Cederberg hiking map and sorting the fantastic inputs that have come in that I’ve been neglecting my blog. Promise to do something soon about New Year’s Eve at Smitswinkel Bay, even though it’s getting a bit historical already.


In the meantime, one of the hazards of this game [there are lots, believe me] is finding a printer who can do a decent job. We had a great printer for ten years, then they sold out to a Big Corporate Bunch and suddenly those guys couldn’t print anymore. We went small, to a local around the corner. They printed beautifully but they just couldn’t get the folding right ...

You can jump over this
waterfall with this map
and it won’t suffer at all!

Meantime there were lots of complaints from our Valued Customers because the paper quality has deteriorated [it has – it’s made by one of the five Big Corporates who own South Africa, what’d you expect?].


Back in 1973 the first firm who printed my maps was an outfit called Creda Press, in Bree Street Cape Town, so we went back to Creda and they have, I’m delirious to say, relatively successfully reprinted three favourites on hard wearing waterproof Duraflex pampier. This stuff costs lots and lots more than it used to, but it’s still affordable.


So there you are. Now you can buy Cederberg [touring], Swartberg/Klein-Karoo and the Wild Coast in very good waterproof versions – but only online. They’ve got different covers to distinguish them from the paper, but the maps inside are exactly the same. Well, updated by about two months because I couldn’t resist it, but otherwise exactly the same.

You can dive into this duck-pond with this map and it won’t even sneeze

You can drop this map into this Cederberg pool and use it to skep water if you wish!

Meantime Viv Horler did a great review for us in the Weekend Argus, and here it is, in all its glory. Bit of a blogging cheat, saving me all that writing, but there it is!

More bloggy stuff soon, I promise, sowaar.
Kaartman 31 January 2012

Tail on the Tortoise

Time to talk turtle. Well, tortoise, actually – I’ve never been able to understand why Americans lump all chelonians together as ‘turtles’. Turtles [and terrapins] live in water and are all carnivorous; tortoises bumble around on the land and they are, as far as I can tell, the only herbivorous reptiles left on Earth. [I have since been reliably informed that large lizards – leguaans, monitors etc. – have carnivorous young, but these mature into herbivores. —Ed]

Mr Foley, the largest leopard tortoise I have ever seen,
lives at Sevilla in the Agter-Pakhuis.
He might be vegetarian but he has a disturbingly
hungry-looking way of following you around ...

We have a tortoise in our garden. She’s always been there [she’s about 25 years old] and her name is Dink. We hoped for a long time that we might find a man-tortoise for her, and he was to be named ‘Humper’, after the singer most of us have forgotten – that Engelbert fellow. However, the best we could do for Dink was to borrow an extremely aggro and probably carnivorous male [tortoises, if fed enough meat, convert – rather like pigs].

This violent fellow had mad eyes and a vicious charge capable of knocking you off your feet. He was affectionately known as Mad Bob. I don’t think he was Zimbabwean but I am certain that he was, like his namesake, a closet gay. Mad Bob used to charge around the garden seeking anything that moved, or that he could move; he could roll a metre-long round pole from one end of the lawn to the other, head-butting it all the way. 

This Yzerfontein tortoise closely
resembles Mad Bob, but has much
kinder eyes.

We would shut Mad Bob up by putting a panama hat over him. This usually resulted in him sulking silently under the hat, wondering in his extremely basic reptilian way what had happened to the lights. However, there were unexpected consequences, like the perplexed passers-by who knocked on the door to report that there was an unleashed hat walking around on our lawn.


Mad Bob was quite unable to impregnate Dink, even though he tried and tried and tried to mount her. She would merely walk away in search of dandelion leaves, and Mad Bob would slide off and land with a thump on the ground. Not very sexy. 

We had to get rid of Mad Bob when he tried to mount the cat.

My brother sent me this pic that graphically illustrates
what neither Mad Bob nor his namesake
are probably capable of

We think that Dink is probably quite a happy tortoise, though there is no way to tell, really. She wanders blissfully around the garden eating everything newly planted, especially small things with pretty flowers. She destroys groundcovers and gazanias in particular, but you can’t smack a naughty torty’s bottom. She’s not entirely untrainable, however – she’ll come to you if you call her by clicking your tongue, because she’s learned to associate the noise with red fruits, like strawberries. Every morning when we have breakfast on the stoep Dink arrives and begs at the edge of the grass, fixing us with her dark, beady eyes.

Dink enjoying a strawberry.
It was her second for the morning and
it defeated her in the end, but
she returned later and polished it off.

Dink has also learned – presumably the hard way – to avoid the grandchildren on their regular visits. Like our ancient dog, the Fat Dog of walkies fame, Dink only has to hear the wild cries of our angelic little girls, the crashing thunder of their twinkly little feet, and she’s off into the agapanthus. Agapanthus are good, because they also harbour large hairy spiders, the kind that twinkly little girls tend not to favour.

A friendly-looking torty
from Baviaanskloof

We’ve met lots of tortoises on our mapping travels; some have their portraits here. They’ve given us insight into one of those mind-games with which humans like to torture and abuse each other: intelligent design vs creationism vs evolution. I’ll explain ...

Kangaroos have large tails; they are essential for balance when hopping through the outback. Crocs use their tails for swimming and knocking prey about. Hippos have tails like fans, that they use for spraying their faeces all over the place; porcupines have short, hard spines on their tails with which to club their enemies. Dogs have tails for balance when they run, and for wagging at their owners, and these days it’s illegal to dock them. Horses have tails as fly-whisks ... the list goes on and on. And on.

But why do tortoises have tails? Every tortoise has a vestigial little tail that has absolutely no use at all. Like stomach-appendixes and male nipples, tortoises’ tails are an unanswerable argument against so-called ‘intelligent design’. Not only are tortoises’ tails quite useless, they also look amazingly stupid ...

I guess you could take this further and ask why a ‘creator’ gave torties tails, but if you are an evolutionist you’ll be completely easy with the explanation that their tails used to be long, large and useful for swimming ... as the fossil record, indeed, shows.

Speaking of which, I discovered something really interesting the other day. A long time ago a loopy cleric known as Bishop Usher ‘worked out’ in a fit of mathematical inexactitude that the Earth was created in 4004 BC. What I discovered was that this antediluvian nutcase also claimed that the date of this fundamental event was the 22nd of October. My birthday! Hooray! I was born on Creation Day! Isn’t that great?

Then I stopped and thought, if the unfortunate Bishop was right, as countless millions of deluded people (especially 60% of Americans) appear to believe, why is my birthday not a world-wide public holiday? Surely there could be no more important day of the year, even more important than Christmas, than Creation Day, the day it all began?

A large and rather boring torty
who terrorizes small children
at Helderberg Nature Reserve

Or does the fact that it’s not even noted on calendars, let alone proclaimed a public holiday, suggest that humankind is in fact a lot more sane than we all thought? Or [much more likely] that creationists are by no means at one about the day it all began, almost as divided in fact as the religious sects that they belong to.

Which is a pity – be really nice if my birthday was always a holiday. 

Tortoises and all that have only a passing link to maps – in Afrikaans their name is skilpad, or ‘shell road’. Don’t ask me why, but maps also have roads, so there it is. Happy New Year!

Kaartman, Summer Solstice, 2011

Clever animals

This week, some signs about clever ... and other ... animals that we’ve found on our travels.

Are you as clever as our baboons?

Could give you quite a scare ...

Can you stamp? Can you buck? Sounds bucking dangerous ...

The Ladies and Gents are around the corner ...

... The dung beetles will try to roll you away, and the elephant dung will ... well ...
Who wants dead elephant dung anyway?

and invading my dog’s privacy, of course.

... and you might be invading their privacy too, dammit.

This dove wasn’t all that clever.
It left this perfect print of itself on
my living room window ...
Ouch.

Just for fun. We'll have some more on another day.

Kaartman, nearly Krismis, 2011

What's up with tourism???

There’s been a whole lot of weepin’, wailin’ and gernashin’ of teeth lately about the state of tourism in our fair land ... in Cape Town there has been a disastrous drop in tourism despite all the fatuous promises made around the soccer world cup – Blatter got fatter, not to mention half of Fifa, Safa, Barfer and Benny McCarfer, but the rest of us got the Fan walk, the Fatuous promises and a Cape Town stadium that seems to get used mainly for a series of increasingly childish wrangles between the City and the WP Rugby Union. Complete with foot-stamping and toys-out-the-cot stuff. Edifying hay – these people are adults, really. Really?

... and World Cup benefits

In Cape Town the tourism debate needs to seen, notably, against an atmosphere of considerable acrimony amongst those worthies charged with actually promoting Cape Town through its tourism agency. Sadly, the fact is that the Tourism Authorities in this country are almost all, in our experience, Beyond Redemption.


Starting with the Honourable Minister, a spawn of the apartheid-and democracy-loving National Party.


I’m a mapmaker and obviously I try to promote my stuff – that’s my living. But I also try my best to make maps to the standards you’ll find overseas, to help tourists and, by extension, to help Tourism agencies and entrepreneurs.


So it’s really great when you come across Info Bureaux like the ones at Bredasdorp, Citrusdal and Clanwilliam, who use my maps to promote the enjoyment of their lekker areas by visitors. Of course they sell lots of maps too – helps me, but it also helps them, because like most Municipal Tourism Agencies they’re supposed to be self-supporting.


And it’s really head-scratchingly confusing when you come across Tourism Agencies like the one in Ladismith, Cape. They looked at my Swartberg map and promptly said, ‘No, tourists don’t want stuff like that.’ 
Then they whipped out a bad photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of someone else’s map [no copyright sensitivities here!]. 
‘We just give them this,’ they said disarmingly.
‘Strange,’ they went on. ‘They still get lost!’


O the painful irony.

My favourite map is this one. I won’t embarrass the agency by naming it. It also refuses to sell my map of their area. Perhaps because mine has names on it. Or it might make money for them. Or help their visitors.


The wife and I swore never to go back to Plett again, after the then-boss of their tourism agency shouted at us [yes, pretty rudely, too], ‘Don’t show me another map of the Garden Route! They’re all wrong!’


She never even looked at ours; reminds you a lot of 200 ANC members of parliament voting for the Suppression of Information Bill without even reading it. Ag, actually reading a proposed Act of Parliament is such a whitey tendency, I guess.


Lastly, here’s an email I received, unaltered [well, I spruced up the spelling ...]:


From: De Oude Meul Country Lodge 
Subject: Re: Slingsby Swartberg and Klein Karoo
Hello
It is a fantastic map and a lot of work has gone into it. People are not interested to buy it, but they love to have a look at it. Most people are here for a day, then they are gone. Some will stay for a day or two to explore Oudtshoorn. To buy a map? The question is : What do you do with it for the rest of your life? 
Hope you understand.
Boy Spies (Owner)

Clearly De Oude Meul Country Lodge does not cater for [or believe in encouraging] returning visitors ... I wonder why. Perhaps it’s a great place and a lot of work has gone into it, but who’d want to spend the rest of their life in it?


Jissie Boy, jy’s darem snaaks.


I’m not even gonna mention Calitzdorp, Prince Albert, Barrydale, Caledon. The Citrusdal/Clanwilliam agencies have sold about 10 000 Cederberg maps over the past few years. That’s about 10 000 more families better informed about that region than there are who know anything about Ladismith, or Caledon, or ... De Oude Meul Country Lodge!


I’ll end with two quotes.


Louis Willemse, formerly of FGASA and the best tourist guide in the Overberg, wrote of the info offices in his area, in 2005: 


‘The good news is the Tourism bureaux are coming alive at last. Thanks to you. After all they have been happily selling your maps all these years without knowing what the hell they were selling.’

The ever-cheerful Louis stuck in an Elim ditch

Maarten Groos of the utterly excellent Farm 215 wrote:

‘Oxwagons still rule in the Overberg ... none of the noise made by persons annoying you is of any importance. I think there was a line in The Brothers Kamarazov: “Some persons are as dust on the road; once the wind blows, they are gone”.’


Think on these things.


– Kaartman 26 November Twintig-Elf