Self-catering [1]

Some of the most pleasurable mapping moments happen on research trips. Mrs Kaartman and I were surprised and delighted recently when we totted up all the places we have stayed at, and found that it was nearly eighty. Self-catering joints, that is, not the less frequent family-or-friends and the very infrequent hotels. Perhaps, we thought, it’s time to share some of our accumulated knowledge of self-catering, both the rough and the smooth. Not all our stays were recent, so the occasional horrors described here might, for all we know, have cleaned up their acts in the meantime. And their kitchen shelves. Windows. Under the beds. Musty wardrobes.
Not that long ago self-catering “chalets” [who concocted that awful name?] were very much a hit-or-miss affair. Some were wonderful, others were extremely basic, hardly more than mountain huts. Time was when you always had to supply your own bedding, and you collected the cutlery in a wooden tray from the farmhouse back door. Before you were allowed to leave, every last teaspoon was counted, every cracked glass charged for. Most places have improved a great deal, but there are a few things to watch out for.
Mrs K, for example, always checks whether there is a top-sheet under the duvets. If there is, a fleeting look of distrust attends her careful inspection of the duvets themselves. 
“If there is a sheet,” she wisely avers, “they might wash just the sheet after each guest, and not the duvet covers.”
We always take our own duvets on our trips, just in case.

Four of our favourites [see URL's below]:
clockwise from top left:
Baviaanskloof : Key by Katrien; Cederberg: Jamaka
Kogelberg: Oudebos; De Vlugt: Gykonna

In many quarters it is still probable that you will encounter single-ply toilet paper. Even the larniest-of-larnie ten-star resorts in the Cederberg puts single-ply into their loos, can you believe. This false economy [because your paying guests will simply use twice as much] is sometimes taken to extremes, with improbable brand-names like “Golden Ring” and “Butt-Soft” [I kid you not]. The latter two are made of a grey kind of blotting paper that instantly disintegrates at a touch, let alone a wipe. Once again, it’s a serious false economy, because you have to destroy at least the first third of the roll while trying to break through the glue-spot that prevents it from unwinding.

We always take a few rolls of decent double-ply on a trip, and so should you.
Another old favourite is to equip the kitchens with a pallid, yellowish liquid that is supposed to be used for washing up. You will use most of the bottle to create a single foamy bubble, let alone help you scrub fried egg off the non-non-stick frying pan with last year’s brillo-pad. The civilized places provide good old healthy-looking green washing-up liquid with a recognizable brand name; you should take your own, just in case. We always do.
A noticeable feature of almost every SC [as the trade know them] is the fridge. Very noticeable, in fact. So far, out of nearly 80 places we’ve stayed in, the only one we’ve not had to turn off at night is the one at Daisy Cottage, Traveller’s Rest. A night free of gurgles, grunts, belches and sudden impromptu high-pitched humming is what one prefers out in the gorgeous silence of the countryside, we feel.
Mind you, Daisy shares a different endearing feature with others we have known. It has a longspan metal roof; in those Agter-Pakhuis temperature ranges from 0° to 40°+ the roof spends all day and much of the night expanding and contracting with pops, groans and squeaks that remind one of the Titanic’s awful death-throes minutes before she plunged into oblivion. We love it. Daisy talks to us, reminding us of happy times.
Another feature of SC fridges is that they are usually set much too high. Open the door and turn the little dial down to 3 or 4 if you prefer your milk unfrozen in the morning. A very undesirable consequence of a deep-freezing fridge, as Mr Kaartman discovered when preparing his evening Scotch on the rocks, is that the ice-cubes anneal themselves most painfully to the fingers and have to be removed with hot water.
Thinking about it, it ought to be the law that anyone wanting to open a self-catering cottage should have to pack their weekend clothes and all the food they need into the car. They must then drive around the block or local equivalent, back to their own self-catering housey, which they may then not leave, except for a swim in the dam or a walk up the koppie, until the Sunday afternoon. That way they’re almost certain to make sure that everything in the house works [even the toaster], and that it really is a “fully-equipped cottage”.
  Maybe they will also discover that there is no such thing as an SC that actually leaves cupboard space for your food, so you spend your entire holiday with everything in bags or on the counter. 
  What’s wrong with these guys?
We always take our own can-opener, sharp knife and pair of scissors on our trips. A long lead and a couple of multi-plugs are a good idea, too. Take your own bath towels even if they have towels. Check on the price of their wood if you want that cosy, fireside feel in winter – there are, I fear, a couple of joints deep in the country where there is no wood to be self-collected, and the price of the bagged-up green blue-gum sold at the office is, well, exploitative.

Four more favourites: clockwise from top left:
Agter-Pakhuis: Traveller’s Rest; Cederberg: Mount Ceder
Stanford: Waterfalls; Klein-Karoo: Red Stone Hills

We’ve had some damn fine cottages over the years. Red Stone Hill’s “Ostrich Palace” near Oudtshoorn – it’s an old cottage, not a real ‘paleis’ – was one of the best. Gykonna near De Vlugt was brilliant. Jamaka, Mount Ceder, Traveller’s Rest, Oudebosch [Kogelberg], Waterfalls, Baviaanskloof’s ‘Key by Katrien’ were amongst the best. Highlands near George was probably the worst, one of those cold places in an alien pine forest, a wooden hut with a stove and rusty chimney full of holes so you dared not make a fire, languid, uncaring service at the desk and – worst of all – just two of everything for the two of you: two teaspoons, two plates, two forks, two knives etc etc etc – as though any kitchen never needs more cutlery than the exact number of people it is serving. Unfriendly, awful, a waste of money.
Take the bad, the ugly and the very, very good, and I would say that if you spend more than R250–R300 pppn on a self-catering cottage, you are being ripped off, and I’m dying for someone to prove me wrong. Most of the very, very best come in at less than R250 ... 
That says a lot, hey.
Next time we’ll regale you with a some of the adventures the Kaartmans have enjoyed in some of them eighty little houseys. Oops, don’t read that wrong ... I mean adventures with wildlife, with floods, with funny cooking, with smoke and fire, with strange loos ... all the stuff that makes travelling such a peculiarly lekker thing ...

Kaartman, April 2013

Noordhoek Beach

For a good leg stretch Noordhoek Beach on a warm morning is hard to beat. The sea is freezing cold, definitely only for wet-suited surfers, but as you walk along beside it it’s like having a giant, cooling aircon right at your side. You can take dogs and horses, too, but you need an ‘Activity Card’ from the National Park to make this legal. We once met someone walking a large grey wolf there, but I don’t know whether you need a card for your wolves. You don't really need a map for the walk, but our Silvermine/Hout Bay map will help you find where to start.

Noordhoek is a beach that has always had a wild loneliness, even when there are lots of people about – maybe because once you’re clear of the usual bizarre beachfront architecture of the ‘village’ there are no human habitations for miles and miles on the landward side. The great Noordhoek wetlands, remnants of the ocean channel that once divided the Peninsula in two, are a part of the National Park and apart from occasional muggers [none for several years now] are home only to a selection of small and mostly inoffensive Cape fauna.

On the beach: Boomers; Birds; Babies; Blondes

The ocean channel silted up several thousand years too soon for Captain Niels Pete Fischer Nicolayson, a Dane captaining the ss Kakapo, his first command. The Kakapo was a 663 ton schooner-rigged steel steamship built in 1898 and originally named Clarence. In 1900 she was sold to the Union Steamship Company of New Zealand, who renamed her Kakapo after a rare, flightless parrot [see below].
On 25th May 1900 the Kakapo, on delivery to her new owners and en route to Sydney, Australia put in to Table Bay Harbour for coal. Coaling was quick and like all ships anxious to avoid harbour dues she sailed for Australia that afternoon.
It was, of course, a wild and stormy night, with a rising Nor’wester. The seas were huge – the famous Dungeons, some of the biggest surfing waves in the world, occur off Noordhoek  – and visibility was poor. Mistaking Chapmans Peak for Cape Point, the officer-of-the-watch turned hard to port and steamed up Noordhoek Beach at full power and full speed [9.5 knots].
663 tons moving at 9.5 knots makes an impact, and today the remains of the Kakapo lie 60 to 100 metres from the sea, depending upon tides and seasonal shifts in the beach-line. 

The crew were able to climb down a rope ladder on to dry sand, but legend has it that Capt Nicolayson was too embarrassed to leave and lived on board for three years, through several failed attempts to salvage the ship. This is undoubtedly rumour; in the subsequent enquiry his ticket was suspended for three months, while a number of Kommetjie residents were prosecuted for pinching liquor [of course] and bales of fabric [why not?] from the ship.

The Kakapo makes a great destination if you’ve walked from Noordhoek, and a good turn-around point for a 2-3 hr walk. The rusting old boiler still dominates the view after 113 years, but be careful where you sit with all those spiky old ribs sticking up out of the sand. She was used during the filming of the Academy Award-winning movie, ‘Ryan’s Daughter’; if you watch carefully during the Kakapo scenes you might just spot – in this story of the nineteenth century – a couple of cars flashing past on Chapmans Peak Drive.

A kakapo is a rare flightless parrot and there are only about 160 of ’em left in the wilds of New Zealand. Most of these are apparently known by name. It’s the largest parrot known, being as large as a chicken – read all about it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakapo . However, if you want a really funny experience watch Stephen Fry pretending to be David Attenborough, and suffering extreme shock at a first-hand experience of the perversity of Mother Nature ... a must-watch at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9T1vfsHYiKY ... that should get you off those Oscar jokes for a while.

All the best
Kaartman, 28 Feb 2013, sojourning temporarily in Betty se Baai.

Free Walking in the Table Mountain National Park

If you’re bothered by the rising entry fees at Silvermine or Cape Point, or the cost of a card that lets you walk your pooch, and you want a bit of pristine Peninsula as wild as anything you’ll find down in the deep, deep south, you really should try the Kleinplaas Dam area on Red Hill. It’s a substantial area with lots of different walks, and entry is absolutely free.

Mosses; Mimetes; Mountain dahlia [Liparia splendens]

There is a small parking area off the Red Hill road, at the Klawervlei turn-off, but there are unfortunately security issues there. There is safer parking up the Brooklands road – turn off Red Hill at Pinehaven – and park at the red roofed house.

Brooklands

  The slopes across the valley are littered with the ruins of houses. This was Brooklands, a small subsistence-farming community that was evicted by the apartheid government. Rumour has it that this was during P W Botha’s tenure at the Ministry of Defence. Whether that’s true or not, it would be in character with everything we remember of that finger-wagging demagogue. I haven’t been able to find out much more about Brooklands – any inputs would be welcome. There is a substantial, built-footpath that cuts down the hill across the Red Hill Road zigzags, and I’m told that the men of Brooklands walked this way to work at the Naval Base, while the women did the laundry for the Officers’ Mess. Rumours?

Unusual views from the Kleinplaas paths

From the red roofed house it’s a short walk up to the Kleinplaas Dam. The dam is a surprisingly-large body of water, built to supply Simon’s Town. It’s one of the few dams I know that has a wall covered in indigenous vegetation – hence almost invisible from below – and it has a sandy shoreline that is welcome on a hot day. You can cross the wall to other walks, but we turned left to find the Grootkop Cracks on our last visit. 

Fynbos; Shelter Rocks; Kleinplaas Dam; Walking in the Rain

The fynbos is gorgeous and at a good in-between-fires stage at the moment, with masses of leucadendrons, sewejaartjies, blue lobelias, watsonias and mimetes trees. There are some rare dragonflies in the area, too, but I am no expert on those I’m afraid.

Sewejaartjies; Watsonia; Orb spider; Suurtjies

The walking is really easy; only the last stretch up Grootkop is steepish but it’s really not much of a sweat. There are some useful shelter rocks on the way up to the cracks, great for wet or very hot weather. The cracks themselves are moderately impressive, with some intriguing views, but don’t expect Tranquillity Cracks-standard.

Grootkop Cracks

There and back takes less than two hours; the route is spelled out on our Cape Point map [see inset below]. Other great walks in the area leave from the top of Black Hill [Glencairn Expressway], or a pleasant short ramble from Da Gama Park to the old Dutch stone forts [1794] that overlook Simon’s Bay.

Click on the map to enlarge it

Kaartman, Feb 2013

Table Mountain XI

A serious hazard in this kartograffickle game is the need to update maps before you reprint them. Maps go out of date on their first day in print, because the Earth and its human environment is a dynamic, ever-changing thing, and it’s downhill all the way from there. By the end of its three to four year shelf life the printed map will have several “errors” caused by changes on the ground.
I say “hazard” because, even with carefully-kept stats and projections, the day the last box of maps from the warehouse empties itself is an unpredictable thing. With little warning you have to drop everything and dust off the files, tear around taking GPS readings and cursing Google Earth because their more recent air photos are fuzzy and dark and much worse than their older out-of-date ones.
Which is why this kaartmaker spent most of the happy holiday season slaving away in the dank depths of his studio over Table Mountain. The map, of course, but also that marvellous mountain itself. TM is not a mountain to be trifled with – it’s a small mountain on a grand world scale, but all too few understand that it’s composed of three very large squarish rocks with near-vertical sides, arranged in an H-shape with the city of Cape Town nestling between the uprights. It’s the near-vertical sides of the lower part that are the problem, because there is literally only one single route up and down [apart from the cableway] where, as far as I know, there has never been a fatality or serious injury.
Which makes the mapping thereof a rather responsible thing, and why we don’t like the TM map to be out of print – ever. 
A related hazard is the extraordinary number of people who never update their collection of maps. “Oh,” they will say, “I’ve got a copy of that, I don’t need a new one.”
Which is a bit like using Fra Mauro’s 1450 ‘Mappa mundi’ to find Harare, Zimbabwe. “Here be beasties”, the map probably says. Indeed – that’s true; Mad Bob lives there.
In an attempt to thwart the update-denialists, Table Mountain XI is the first map we’ve published that carries a “Best Before” date. 

Sounds like a funny idea, but we mean it most sincerely. We get too many emails that say things like “I’ve used your 1974 map of Table Mountain for the past 39 years and I have to tell you how disappointed I am that there is an error on it. It shows a path called the ‘Trolley Track’ but when we tried to go that way all we found was a lot of old rusty barbed wire and no path at all ...” etc etc. They never mention that they also met Rip van Winkle and the Ancient Mariner on their hike. 

Quite apart from all that, it’s a simple safety precaution for you to make sure that your map is the most up-to-date available.
Nonetheless the redrawing was fun, and a riffle over the latest air photos [fuzzy or not] revealed a couple of interesting things. Like if you live in one of those very large pads at Ruyteplaats or Kenrock, at the north end of Hout Bay, you should be jacking up your fire insurance. Same applies across the valley at all those only-slightly-more-modest homes on the western slopes of Vlakkenberg (wake up, Cousin Robert!). 

Three-and-a-half centuries after the introduction of home ownership to the Cape you’d have thought that everyone would have learned the simple truth by now – there is never a question of ‘if’ fynbos will burn – there is only an absolute 100% certainty that it will, some time. This year, next year, in ten years’ time, it’s gonna happen ... and if it’s lekker old stuff growing taller than your house, well, you’re in for a lovely whoosh!

New features on Table Mountain XI:

* Distances and estimated times shown for all paths above the Contour Path or Pipe Track
* GPS coords in DD MM SS format at important junctions
* Completely revised vegetation distribution
* Some vanished paths removed; some new ones added
* Three Firs, Oudekraal Ravine and Constantia Corner routes upgraded
* Clearer depiction of many features, including dangerous routes
* All the features for which the map is famous are still there.

The price of Duraflex waterproof paper has forced a price increase on this edition, but NB NB NB – all copies sold online up to the end of Feb 2013, including those in the complete TMNP set, will be at the old price – so grab yours fast!

In the past I have used this blog for items of more personal reflection and even family history. I’ve decided to continue those, in a new blog and keep Maps for Afrika for more directly map-related stuff. Go to the new one to find out about an amazing herpetological discovery concerning Dink, the family tortoise ... Notes for a Novel and occasional anger-dumps around the extraordinary range of fat, rude, racist, stupid and corrupt politicians who with yawningly predictable frequency conspire to muck up our fair land, may crop up there too from time to time. 

Kaartman, Januarie 2013

Smitswinkel Dogged

Another great New Year’s Eve it was, but this year the Smits weather was churlish, with a Strong Winds to Moderate Gale keeping us battened down indoors, doing Sudokus, reading out of date newspapers and struggling with a 1000-piece jigsaw ...

There were fishermen ...

But no fish.

There were giant oil rigs ...

But no oil.

There were girls ...

But hardly any belles [just a few].

There were boys ...

But no SuperBoy.

There were scads of dogs ...

But no SuperDog.

And then we saw him, leaping giant granite boulders in a single bound ...

THE REAL THING AT LAST!!!

Kaartman – Happy 2013, hey. 

And the winners are ...

Lynne Smit

Enjo Nature Farm

Andrea Bruns*

Vanessa Boyd
Rudi de Lange

Well done! ... and thanks to all who participated. We’ll post to the winners as soon as the office is up and running again and there are no more mince pies or turkey left-overs.

*Andrea has pointed out that she’s the same as Enjo Nature Farm, and has asked that we pass the second map on to another winner. Thanks, Andrea! The next lucky person in the draw is

JP Watson

Well done all, and a Happy Happy 2013!

from all at Chez Kaartman

Season’s Greetings: Win a Prezzie

It’s been a good year for the Kaartmans [on the whole] – we don’t go for all the gloom n doom stuff that so many people seem to love wallowing in – so we thought we’d end our blogs for the year with a free gift for you. Or at least a chance at a free gift. 

Send us a message with your name and postal address [South Africa only] and on Friday 21 December at 12 noon we’ll draw five messages out of the hat and send the winners each a copy of our brand new, waterproof Cape Peninsula map. Ordinary postage, it should reach you by New Year!  Send your message via: http://www.slingsbymaps.com/contactus.aspx 

If you’re on Facebook you could double your chances of winning by liking our page there (http://www.facebook.com/slingsbymaps?ref=hl) and sharing the news of this giveaway. Every share will count as an extra entry.

And to you, whether you’re a winner or not, all the very best for the Season and the whole of 2013!

Kaartman, Krismis 2012

Notes for a Novel #3: About snakes

Time for some light relief before moving on. There’s an elephant in the room that needs to be winkled out – apartheid, a prodigious pachyderm if there ever was one – but it can wait for next time. 
      Not everything in the life of a rural child was – is – unutterably dreadful. There’s a lot of humour, too. As anyone who has ever worked with kids (or had their own!) knows, children of all ages come packaged with a hugely generous dollop of good humour and a massive subscription of smiles.
The Kaartman Kids were rural children, too, of course, with some tales of their own. When our oldest boychild, Kaartmannetjie (Manne for short) was about seven he and a ragtag of tiny mates, including his own younger brother, used to go out into the veld near our Plumfoot house to catch taddies. There was an open sandy break there, a place where cables or pipes had once been laid, known to the kleintjies as the “Sandy Track”. The winter rains would fill the sandy depressions with clean, clear water, breeding grounds for frogs of several kinds. For weeks the puddles would be filled with thousands of wriggly tadpoles, all desperately growing and metamorphosing before the early summer sunshine dried up their nurseries and turned the unlucky ones into tiny shreds of biltong.
Manne and his mates would squat at edge of a puddle, their homemade nets hopefully scooping the water for hapless pollywogs, glass jars of pond water waiting to take home the catch. It was one of the truly great privileges of a rural childhood that even kids so small could enjoy that kind of freedom, unsupervised but within earshot of Mrs Kaartman’s voluble call that would summon them to the next meal, or baths, or whatever. So it was that one bright September morning the small people were well-established at their puddleside posts when Dickie, a neighbour’s kid, poked Manne in the ribs and whispered, “Mannetjie, what’s that?”
Manne looked up and froze. “Keep very still,” he whispered to the others; “If you keep absolutely still it won’t see you and it will go away.”

They all sat very, very still as a very large puff adder sidled slowly down across the sand, its black forked tongue flickering in and out of its clamped mouth, its deadly fangs hidden beneath its broad, pig-flat nose.
“Shhh!” whispered Manne softly as the fat, yellow-chevronned snake sniffed the water with its tongue, then immersed half its head and drank, long slow gulps that rolled and pulsated down its scaly sides. The serpent blew a few bubbles from its submerged nostrils, then withdrew from the water and slowly turned around. It was huge, one of the biggest snakes any of them had ever seen, and for a few moments its yellow, unlidded eyes met Manne’s. Then it turned and oozed away – puff adders don’t wriggle, they sort of ooze with subtle, peristaltic waves of ribs through patterned hide. Some people are repulsed by them; herpetologists love ’em.
When the snake had gone Kaartmannetjie stood up. “What was it?” whispered Dickie.
“It was a puff adder,” Manne breathed; “and if any of you ever tell Mum that we saw it here, I promise I’ll kill you!”
The manifest sincerity in Manne’s threat clearly impressed the ragtag, for nary a word of this was ever spoken by any of them, either to Mrs Kaartman or their own mamas. Manne confessed to his mother just last year, for the first time. It might have been his 33rd birthday, a full quarter-century post facto, but Mrs K was undeterred. “If I ever catch you going to the Sandy Track to catch taddies ... ever again ... I’ll tan your hide, young man!”
Of course the junior Kaartmanne were amongst the privileged rural kids. That was an accident of their birth, not their fault, and, as we shall see, lack of privilege did not prevent a great many funny things happening amongst the less well-off. Nevertheless, despite the freedoms the Kaartman Kids enjoyed they did have a few disadvantages, compared to city kids. Mrs K once landed on the first floor of the Golden Acre building in Cape Town, with an urgent bus to catch on the ground floor. The only apparent way down was via the escalators. The littlest Kaartman, these days an urbane, well-travelled scientist of growing repute, had never seen an escalator in his life and nothing, not even the loving arms of his mama, could persuade him to descend a machine that regurgitated and then swallowed its own steps. It took them half-an-hour to find the fixed stairs, and by then the bus had long gone ...
I have tales of rural waifs visiting the big city, too, but those will have to wait for another day.

Kaartman, December 2012

Fat Dog’s Last Walk

Mourning Minnie

Minnie’s book, “Walks with a Fat Dog”, went out of print in April 2012. Minnie outlived her book by just eight months.

All the Kaartman dogs have been the Best Kind: indeterminate Faithfuls just as totally descended from wolves as any snooty pedigreed woossies with bad hips and pink bows in their just-as-smelly powdered hair. The Official Birthday for all our dogs is July 5th. On July 5th this year Minnie turned 15. That’s supposed to be 105 in Dog Years, a helluvan age when blindness and deafness are just so very excusable, and manageable too.

Minnie came into our lives by mistake. Annie, her predecessor, chewed up some organo-phosphates left by a callous farmer to thwart his jackals, and died in agony in the vet’s arms in Vredendal, up the West Coast. Days after the Kaartmans returned home fighting tears a friend phoned. A friend of the friend had a dog, a brakkie that had stopped the traffic on the N2 near the airport. Fleeing in terror through squealing tyres from several overweight traffic cops, the brak had jumped eagerly into the opened door of the friend’s friend’s car. 

She was filthy and shaggy with dreadlocks, but the vet said that she was in good shape, a well-kept dog, probably just lost or stolen, a properly spayed bitch who had had at least one litter of pups. He cleaned her up and got her hair cut, and the friend’s friend called her ‘Sophie’ and set about finding a home for her because they already had five pooches of their own.

We renamed her Minnie because she was so like Annie that we kept using that name, and ‘Minnie’ seemed closer to ‘Annie’ than ‘Sophie’. Besides, she didn’t look much like Meryl Streep. She was the soppiest dog we’ve ever known, with a most fetching habit of snuggling her head up against you if you picked her up. 

Minnie had wondrously soft fur; we later discovered that, if not a thoroughbred, she was so like a breed called a “wheaten soft-haired Irish terrier” that she had to have lots of that amongst her varieties. She was wheaten coloured, soft-haired and, if truth be told, not the brightest spark as doggies go, but she was incredibly faithful and loving and a brilliant walker, too. She was never really fat, but her soft fur grew very rapidly and if not groomed every three to four weeks she blew up into a furry ball. We couldn’t call our book “Walks with a Fat Wife”, could we? – and Minnie didn’t mind being the patsy. 

Her white and wheaten coat would get pretty smelly and descend into that grubby-pyjamas look that tends to turn visitors into stand-offs, but whenever she’d been groomed everyone loved her. She was a helluva flirt, chasing the boy-dogs whenever she saw them, but toys like tennis balls were quite beyond her understanding.

The sadness that goes with your beloved pets’ short lives is a cliché, I guess, but you can’t avoid it. Unconditional love, forgiveness, hope, affection are tough things to lose. This morning when Minnie came into the kitchen I knew it was Time. Her legs just wouldn’t work properly; she’d messed herself; she couldn’t see me or hear me. She wagged her tail when I touched her, but she howled in pain when we tried to clean her.

“You’ll know when it’s time,” the radio vet had said. “Always remember this – you can do a kindness for your pet that you can’t do for your human loved ones. And your beloved pet will never hold it against you, either.”

Totsiens, hondjie.

Kaartman, November 30 2012

Being Abroad

Spent most of September 2012 in the United Kingdom, visiting family and parts previously unknown to us – Scotland and the Western Isles, northern Wales, the Northumberland coast ... a fabulous trip when Mrs Kaartman and I spent only one night of thirty out of the company of excellent friends or family.

The Cutty Sark [London];
the 1400-year old Chapel of St Columba [Mull of Kintyre]

It was an absolute treat. Travel leads to interesting reflections – despite being a born and bred Suid-Afrikaner with African roots snatching back to the 17th century, I find myself strongly drawn to those northern isles. I love them, even their grotty bits (and they have ’em!) – but I could not live there. Not sure why. Too cold? I love the sun-soaked, dry interior of my country – it speaks to me with very persuasive voices. I love empty spaces, too. We found one in the UK – I’m sure there are more. Rannoch Moor is remote; in the middle of it is a railway siding that is reached by a single, dead-end road. It is the place that is the furthest from anywhere else in the whole of the British Isles. It’s bleak, lonely and lovely, but it has not the colours, the skies, the scents of the remote Karoo. It’s too different: I loved the visit, even the proliferation of dank and cheerless Scots monuments, but I could not live there.

A gloomy Scottish B&B: no toilets;
A pale and gloomy Scottish knight

You might say that it’s too cold and wet, and there are too many people, so many that to accommodate them all and their cars the motorway lanes are terribly narrow, the houses small and viewless, the supermarkets inhumanly vast, the traffic always and everywhere congested. But we did not complain. Congestion is what happens when a country has too many people (imagine China or India!), and when you know you’re merely a visitor you love the lovable, you ogle and gasp, and you embrace a bit of a branch – it’s only one of many branches, hey – of your cultural roots. It’s not your place as a visitor to complain, to criticise; you don’t live there, your four weeks are too short for you to contribute anything at all. My fierce maternal grandmother always said that the rudest, most uncouth thing a guest could do was to complain about the house and household of his host. Her name was Grace; she was not a person one easily crossed.

Good thing Poms can’t read Afrikaans;
Was that really Mrs Gripper’s first name?

Which is why I was perturbed by an email recently received from a friend of many years standing; and why I need to address some remarks to you, John. It seems daft and improbable that we were in England, unknowingly, only a few miles from where you now live, and even more daft that when, a few weeks later, you appeared in South Africa, we were away in the desert. So sorry to have missed you, old friend, and to have missed the chance to interrogate why and when you left SA – apparently with your boys? I have no problems with your emigration, your adoption of England as a your new home. Time was when we might have done the same – the Kaartmans even contemplated Australia, until we decided that we could stay here if – a big ‘if’ of course – we could contribute meaningfully to change. But that’s our story, for another meeting. This one is about you. 
Down the ages people have uprooted themselves and moved, given the chance. Down the ages people have rejected the “take root or die” option, and sought greener pastures. It’s why human beings occupy our entire planet, after all! Without that urge humanity might, for better or worse, have remained squatting around the fading firelight in Klasies River Cave, gnawing at an endless diet of blue mussels and half-done porcupine. I have no problems at all with your re-location.

Re-located Romans:
Kaartman inspects Hadrian’s defences; apartheid failed there too!
Kaartman being sacrilegious in the Sacrum 

But having relocated of your own free choice you’re now a Brit, and you’re a guest when you visit South Africa, a guest as Granma Grace described. Yet you wrote to me (and others), “I now desperately want to get home to the UK ... ”
Why were you, our guest, so desperate to get home to the UK? Because, as you also wrote, most B and B’s you stayed in in SA were like ‘toilets’? The Kaartman’s mapping takes us all over our country; we’ve stayed in a huge variety of lodgings, but hell man, you had bad luck – none of ours were like toilets. In fact, every single one of them was as good as anywhere we stayed in in the UK – and I include the Welsh Georgian hotel at £250 per night (for the same price, in Wales you could go ‘glamping’ in a luxury tent sourced from Cristy Sports, in Diep River, Cape Town, or bathe in a Sundance pool imported from Somerset West ... but I digress ...)
While in the UK we stumbled upon a Scottish Nationalist rally in Edinburgh; elsewhere, in Bristol, it was Party Congress time; and somewhere in London a cabinet minister told a policeman that he was a ‘peasant’. A man called Miliband made a speech on TV that had the media in raptures; another man, a Prime Minister perhaps, made a speech about the stumbling economy; the Scottish Nats made speeches about Perfidious Albion. The level of fatuous inanity in every one of these politicians’ sundry utterances made George Bush II seem like an admirable orator. Later, we passed through Campbeltown in Kintyre, a filthy, shabby place that was made the worse by the realisation that all its dirty, indigent inhabitants have enjoyed the benefit of a century and a half of free education and full democracy. And while they were enjoying that, their compatriots, masters, apparatchiks and idols were busy denying the same benefits to the majority of South Africans ...

Windsor Castle: Kaartman inspects this early British Nkandla;
Rannoch Moor: no toilets there either

On neither issue did we ever complain, either to ourselves or our generous, lovely hosts. Petrol might have been R20 per litre, bus fares out of sight, house prices beyond belief, TV licences over R1700 per year, but we did not complain. We were guests, and we behaved like guests, and in our emails to our friends we thanked them truthfully and sincerely for a really wonderful holiday, filled with hospitality, leaving us with great, great memories.
So I’m sorry we missed you in Cape Town, Johnno, old friend. You clearly needed a bit of cheering up, and if WP winning the Currie Cup didn’t do it for you, mebbe we could have – in our home, of course, not in a ‘toilet’. Next time maybe we won’t be away basking in the desert sunshine, relishing its empty spaces ... ? 

London: They must have imported this vaatjie from the Western Cape;
London: a typically warm, sunny day

Kaartman, November 2012

Notes for a Novel #2

... so I carried the smaller one to the house, while the other one followed me with small snivels through the dark garden. Mrs Kaartman put them both into a warm bath while I sorted out some soup and bread. Mrs K dressed them in two adult T-shirts; they supped their soup in silence, watching our every move with large, deep brown eyes.
We put them to bed in the spare room; Mrs K had the presence of mind to equip the bed with a plastic undersheet, a thoughtful move. Our own babies slept on; the dog was long in her own basket; the cat stalked outside somewhere in the night. By midnight everyone was asleep except Mrs K and I; we lay awake staring at the ceiling, our next move long talked out.
The morning was bleary but we felt it was necessary to find out what the story was. The father was a large man, an ex-policeman who had been fired from the force, not so much for his heavy-handedness with his arrestees as for being drunk on duty. It was a Friday night, of course. The children had been asleep in bed; the father was drinking with his poacher-friends around the outside fireplace; the mother was ... well, who knows. Wanting a bed for a friend who could no longer stand up, the father had woken the kids and chased them out. Discovering that one had wet the bed, he had started to take off his belt, whereupon the kids had escaped his grasping hands and run away.
The situation was dire; it was a very dark, moonless night and the streetlights of Plumfoot were, well, few and far between. The smaller boy had abandoned his wet, chafing onderbroekie, the better to run fast enough to keep up with big bro. With nowhere to go, the eldest had remembered coming to our house some weeks before, with his mother, on a begging expedition. It seems we already had a reputation of the “there be sandwiches” kind. 
They’d arrived breathless, tearful and probably terrified and, they said, knocked on the back door, but no one had answered.
They must have knocked very softly, very timidly, because we had not heard them at all – and nor had the dog. With no options left they had decided to ‘nest’ under a bush in our garden ...
Well, we had to find them some clothes etc etc etc, and we sent them on their way, noting their names and addresses for the social worker who, if they were lucky, would visit Plumfoot some time in the next month or so.
We called them ‘the waifs’, and over the next decade and a half we would encounter some forty of them, mostly boys, one little girl. They had varying and different stories, though alcohol abuse was a common theme. Most came to us unbidden; some were reported to us by others, runaway kids who had built nests in the bush somewhere, and we had to winkle them out and persuade them to return to the real world.
Friday nights were the most common, and if we were away we would leave the outside room unlocked with blankets on the bed and plate of fortified biscuits. The biscuits were always gone when we returned; the bed slept in. One small boy spent an entire week at our house, alone, while we were on a trip. I don’t know what he ate; he never explained.
Saturday nights were less common, but did occur. Thursdays became frequent for a while, too, which surprised us until we realised why. Thursday was not a drinking night, but Thursday was the day before pay day. By Thursday the money had run out and there was no food left in the house. There would be food at the Kaartmans, of course.
Our youngest waif was four years old. He knocked loudly on the door late one Friday evening; the dog exploded. We opened the door; Bessie – his nickname, it means ‘berry’ in Afrikaans – was so small that at first we did not see him. He was the size of a two year old and weighed 9 kg. In the morning his mother came looking for him, anger in her bloodshot, hungover eyes.
“Kom!” she screamed at Bessie.
“Nee!” screamed Bessie, aged only four, “Ek wil nie ’n dronk ma hê nie!” [No, I don’t want a drunk mother].
 The most we ever had all at once was six, but generally they appeared in a long, unbroken queue – sort out one or two, within days another would fill the vacant niche. They all came from unspeakably poor homes; they all had to be taught to use a flush loo – when you only have a bucket loo you stand on the seat, not sit – and warned not to jump into a hot bath until they’d tested the water. They were all terribly undersized and many were ill. One seven year old was literally fading away – he was riddled with TB and was too weak to feed himself. Our eldest son would hold him like a three  year old on his lap – he weighed 11 kg – and spoon-feed him.
I have many more waif stories, but in the meantime South Africa was rapidly unravelling. In 1978 P W Botha took over from John Balthazar Vorster as Prime Minister and from there it was down hill all the way. Unrest at schools and universities continued; in May 1980 Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” was banned. Bombs were going off all over and opposition politicians and press were being suppressed wherever the apartheid state could find them. In 1981 Desmond Tutu was arrested and his passport confiscated; Mandela and most of the ANC old guard were still firmly incarcerated on Robben Island. Our waif problems were finding no resolution in the face of a complete lack of interest by any form of ‘welfare’ authority. By 1982 we’d had enough; we went to the embassy and collected the forms. We took them home to Plumfoot, filled them in, and began to plan the logistics of emigrating, lock, stock, three kids and a small scruffy dog, to Australia.

Kaartman, November 2012

Notes for a Novel #1

My favourite blogger, C is for Cape Town [and see Blog], recently encouraged us all to Help a Rural Child, a fantastic project that I fell instantly in love with.
Like C we too spent many years in the rural hinterland of the Cape, and Mrs Kaartman and I and the junior Kaartmanne were not uninvolved with the rural children of those times. There’s a story to be told here ... the occasional Kaartman blog might indulge. I have no fear of being sued, but I will say that I’m sure that all my characters are entirely fictitious, at least the guilty ones. Tuesday 13th November is an important anniversary in our particular struggle, too, as may eventually be revealed, if I remember.

Here’s the background. A few months after the 1976 Soweto tragedy the Kaartmans relocated to Plumfoot, a small rural town on the Cape coast. Its real name is, geographically speaking, just as dom as Plumfoot – you can call it Pruimvoet, if that sounds more authentic. The Kaartmans’ move had nothing to do with Soweto, but everything to do with some mapping contracts for the all-new National Hiking Way.
Don’t get me wrong – we were not politically naive, we’d had our share of the Cathedral steps, Twickenham protests, student unions, Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd, but we were frankly absolutely skint with a small child, and there was a family holiday home going cheap at Plumfoot. We were almost, but not quite, remittance men [actually man, woman and girlchild].
We rapidly discovered that full-time living in Plumfoot wasn’t quite the same as our childhood holiday experience. For starters the social hierarchy was quite beyond our ken. At a crude level it went like this:
1. Afrikaners, with obligatory membership of the NG Kerk and the National Party; the “ruling elite”, like today’s ANC fatties.
2. Germans, mostly retired from Namibia, mostly living on pensions from the West German government;
3. Engelse like us, a teeny sprinkling of entrepreneurs and remittance men.
4.
5.
6. The Coloured population, the labouring class with a few self-employed poachers.
Each of these categories could be further subdivided several times: 
in category 1, depending upon favourite social activities; religious groupings in category 6; 
native or foreign born in category 2; 
and, in our category 3, age, income, dress habits and the probability that you were a secret communist. 
      There were no categories 7. Asians, or 8. Black Africans because neither of these population groups were represented. Actually there was a solitary Black African, who lived in a small tin shack at the bottom of the garden of a prominent retired Afrikaans professor, but he didn’t really count. He had no friends or social contacts at all and I always felt that for him life in Plumfoot must have felt exactly as it would if you were a solitary human, captured by aliens and forced to live amongst weird monsters in a galaxy far, far away.
Asians were completely unknown in Plumfoot. Many years later we landed in Durban with a bunch of Plumfoot kleintjies; to feed the hungry masses we ducked into a KFC. After a few minutes I felt a tug on my elbow.
“Pietta,” [my name] whispered Sandy Khoikhoi [his nickname], pointing to the shop attendants, “is dié almal Mexikane?”
The Plumfoot political breakdown was unspeakable. If there were any liberal, apartheid-hating Afrikaners at all we never came across them; of course, the entire community we knew must have died by 1994 because in that year there were no apartheid supporters at all still alive in Plumfoot.
The German community remained stolidly indifferent to all local and national politics. Secure in their multi-Deutschmark pensions they could no more contemplate getting politically involved in SA than fly the East German flag. Besides, some of them were ivory and diamond smugglers, of which more anon.
The Engelse kept their heads down and the Coloured community did not squeak. There was no tri-cameral parliament yet and resistance movements such as the ANC were but improbable rumours on the wind. The school children of the Scheme, the township, had not risen up in 1976 to confront the apartheid police.
The mayor of Plumfoot was a retired policeman, a surprisingly short, chubby little fellow, Colonel Johannes Jacobus Knoetze. Everyone knew him as “Kolonel” and in our first year at Plumfoot, in his Christmas message to the holiday makers who annually streamed into the village he placed his cards firmly on the table by describing Plumfoot as an “Afrikaner Seaside Resort” [his actual words were “Boere Kusdorp”]. This despite the fact that the majority of residents were Coloured, German or Engelse, in that order, and at least 50% of the holiday makers were Engelse, too, but facts, then as now, were not important if you were part of the ruling elite.
The elite’s racial attitudes were, to us, unfathomable. There was a retired dominee in the town – one of many, and we’ll meet more of them later – whom I always found to be a charming, educated and cultured man. Dominee Gysbert was tall and aristocratic; his family were part of the old Stellenbosch aristocracy and his brother was a prominent Advocate. Dominee Gysbert had won gold for South Africa throwing the javelin at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. He had been personally congratulated by the Fuhrer and had shaken Hitler’s hand; he was often rumoured to have been a personal acquaintance of the traitor, Robey Leibbrandt. 
Gysbert played a prominent role in the town’s White social life; he was a conservationist of note, but he was not known for charitable work amongst the poor and oppressed. I once asked him for a donation – he was a wealthy man – towards a bursary fund that sent impoverished Coloured children to high school.
“One thing you must understand,” the good dominee said to me, pulling himself up to his full, aristocratic, refined, educated, god-fearing height, “is that the Coloured people are still children. They might not be ready for high school education, they might be better off not reaching for heights which they cannot attain.” He declined to donate; he died before 1994, which I have always felt was a real pity. Maybe his god had mercy upon him.
There it is. May these notes set the scene, for what I hope will be an unfolding story of hope as much as its bizarre dramatis personae might allow. There was plenty of humour in Plumfoot as well as pathos; bathos as well as inspiring stuff. So what, prithee, does this all have to do with the rural child?
Well, there came an evening in Plumfoot when I put the dog out to wee before closing up the house for the night. From the bottom of the garden the dog, a small hairy mongrel, barked and barked. I took a torch, expecting to find a treed cat, a snared buck or even a snake. I found two tiny shivering children, boys, one seven, one eight, hiding in the bushes, staring out with huge, frightened eyes. One was wearing a dirty sleeveless vest and underpants; the other was wearing just a vest. That’s where my tale can rest, until another time.

Kaartman, November 2012