I highly recommend that you click on the photos to enlarge them.
On Friday we set out to go to the drier part of the Cape Floristic Region, heading from the lusher fynbos to the karoo, a semi-desert which nevertheless harbors a lot of endemic plants and birds.
But the night before we had a big dinner, whipped up by Rita, the night before. It featured lamb chops, sausages, pap (African cornmeal mush) with tomato sauce, salad, garlic bread, and of course the local Shiraz. As you see, we were not gastronomically deprived.
My plate:
Of course there was the wine of the property: a creditable chenin blanc (I’m amazed they can make wine there at all, much less good wine):
At stops along the way to the karoo, we saw several stuffed specimens of local wildlife, which is sad but I’m sure they were shot a while back before trophy hunting became somewhat taboo.
This is a Verreaux’s eagle (Aquila verreauxii), which has a distinction of extreme prey specificity. According to Wikipedia,
Verreaux’s eagle is one of the most specialized species of accipitrid in the world, with its distribution and life history revolving around its favorite prey species, the rock hyraxes. When hyrax populations decline, the species have been shown to survive with mixed success on other prey, such as small antelopes, gamebirds, hares, monkeys and other assorted vertebrates.
The Cape leopard is a subspecies of the African leopard (Panthera pardus pardus), and there’s only one species in toto. Cape leopards are smaller than those further north (the “normal” leopard), perhaps because prey are sparser and so they evolved to do with less food, which means a smaller body. Some miscreant shot this one, whose stuffed remains we found in a snack bar/restaurant/shop.
It poured the night we left the lovely Driehoek Farm, and we checked in with the managers, who informed us that the rivers were running high and swift, damaging bridges, turning rivulets into dangerous torrents, and even overturning a car (the occupants survived). Martim carefully got maps of all the rivers, which we hoped would have gone down when we crossed what were identified to us as the Three Major Obstacles. Fortunately, we made them all, though the last (where the car overturned) was the diciest.
Obstacle #1–no problem!
Some flowers we saw heading towards the karoo. This one is unidentified, but may be Helichrysum.
Metalasis sp. (African blombos)
Another unknown flower from the daisy family
A must-see in this part of the karoo are the San people’s (previously called “Bushmen”) rock paintings in the Truitjieskrall Reserve of the Cederberg Mountains (see also here). Although there are fewer paintings than at some other sites, it was accessible with the purchase of a permit (it gives you the code for the lock), and the surrounding rocks, in whose caves and crevices the San clearly sheltered, are fantastic. Below is the rock complex:
. . . and some of the rocks:
You can se that there are many places to shelter here, and although the San apparently didn’t wear anything above the waist (a mystery to me given the cold), they also had fires and plenty of caves and overhangs:
This is the site where all the paintings are; they are exposed to the elements and, sadly, will eventually disappear. Most of the faces of the human figures, depicted in white instead of the usual red ochre pigments, are already gone.
The entrance to the cave, on whose walls the San did their art, is to the right. I can’t say how old these paintings are as it’s been very hard to date them. The oldest in South Africa appear to be 8,000 years old, and the youngest, depicting ships and wagons of the Europeans, are from the 19th century.
This plaque (click to enlarge) tells how they made and used pigments. Painting was sophisticated, often using fine brushes rather than fingers and hands. Curiously, the later paintings appear to be less fine, made without brushes.
The inside of the cave. You can see one painting in red at the lower right:
This is identified on another plaque as showing “five women clapping and dancing. The men on either side are postures typical of trance healers. The dances were held regularly to allow trained healers to receive power from the spirit world to heal the sick and help the community.”
I presume this is known from observations of San hunter-gatherers (a few still exist) in modern times.
“A line of six female eland. In the San belief system, eland could help people get close to the spirit world where they could access power for healing and making rain. Many paintings depict spiritual experiences and show associated animals.”
Clearly a man! But his face, originally painted in white, has disappeared as the white pigments didn’t bond as tightly to the rock as did the white ones
More figures and an unknown animal to the right. San paintings in other places showed elephants, but I doubt that the San could bring them down with their spears, though perhaps they killed young ones.
A line of dots; I don’t know what they represent:
An enlargement of the three figures above holding hands.
More of the gorgeous rock formations:
The cylindrical rock must be simply part of the formation:
Obstacle #3! This is where a car had overturned the night before. When we arrived before lunch it had been removed, but yet another car had been swept off the road into the rushing water. In the picture below this one, a group of people are about to tow the car out of the water. I don’t know if they succeeded.
The Obstacle. After observing several cars go through the stream, Martim, an intrepid driver, essayed the obstacle and we made it!
We celebrated with ribs for lunch, as a woman at the shop where we stopped said her friend made some wicked ribs there. Well, I’m a BBQ maven, and all I can say is that they were just okay. But with some fries and a beer they hit the spot.
This menu shows South African humor as well as their tremendous love of MEAT, something I didn’t know before I came here. (A local joke is that in South Africa, chicken counts as a vegetable.) Just read the part by the asterisk.
More attempts at humor on another menu board:
Oranges are grown in the karoo, making for a strange sight:
This is melkbos (“milk bush”, Euphorbia burmanii), which exudes a viscous and somewhat poisonous sap when you break the stems (see next photo):
Martim said that the San dipped their spear points and arrowheads into the semi-toxic sap to help bring down the animals.
Our next stop was another Afrikaaner farm that doubled as a motel, one with a clear Wild West theme. One room was called “the Jailhouse,” another “sheriff’s office”, while I had the House With No Name (in the desert, they can’t remember the names!). I called it, in keeping with the theme, “The Bordello.” In the dining room (here they feed you) there were displays of saddles, Western cowboy hats, and rifles. The farm offers horseback riding.
The inside of my room, which has a boiler called a “donkey” that you have to turn on by lighting a fire under it. None of us wanted to do that, even though it was bloody cold. And I mean COLD! It took me an hour to warm up sufficiently to even think about sleeping, even though I was under a comforter and a thick blanket.
But I had an Afrikaans Bible in my room. The faithful insinuate themselves everywhere, even in the frigid karoo!
The best part of this farm was the home-cooked meals. This is dinner for five people (Martim, Rita, their two daughters, and me), and it’s enough food for at least 15 people (we also had beer and soda). Lamb slices, mutton stew, two quiches, potatoes mixed with eggs, vegetables, vegetarian lasagne, and gravy.
Martim is an inveterate hiker, so he got up at 7 a.m. and walked around the property. He found a hole just dug by an aardvark (Orycteropus afer) as a burrow. (“Aardvark” means “earth pig” in Afrikaans.). Aardvarks are shy and are hard to see, but can dig at the rate of one meter every five minutes. Their evening burrows are from 1-6 meters long.
A footprint nearby, almost surely of the aardvark.
A succulent plant (probably from the iceplant family, Aizoaceae) from the dry areas. Lots of people uproot succulents to take them home for decoration. Not good for the environment.
A view of the karoo:
Martim, PCC(E) and Rita in the karoo, photo by one of their daughters.
On the way back to Capetown, we saw several signs saying “Watch for baboons” or “Be careful of baboons”. The chacma baboon (Papio ursinus) can be either dangerous, boisterous, ravenous, or all three. You don’t want to be around one of these (I took the photo as we passed them in the car) if it’s had experience with human food. In some places they have even learned the noise that a beeper makes when you use it to open a car door, and have learned to rush to the car and open the door (and get inside) when they hear that noise, hoping to ransack the car for food. Martim was once knocked down by a boisterous chacma that jumped on his back.
. . . and the fulfillment of a culinary dream. Ever since I heard of bunny chow, an Indian-inspired workingman’s food in South Africa, I’ve wanted to try one. Yesterday Martim and Rita, while visiting a friend, happened upon a good place to get bunny chow, and phoned me. I asked for a “quarter bunny,” which you’ll see below. From Wikipedia:
Bunny chow, often referred to simply as a bunny, is an Indian South African fast food dish consisting of a hollowed-out loaf of white bread filled with curry and a serving of salad on the side. It originated among Indian South Africans of Durban. Throughout various South African communities, one can find cultural adaptations to the original version of the bunny chow, which uses only a quarter loaf of bread and is sometimes called a skhambane, kota (“quarter”) or shibobo, a name it shares with sphatlho, a South African dish that evolved from the bunny chow.
. . . The traditional Indian meal was roti and beans, but the roti tended to fall apart as a take-away item. To solve this, the centre portion of a loaf of white bread was hollowed out and filled with curry, then the filling was capped with the portion that was carved out.
. . . Bunny chow was created in Durban, South Africa, which is home to a large community of people of Indian origin.
Here’s a quarter bunny with lamb curry. It was terrific, and you can eat it with your hands, as is the custom, sopping up the curry with the bread removed when the quarter loaf is hollowed out to make a bread bowl (you can also get a half bunny).
Sure good eating, I gar-un-tee! (Photos by Martim.)
p.s. From the balcony of the house, we saw a whale disporting itself in the waters of the bay. This was just a few minutes ago (I’m writing at 8 a.m. South African time on Sunday.)
