/ 28 September 2009

The female form from the skyline

I left Ardmore with a herd of Nguni cattle. They were making their way to the fields to spend yet another day grazing. I was aiming to find a back route to White Mountain, one which would mean that cyclists do not have to deal with the busyness of the Loskop area, particularly the taxis.

Ardmore, by the way, scores highly on any revisit score. The accommodation is both upscale and homely. You eat as a group, meaning that you can interact with the other guests. They included a cycle enthusiast from Aussie; a guy who teaches cyclists to do their own maintenance; and the flight crew of an international liner.

One of the pilots was a little concerned that South Africa may be going to the dogs now that a traditionalist is in charge. I said the UK, with its antiquated insistence on this royalty thing, suffered from the same problem. But the queen is good for tourism, he said.

I agreed but said it was not necessary that she own half the country to achieve this. To add garnish to the argument I said that the country would not be in hock to Wall Street now if it used the queen’s assets more wisely. But what do we do about it? Tell the royal family they made a mistake 400 years or so ago and you’re now taking it all back. The tourist thing can continue …

Paul, who runs Ardmore, says that a couple of times a year the cops mount massive raids to combat dagga smuggling from Lesotho into South Africa. As he sees it, the dagga trade is benign enough, but if not combated the revenues earned could be used to buy guns and develop private armies. In this scenario you are quickly on your way to becoming another Colombia.

When the raids are happening, says Paul, sales at the local bottle stores are down.

Into the next valley
Paul gave me directions for getting from Ardmore into the next valley, Injasuti. There is a track which runs through the forest into the valley. The forest was noticeably wet after the rain. The farmers in the huge swathe of country which I had travelled will be breathing a collective sigh of relief as the rain means it is the end of the fire season.

My sense is that few of the smaller outfits insure themselves as insurance is prohibitively expensive. If you have a fire, there is the knowledge that the big guy next door with his fleet of bomber planes will scramble to put out the fire as your problem can very soon become his problem too.

Fire appears to act as an informal CCMA-mechanism. If you have bad staff relations or have recently fired staff, you can expect that you will soon be putting out burning trees.

From Injasuti I had to find my way up out of the valley to the top of the spur which runs from the main range. I followed the maps and the directions of locals, eventually finding a well-hidden track which took me to the top.

Nguni bulls
The bulls in this area seemed to be more and more splendid than the last. Most were Nguni. These animals are increasingly in favour among farmers as they are disease resistant and can largely look after themselves in the higher pastures, being extremely well adapted to local conditions. They are also relatively light of foot, I have been told, and can be thought of the ultimate ecological cattle.

I have a little project now, given all of this, to try and buy Nguni beef as it should be more flavoursome and have less toxic properties. It could arguably even be marketed as a top-range organic product.

One creature in particular, impressed. This is the same animal which was painted by the artist on Le Valliant’s expedition to South Africa in the late 1700s. The Khoi people at that time rode these animals and used them to carry their belongings as they moved to new pastures. They were also, according to one account I have read, used in battle. The bulls were trained to attack an enemy in unison.

he fellow I am looking at now looks pretty intimidating. I can hardly imagine a herd of him and his buddies running at me.

He has positioned himself on the skyline and fully knows that he is the most impressive thing for miles around. His job is to break the skyline and check out the female form. I keep a safe distance and tip-toe by.

Days back, on the second day in fact, I had come across a large black bull on a narrow path. It was only a metre from me and positioned in a way that I could not see if it had udders. I balanced on my pedals, thinking that matadors, who also coincidentally wear the same kind of tight trousers as cyclists, are paid a lot of money to get this close to a bull. It may or may not have been a bull, but in any event, it moved out of the way and I continued on my way.

No bull had yet threatened me in any way, but making my way towards the dirt road which would take me to White Mountain, there was this large fellow who in one action turned and stomped his one leg. I made a long detour around him.

Accommodation
The day was ending as I cycled the last few kilometres to White Mountain. Two girls in a bakkie appeared, lost. They were on their way to the resort. I remembered being told that there was to be a music festival there this weekend. Sure enough, a call ahead said there was no accommodation to be had, not for love or money. Besides White Mountain, this part of the Drakensberg is devoid of formal accommodation.

I stopped about eight or nine herders who were taking a herd of several hundred-strong Ngunis home. They confirmed — there was no accommodation here.

My mother had always made a big point that if you were ever stuck for a place to stay, you could go to the local police station and they would put you up in a cell. There were two cops on duty at the station near White Mountain, but definitely, certainly, I could not stay there. In truth, I don’t think I would have gone ahead with it, even if a cell was available. I could just imagine some kind of small bureaucratic bungle happening which meant that I would spend the next 13 years going all the way to the Constitutional Court to get myself released.

The cops recommended a spot near Estcourt but were firm that the road to Estcourt was too dangerous to drive. They said going by taxi was also too dangerous. No problem, I would hitch.

A bakkie ride
A guy in a ramshackle bakkie stopped. He was going the same way as me. As I loaded my bike I noticed the back was several inches thick in cowshit. I don’t like doing this to the bike but we have an agreement in cases like this: no matter what goes on the back, I go in the cab.

I climbed in the front, noticing immediately that there were no seat belts.

TA rents outs this bakkie to people to take their cattle for slaughter. We trundled down the hill, then noticed a motorist in distress. I know this guy, said TA, as he stopped.

Hello, Umfundees, he greeted the man. I moved over as the Umfundees got in. A girl climbed in to the back.

‘Umfundisi means priest”, I said to the newcomer, ‘what denomination are you?”

The three of us were now eating PVM energy bars which I had supplied.

Shembe, he replied, explaining that Jesus was the first prophet and Shembe the second. Jesus had walked on water, Shembe had held back the tide in Durban harbour. Shembe is a black man. The three of us laughed as we agreed there was no way to know Jesus’ race.

Accommodation prices can vary enormously. My room-with-no-meals would be R510. The cheapest accommodation I had tried ranged from R85 at Horseshoe Falls to the best value at Ardmore at R385 for dinner, bed and breakfast.

I got up early and hitched back to White Mountain, beginning a 130km ride to Underberg.

The Drakensberg
Pretty much without exception, the South Africans I have interacted with on this trip do not know where the Drakensberg starts and stops, or to put it more clearly, where its two ends are.

The Natalians, in general, say it starts in Underberg and finishes at Royal Natal. This would be about 250km of the full 1 600-or-so kilometres of the range as noted on most maps. I would think that this is a big opportunity for the tourist authorities to mount a campaign to get South Africans to better understand what is probably the country’s greatest resource.

Chris from Treks, Trips and Trails called with a better suggestion on how to get from Bergville to the central Berg. This would cut out the busy and dangerous R10 which I took. It would also mean that from a mountain biker’s point of view you would be able to traverse this whole section of the route on back roads.

Some of these roads, it should be noted, are tarred, but see very little traffic and are pleasant to ride along. They also contain some savage climbs, most noticeably the 7km hike out of the Umkomaas valley.

I had been in the KwaZulu-Natal section of the Drakensberg for several days now, but because of the overcast conditions, had not yet seen the main range. It cleared in the afternoon and there in all its impressive glory, was the main range, pushing up skywards to 3 000m.

In the northern section of the range you can be in an impressive enough mountain, only to find that when you check the altitude, you are actually lower than where you live back home in Johannesburg.

But if this section of the berg impresses in height, it is the top section which wins any age contest, hands-down. The KwaZulu-Natal peaks are but 200-million years old while the range up north was formed 3 800-million years ago, not too long after the earth formed 4 500-million years ago.

One difference is that while the rivers in the south run down one side of the mountain or the other, up north they run along the mountain and in some cases, through it.