From the ear-popping highest point on the Witwatersrand you can look back on the city of Johannesburg, on the horizon to the north. The muddle of ziggurats of mine dumps and those soaring tower blocks signify one of Africa’s largest commercial settlements, only 50km away.
You have come down the map on the never-finished N3, past stadiums babbling with football and shacklands flying the flag, past immense landfills. Just after the Petroport, you have turned westwards on to the R550. Then you have followed the signs to Suikerbosrand. You have escaped every bit of it.
The Suikerbosrand Nature Reserve is a well-kept secret of Gauteng’s department of agriculture and rural development. It is popular with the people in and around the area, especially those who lost their farms on the spectacular ridge by 1980 to conservation. Now they come back to see how, fences long down, their 13 000ha are rehabilitating into the wild. Braai kits and walking shoes are the new order of the day.
The tougher ones among them set off from the Diepkloof Farm Museum on scrubby trails threading through the frost-flattened grasslands into sheltered ravines — for up to six nights away in the bundu. Although I have never lasted it, I believe their reward is a meditation hut at the end, which can be hired for a modest fee.
More for the pavement stroller, guiding pamphlet in hand, earmuffs on against the gale, is the Cheetah Trail. This proceeds in well-marked stretches about a sizeable koppie, as often as not topped with baboons. Once I came across an eland cow, giving me the eye, chewing the cud, at station six. The requisite bird designed for the purpose was pecking ticks from her dewlap.
Otherwise, you could come upon a troop of zebra, so close you need no binoculars. Or even several dozen wildebeest — not your ordinary blue gnus, but the uncommon black ones with the white tails, breeding up from extinction.
Cycling routes and trails for riders are offered as well, as is evident from the parking lot at reception. The reserve officials advise you to bring your own horse, although they do have some of their own for hire.
For me a novelty was that the old information centre has been converted into a rambling, camouflaged Protea Hotel.
Appropriately so, as suikerbos means the Protea caffra bush, after all. The cliffsides on the circular scenic drive (which takes about two to three hours) crawl with these silver sugarbushes.
Those of us of a certain age will recall Eve Boswell’s hit song, which she belted out in more than one language: Sugarbush, I Love You So. The last line, of course, runs to the effect that mother will have something to say about that.
Behind the hotel an ingenious trail called Toktokkie has been opened. It is a tapping route, meaning it has been laid out for the blind among us. Stick in left hand, each proceeds, the low left-hand border indicating the direction and stopping points.
Eyes firmly closed, I tried it. I sniffed a pig’s ear. Then I bumped into the trunk of a tall cabbage tree, which felt as though it was an elephant’s. Out of the foliage I fondled a bitter grape. Twenty minutes of stumbling later, at the last of the braille boards, I opened my eyes and, lo — the basalt rockslide had gone patriotically yellow. Yellow as in lichen.
Football fans here should know that our birds are in the habit of reverse migration in winter — no ducks on the dam, only one glossy starling on a Stone Age site, and a single ant-eating chat, glossy black. Colours too are down to tawny and russet.
The Highveld always was a tough, cruel landscape. Soon though, cotoneaster berries will be out and then those aloes will flower.
If you cannot wait till then, stay in your lodging and, between matches, watch the tadpoles growing legs in your local pothole.