Quathlamba - or should that be Dragon Mountains?

After leaving the Pilanesburg Game Reserve, we drove down the toll-roads by-passing Pretoria and Johannesburg, to the Drakensburg Mountains. The term means Dragon in Afrikaans, though the Zulu originally named it Quathlamba, meaning 'Battlement of Spears' - a pretty accurate description of the sheer and dramatic escarpment we've now seen, although the Afrikaans name does capture something of the 'other-wordly' atmosphere around here too.

Again thanks to the Airbnb website (will we be getting commission if we mention it often enough...?), we're staying just on the eastern edge of the mountain range in a very lovely, delightfully old-fashioned, thatched house (thatched in the English, rather than African, way). The estate is called Glenroy, and has a large, almost quintessentially English-country-estate garden, complete with well-rolled lawns (brushed daily (yes, really ) by an elderly, bent-double, black woman - one of the small army of black Africans who work in and around the estate - using a short-handled, twig besom. 'Our' garden overlooked the beautiful view of Wagensdrift Dam lake in the valley below, where many of the campers and caravanners on the beautifully-kept nature reserve there sailed, canoed, or jet-skied (silently, from our distance!) around the otherwise calm waters . Our 4-bedroomed, 2-bathroomed house (which we two had entirely to ourselves!) is the former main house in this family farm/estate, where a number of family members, children and grandchildren, of our host , Wendy, are either living in, or staying for Christmas in, some of the other homes within the grounds. They would sometimes stop and chat with us, or simply wave to us as we sat outside eating our meals and they crossed the lawns from one part of the grounds to another: a very friendly, family-oriented place indeed.

For our first two days here, (14/15 Dec), we had lovely warm sunshine, with just the occasional cloud, and we decided to have some chill-out time, sitting and sunbathing, cooking 'braai', and eating our meals in the beautiful garden. Disappointingly, though, the weather pressure system since then deteriorated for the next few days. Although we always knew that this would be the 'wet' summer season in the mountains, we had expected perhaps some short, sharp downpours complete with dramatic thunder and lightening. Instead, it gradually became more and more drizzly, misty, cloudy - and cold! On Wednesday, (18 Dec), by late morning it was only 13-degrees C(!) AND we were forced to turn back from our attempt to visit the Giant's Castle, a prominent peak and 4-kilometres long ridge which, at 3,314 metres is the 5th highest in the Drakensburgs. For the previous two days, however, before the weather really closed in, we had managed a couple of visits, and a guided walk, around Cathedral Peak and the Didima Special Conservation Area - where we also visited an interesting exhibition and video-show explaining all about the amazing San rock art all around this area, some of which we managed to visit.

Both the Giant's Castle (which we finally got to see on Thursday of the same week, when the sun was shining and the temperature got into the low 20s) and the Cathedral Peak range, are formed by high corridors of basalt, eroded over millions and millions of years, which jut out from the main escarpment; in both cases, the scenery was truly dramatic: indeed the Cathedral Peak range was so dramatic and vast that it was almost intimidating! The drive up to the Peak from our accommodation in Glenroy, just west of the town of Estcourt, close to the township of Wembezi, also took us through some beautiful, more gently-undulating pastoral / agricultural / farming countryside, dotted with typically African homes - rickety-rackety rondavels or rectangular thatched houses made of mud, mud-and-clay bricks, breeze-blocks, or even sheets of corrugated-iron and cardboard. But in amongst these were some obviously more sophisticated residences which were either mud-houses 'tarted up' with brightly-coloured paint or even, for the wealthier of the farming families here presumably, brick-built homes with red-tiled roofs like you might see in many southern European countries. Unlike some of the townships we'd seen in other parts of Africa, these farming communities were remarkably well-spaced-out, litter-free, and with lots of well-tended small-holding plots in and around the houses. As we drove by on our first trip through these villages (hmmm - just realised I'm not really sure when a village is a town, or a town a township) it must have been quite obvious that we were tourists, and there were many times, whenever we dared to slow down or stop to take a photograph, when young children and teenagers (currently on school holidays) suddenly appeared as if from nowhere, pleading with us for sweets or money.



 



By the end of the week, and our departure from Glenroy, the sun was shining, the temperature had climbed back up to the low-mid-20s, and the sky was as blue as could be. We decided to take Wendy's advice about stopping off on the R103 near Howich, part of the 'Midlands Meander' route in the Drakensburgs, to see the Mandela Capture Memorial site. This is an otherwise ordinary piece of road which took on profound consequence on 5 August 1952 when armed Apartheid police flagged down a car in which Mandela was pretending to be the chauffeur. Mandela had just paid a clandestine visit to ANC President Chief Albert Luthulie, to request support in calling for an armed struggle  - where Mandela was captured as he was travelling through to Johannesburg on the occasion of his arrest and eventual sentencing to life imprisonment. It was in this unassuming spot where Mandela was finally captured, and proceded to disappear from public view for the following 27 years. What a good decision that was to stop there - the sculpture there is a real phenomenon, which some of you, unlike us, may already have known about.
The sculpture, by artist Marco Cianfanelli, comprises 50 steel column constructions, each between 6.5 and 9.5 metres tall. It is only as you walk towards these steel columns down a 'long walk to freedom' pathway, that, at a distance of around 35 metres, a portrait of Mandela comes into focus, the 50 linear vertical units lining up to create the illusion of a flat image. that the columns form a portrait of Mandela. As one critic puts it, the sculpture is appropriately monumental, and yet fittingly transient and delicate, and structurally suggestive of his incarceration. Though we didn't stay long enough to experience this, the sculpture apparently visually shifts throughout the day, being affectred by the changing light and atmosphere behind and around it. An amazing conception, and brilliantly executed!

 

Well, as we head into the 'festive' season, we'll be heading for the coast and, hopefully, even warmer and more reliable weather. Since this is possibly the last posting before Christmas, we'll take the opportunity to wish you all a very Merry Christmas, and a Happy and Peaceful New Year.