Lisa Call

Day 7 – The Free Day

It’s been a while since I posted any photos from South Africa. I do plan on getting through all 21 days of the tour eventually, this is just a low priority task at the moment, one for times when I’m too tired for the studio.

Day 7 of the South African Tour was a free day while we were in the Drakensburg, the mountains in central part of the country. I chose to spend my free day hiking and was happy Barb and Jessie invited me to join them on a hike toward Cathedral Peak. We didn’t aim for the top but to get a great view of the peak.

It was a beautiful day and the hike was gorgeous. These photos bring back only wonderful fond memories.

[For new readers - I spent a month in South Africa in August - had a fabulous time on the arts and crafts tour - you can see previous posts here.]

The Hike To Cathedral Peak

This photo was taken about an hour into the hike. We’d done a bunch of up and had a bunch more to go.

A bit later looking back to where we came from.

Up the valley – looking back again to the start. Notice the difference on the 2 sides of the valley – one green – one brown – amazing the effect of the sun!

The smoke in the distance is controlled grass fires – they do that a lot. Also the peaks in the background are the escarpment that gently slopes down towards the west. Funky thing escarpments.

And finally – after a lot more up that originally anticipated (I think 2 1/2 hours but might have been 3) we see Cathedral Peak. It was amazing!

Very rocky – just like colorado.

The view over the valley.

Someone thought we were dinner.

The dark streak is a burned grass area.

Hiking back down (much faster than going up).

Then I started taking photos of the grass.

Isn’t grass cool!!!

Love the splotch of green grass in the sea of brown. These colors heavily influenced the fabric I dyed for my South African Impressions textile paintings.

It was a fabulous day. We had a long leisurely lunch after the hike then walked back to our camp – another 1/2-hour of walking. Or at least that is what I remember – it was a big walking day.

This was definitely one of the highlights for me on this trip.

An Adventure with Frans

August 7th was the day to see San Rock Art in the caves with our guide Frans, an anthropologist and rock art specialist. There are around 20,000 individual rock paintings at 500 different cave and overhang sites in the Drakensburg.

After a rather adventurous hike (Frans might benefit from a GPS) we found the location of the first cave (really more of an overhang). Not visible in the photo but it’s to the right:

 

Before we started up, first a stop at the waterfall for everyone to catch up. This is one of the very few photos of me taken in South Africa:

 

Another view of our destination – we had to go up to about the level of the white cliffs on the right hand side of the photo. Note the taller mountains in the background also:

 

And finally – the paintings. I can’t recall how old these are, somewhere around 1000-4000 years old I think but I didn’t write it down. It is very difficult to date because there is almost no carbon in the paint to date. (click on the photos for a larger image to see the art better):

 

An Eland:

 

Running people. Frans talked for quite a while about the paintings and it was absolutely fascinating. He might not be the best at directions but he certainly knew his rock art paintings.

 

We sat in the cave for quite a while listening to his stories. The roof of the cave also caught my attention:

 

Cathedral Hotel

We had lunch at the Cathedral Hotel after our long hike. In my opinion this was one of the best meals of the trip.

I’m not a fan of pineapple but they had a pineapple, tomato and cucumber salad that was delish. And for dessert – home made icecream and milk tart (like custard) – I had 3 servings – yum yum. (I ended up gaining 5 pounds on this trip – buffets can be evil things – oink).

The Cathedral Hotel is even closer up near Cathedral Peak than Didima Camp where we were sleeping. The view was stunning (Cathedral Peak is the one to the far right):

 

Another Adventure with Frans

After lunch Frans said he knew another closer place to see some rock art that was a shorter walk so we loaded back into the bus and headed off to this secret location.

When we got down to the river he noted “er, there was less water last time”. There was no way to walk along the river to see the paintings.

Well except I wasn’t to be deterred and started to crawl along this ledge and was able to find the paintings (you can see the last couple folks crawling back along the ledge in the center of this photo):

 
Only 4 people followed me, everyone else waded across the river to try to see them from the other side. With Frans pointing things out from the other side we were able to location the human figures and 3 eland. I didn’t bring my camera on the ledge so no photos of that art.

After crawling back (there was about 2 feet of clearance) I also took of my shoes and waded across the river as there was more rock art on the other side.

Well except not really – it had been destroyed or worn away by the cattle. All that was left were 2 legs about an inch high.

I did find the rocks to be beautiful so it wasn’t a wasted trip across the water:

The Views

The walk back to the bus afforded us some beautiful views of the valley and Cathedral peak:

Didima Camp

After the hike we rested in our rooms and enjoyed the view of Cathedral peak before another big buffet for dinner (if I never see another buffet again I’d probably be okay).

 
This was one of my most favorite days of the tour. I got to go hiking, Frans was delightful, the food was amazing, the weather was gorgeous. I am definitely a mountain girl.

Travel

The 5th day of the South Africa, August 6, we traveled in our big bus from Johannesburg down to the Drakensburg Park in Kwq-Zulu Natal.

It was our first ride south in Johannesburg and it look similar to other directions. Lots of houses.

There was a layer of smoke over the southern part of Johannesburg that I hadn’t noticed much in the city. You can kinda see it in the 2 photos below. Lots of fires to heat and cook results in this layer of yuck in the air. Kinda like Denver in the winter.

Love these duplexes with each half painted a different color. And a huge sea of them.

 

And like everywhere else – gotta have the satellite TV. Somethings are universal.

 
The drive south was beautiful. We took the scenic route by the Sterkfontein Dam – an interesting combination of water storage and hydro electric station that is part of the Tugela-Vaal Water Project. They pump the water around depending on if they need water or electricty.

Mostly it was just beautiful to drive by for this tourist.

 

Water.

 

More Water.

The mechanism to pump the water back up the mountain is here. But it can’t be seen as they covered it all back up after building it. Very cool.

Lunch

We had lunch near Winterton at a place called Thokosiza, shops and an amazing lunch. We had a brownie that everyone talked about for the rest of the trip as it won the award for best dessert. I failed to take photos of my food, but we had some amazing meals.

While waiting for our lunch we got to watch the Weaver birds. We had a lot of bird folks on the trip and I have to admit I’m not much of a bird person although I enjoyed the few that made themselves very obvious.

Weaver

 

The nests of the Weavers. Pretty clever houses hanging in the tree.

 
There were aleo all over South Africa and many beautiful flowering ones at Thokosiza. I did some sketching and plenty of photography also. We were all swarming about taking photos of the birds and flowers (and shopping).

To Cathedral Peak

We stopped into a rug weaving/candle making place nearby and then loaded back in the bus for the drive up into the Drakensburg mountains. One of the top holiday destinations in SA and for good reason – it’s incredibly beautiful.

Our destination was to Didima Camp- near Cathedral Peak.

The drive up up to mountains was amazing. Through a tribal area (Zulu? I wrote that down but later remember being told they were not zulu so not sure).

I took a zillion photos of the homes and when I get them processed and up on smugmug you will see many more.

I’m pretty sure views like these would be rather expensive in a place like California. Gorgeous!

 

Photos out the bus window are an artform that I sometimes mastered and sometimes didn’t.
 

The mountains had a very similar feel to the Colorado Rockies but also very different. They were gorgeous. It was late afternoon when we arrived.

First view of Cathedral Peak.
 

Cathedral Peak from my hotel room – my view for the next 3 nights.