The Kirks

The storm that the ranger had promised yesterday hit with some force overnight.  My dream of cycling from Cape Town to Port Elizabeth in the cool clear sunny South African winter was dented a bit by gale force winds and horizontal rain.  We’ve been very lucky with the weather during this holiday.  It’s easy to forget that South Africa does have a winter and there’s a reason why the landscape on the cape is so verdant.

We lit a fire in the cabin and played cards all morning but the weather lifted in the afternoon so we decided to go down to the Walker Bay Conservation Area (WBCA) and walk along the beach.  Without doubt, the WBCA is the single hardest place to find in South Africa.  In a country that signs sewage plants from four miles out, it was impossible to find.  We drove around and around looking for an entrance.  Finally after about an hour we drove through a housing development and there, at the end of a normal looking road was the (unsigned) entrance to WBCA.  Hurrah we thought.  As guests at Grootbos, we were supposed to be able to go in for free but the guy on the entrance wasn’t having any of it.  We showed him the key to our room but no dice.  I was going to pay for it anyway since it was only about four quid to get in but I’d left my wallet back in the cabin.  Aaargh.  So we had to drive back to Grootbos and get them to type up a letter saying that we really were residents and then drive back and show it to the guy on the gate. 

Some of the earliest settlers in Southern Africa were the San people who were displaced by (and somewhat merged) with the Khoi people before they in turn were marginalised by the Bantu speakers who came from the north.  All that remains of the Khoi-San in Southern Africa are their fossilised fishing implments and the clicks and clucks which are found in the Xhosa language here.  Or the <click>hosa language.  The Khoi-San do still exist at the very fringes in some very marginal places but they were almost wiped out.  There are some Khoi-san caves in the WBCA but all we could find were some rock depressions that people appeared to be using as toilets.  There are some shell middens around as well but once again, we weren’t lucky in finding them.  Maybe we should have gone on the guided Grootbos “Beach Safari” but we were all a little safaried-out by now.  It’s only a blooming beach after all.

 Despite not discovering the remanins of the Khoi-San, it was a beautiful beach walk.  We looked out over the ocean towards the South Pole and we collected a dog along the way who was christened “Sparky” for no good reason.  Sparky walked all the way from one end of the beach to the other with us finding and bringing back some extremely smelly old dead fish for our enjoyment. 

Tomorrow we drive back to Cape Town and then fly on to Windhoek in Namibia.  The trip down here was interesting.  Not maybe as exciting as the safari lodges and although Grootbos is good, it’s not in the same league as Phinda or Kwandwe.  Still, we had a nice time and that’s what holidays are about.