Tag Archives: Western Cape

A Day in Darling

South Africa, ,

It’s been a very long year, topped off with a flurry of interviews and resignation and appointments and getting ready to move and start new job. Exhaustion settling into finally taking a break was interrupted for one day for a quick trip to Darling.

Darling is a (very) small town in the West Coast/ Winelands area of the Western Cape. It’s probably best known as the home of Evita se Peron, although the town itself is much less arty than that would imply. Far less art and theatre-inclined than some of the towns on the R66.

Most of Darling is small settler farming town, set in rolling hills and dry, Karoo-like land. Dusty streets with names like Kerk, Pastorie and Queen Victoria. Houses built with thick walls and tin roofs, picture windows and wrap-around verandas. We stopped at the Presbyterian Church first. It’s a pretty church that looks like what you think a settler or frontier church should look like. Narrow building with steep sloped roof, topped with a cross, and a large, deep bell (I don’t really know if it was deep but it feels like it should have been).

After that, we popped next door to the Darling museum. Some museums are state or academic institutions that work hard to build up collections and to document the past in a systematic way, ensuring balance and fidelity. This isn’t one of those. Still, there is sometimes something delightfully idiosyncratic about a private museum with a collection built solely on the items that individual families choose to donate. This one had definite flashes of delight.

The first room was set up to document home and town settler life, with rough recreations of dining-rooms, bedrooms and gardens. The bedroom included, among other things, his and hers grooming sets with those silver-backed brushes that look like they’d struggle to make a dent in the hair of an infant, let alone an adult. Particularly when one considers that settler women tended to wear their hair long and thick. As in several such museums, there is also a doctor’s room, possibly designed expressly to encourage visitors to be thankful for the comforts and luxuries of modern medicine. Of particular interest in the Darling Museum, is a steam engine recently uncovered in the area that was used in the original Swedish Dairy.

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A little further along is a room with church history from the area, unfortunately currently being restored after a water leak, but including one of the original pretty stained glass windows from the Presby church. There is also a small room of bridal-wear and women’s clothes. Some pretty dresses, some really not attractive at all – apparently bad taste is timeless. Also several dead things that women would have worn around their shoulders.

Next, a room on butter making. Yes, totally quirky but quite fun. Also a little bit about the wars. Including a bit about the Anglo-Boer War (South African War) action that took place in this part of the world. Somehow, I always picture the South African War being primarily a Transvaal/Free State affair. I was surprised to discover, a few years back, that the small town of Stutterheim near East London in the Eastern Cape was involved. Even that didn’t have actual fighting. Apparently there is a moment outside of town to the Afrikaner leader who perished after the British took back Darling after he’d captured it.

Alongside the main part of the museum is a barn full, we were told, of agricultural implements. Actually, what it is mostly full of is transportation history – horse-carts and ox-wagons, what must be an ancestor of a combine harvester and even the tanks and stands from an old shell garage. It’s quite an impressive collection for a small town museum.

After the museum, we drove around town. This did not take long. Darling has some lovely houses and some pretty churches, a wine estate on the edge of town, a few shops, a hotel and that is about all. Some of the roads are tarred. There is also a “mall”, by which they mean an old converted house that now houses a bookshop, a cafe and a few other small shops. Sadly it appeared closed on a Saturday afternoon.

After Darling, we took a quick swing through Ysterfontein to see the sea before heading back to Somerset West. Also, a very strange farm stall inviting visitors to stop and see their black panthers, tigers and brown and white lions.

Dusty settler towns like Darling always make me wonder if I’ll find myself, one day, in a similar dusty, small town in another part of Africa and if it’ll feel anything like Darling.

Butterfly World and Fairview

Adventures, Western Cape, , , , ,

A couple of weeks tack, I flew down to the Western Cape to spend the weekend with my family. I haven’t seen the family in months so I was pretty thrilled. Particularly because I won’t be around for Christmas. But, of course, we didn’t just do family catch-up stuff, we also visited two places I’ve been wanting to go to for ages.

The first was Butterfly World. Butterfly World is outside Stellenbosch on the Klapmuts road. It is, as the name suggests, a centre focused on butterflies. What they do is import crates of butterfly pupae and then place them in the special tropical butterfly enclosure. The enclosure is full of plants and fishponds and the butterflies hatch in flashes of bright colours and spend their happy little lives flapping from plant to plant. All the butterflies are imported, apparently, and there are some gorgeous colours and shapes. We also saw one butterfly take an unfortunate dip in the fishpond where it became a quick snack for the fish. But for the most part, it was a room full of beauty. I particularly loved the gauze-winged butterflies that collected on plants or around food – like a butterfly tree.

Butterfly World also has other things. In a second room, we spotted the brightest red-orange parrots huddled with their heads hanging upside down on a branch, an iguana sitting regally in a high-up iguana house and a couple of blue duikers. Another room has all manner of strange lizards and the cutest, tiniest tortoises in the world. Yet another has love-birds and parrots and guinea pigs. Some of the guinea pigs were ordinary-looking and some had babies – first time I’ve seen a mother guinea pig suckle her young. There were also some that looked a little like they had been crossed with a Pekingese dog – all long fur but instead of being smooth and silky, it was ruffled and sticking out and made them look a little insane.

When we were there, the place was full of children who, in spite of the signs asking them not to, were attempting to pick up the guinea pigs. All of a sudden, one of the fluffy-haired ones that had been lying there playing dead decided he’d had enough, jumped up, scaled the little wall, took off across the path and hid under a bench. Of course, everyone could still see him, but I’m guessing he wasn’t the brightest of guinea pigs and was happy to go with the ‘if I can’t see you, you can’t see me’ theory of escape. In the final room, we met the manic marmoset. My mother had been here a few days before and one of the marmosets had become quite attached to her – sitting on her shoulder and refusing to get off – and succeeded in following her into the spider room (the less said about the spider room, the better). When it saw her again, it happily jumped onto her shoulder and settled down as if it had known her all its life. It really looked like it was completely ready to go home with her. And when she tried to get it to climb off, it hopped onto my sister’s shoulder instead.

Eventually we managed to leave the marmoset behind and headed one last time through the fluttering beauty of the butterfly room and back to the car to head to our next stop.

This time we were going to Fairview. Fairview is a wine and cheese estate near Paarl. They’re particularly well-known for their goat’s cheese and their wines are gaining recognition over time. The first thing we noticed when we arrived was the goat tower. The goat tower is pictured on many of their products – most South Africans would probably recognise it – and it looks just like the picture. When we arrived, there were no goats outside but we could see horns and tails in the house at the top.

We left the goats to sleep and headed inside to taste some cheese and wine. Very intelligently, Fairview has set up their pricing so that you can pay to taste 6 wines and 6 cheeses or just the cheeses – so that non-wine drinkers don’t suffer. The wine tasting involves selecting from a list. It was lovely. We tried several different wines from three of the Fairview ranges – all red – including the delightfully named Goat Roti Syrah Viognier, a La Capra Malbec and the 2006 (Reserve) Beacon Shiraz. There was another we tasted (and I wish I had kept the paper because I’m not sure I’m right but I think it was the Fairview Mourverde) that was fascinating – they gave us two different wines, one their own, one the Spice Route version of the same wine, to compare. One is produced in the much dryer West Coast area of the Western Cape, the other in Paarl and the difference is significant. It was fascinating.

From there, we headed off to try the cheeses. My sister’s description of the goat’s milk feta as tasting hairy is pretty accurate but the camembert was good and I really enjoyed one of the last cheeses we tasted, which was a cross between a camembert and a blue. I’m not normally a blue cheese fan but this was really interesting.

After picking up some wine and cheese to last us the weekend, we stopped at the tower. The goats had decided to make an appearance and were posing obligingly for the tourists. Really, they’re very photo-friendly goats, even if they do smell awful – quite a lot like the taste of the cheese my sister had been criticising inside. From there, we headed back to my brother and sister’s place in Somerset West, with a short stop at the strawberry farm along the way and settled in to a weekend of family, catching up and a little bit of shopping.