Category Archives: South Africa

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.

Driving to Joburg

Car, South Africa, Travel,

It occurs to me, the day before we leave, that I’ve never done this before. I’ve never travelled by car from Durban to Johannesburg. All the times I’ve travelled between the two cities – and there have been many visits since I first came this way in 2003 – have been by plane. It’s an odd thought. I love flying and I have a soft-spot for this particular route, especially in the late afternoon when you get to dodge and soar between giant thunderstorm clouds. The most dramatic experience I’ve ever had of flying through a thunderstorm was on this route. But flying has disadvantages. I remember a discussion, perhaps from a TV show or a movie, maybe a book, about seeing the earth from outer space and that it is all beautiful and uniform but there is no detail. From a plane you get to see the gentle rise and fall of the landscape. You get to enjoy the splendour of mountain ranges and the curve of escarpments, but you don’t see the newly build gateposts on a farm named Grootgeluk – grateful in spite of the hardships, perhaps a long-held dream come true. You miss the human detail, the texture of the landscape seen close-up.

Traveling by car (and I find trains the same) gives you a chance to soak up that texture. It’s a way to get a glimpse of what may really be true. Of course, you don’t get all the detail – it’s a painting, not a movie – but it is so rich with possible interpretations and ideas. Also, you get to sit still and watch for a few hours. That’s not something that happens very often. Sitting in a bus or a car or a train for hours and hours with no distractions, just letting your mind wander as you take in a world beyond the window. Some people hate the sitting still. I find it one of the most restorative parts of travel.

That’s how I felt yesterday on the drive up to Johannesburg. Not far into the journey, we began to leave behind the oppressive greenness of the KZN mist belt and to travel through farmland and acacia-dotted veld. The roads are good, the sky was clear and the weather was warm. Further along, clouds began to build up. The beginnings of what should have become a thunderstorm – those same giant, charged clouds that the planes overhead travel between. On the ground, there was little sign of those storms. The Free State is dry. Cattle graze in fields of dried-out, post-harvest stalks. Maize? Some winter crop? Newly ploughed fields lie waiting for the moment the new growing season can begin. Perhaps there is another reason they haven’t been planted yet. Perhaps they’re waiting for the rain. Dust devils lift layers of precious soil and sweep them across the road. The air is hazy with dust. Town after town, hazy with dust. Clouds are now gathering overhead and stray rays of sunshine turn dust devils golden.

Eventually, beyond the dry fields, we cross the Vaal River. Things seem calmer here but the haziness remains. We drive on, through the beginnings of the city, following the white lines. The road opens up and the Joburg skyline is before me. It feels like coming home. The whole trip has felt a little like that. The flat landscape of ploughed fields and open grass stretching to hills in the distance felt like relaxing. The small towns felt warm and familiar. This skyline feels alive. It’s late afternoon and Joburg is dusty and hazy. The clouds have gathered here, too, and they float across the city as stray sunbeams light up buildings and billboards. Through Sandton, along Katherine Street, past the place I used to live, along Rivonia Road towards Rosebank and my home for the night. Still my favourite part of the city. An evening with friends, a good night’s sleep. The drive, the trip, the hours in transit make a difference. I begin to exhale.

 

So Much Water, So Little Sky

Regrets, seasons, South Africa

Four years ago and many, many miles away, I wrote a blog post about missing the sky. Living in a crowded Korean city for a year, I missed the sky often and a lot. Missed open spaces. I talked, in that blogpost, about a quote from Dana Snyman’s book On the Back Roads, 

“Maybe it’s because today most of us are confined to life in the cooped-up spaces of the cities. It’s great to know there’s open space out there where you can just drive, and drive, and drive. Open spaces allow you to dream dreams of freedom.”

Today feels very much like that missing-the-sky time. Before I went overseas, I lived in Johannesburg and Cape Town and the Eastern Cape and travelled to odd corners of South Africa, from Port Shepstone to Vredendal, East London to Tzaneen. Almost every place I went shared one taken-for-granted characteristic: wide open spaces with plenty of sky.

Then I came back to South Africa and instead of finding my way back to my beloved wide open spaces, I moved to a place almost as green and crowded and claustrophobic as Korea. Instead a place to dream dreams of freedom, I discovered a totally different face of South Africa. Every time I’ve tried to explain the difference, people seem confused. After all, it’s still South Africa. It’s part of the same country. Just because it’s green? Just because it gets plenty of rain? It should still feel like home. It doesn’t.

The clouds are lying low again today. Yesterday morning the mist was like soup, think and cold. The mist lifted later, turning the day into a hot, humid weight upon the air. I like hot. I love hot. Tropical rain forests in December. New Year’s humidity in Mozambique. Glorious, terrifying, summer storms in Windhoek. The way the air smells and tastes before a thunderstorm in Grahamstown or Joburg or Queestown. This isn’t like that. It’s warmth without sunshine. For two days now, the clouds have sat, low and brooding, while the humidity and the heat built up and built up and sat. The hot air is heavy with the almost overpowering scents of flowers. It’s spring. Everything is green. Everything is always green. Steep green hills and deep green valleys and grey, green rivers.

I never knew there was a place in South Africa with so much water and so little sky.