Fynbos and Forest

Tales from the Bundu #1: Tsitsikamma Trail Trip

Mostly I travel, when I travel, in my home turf of southern Africa. So here’s a little piece acknowledging more of that. This week on the podcast I’ve released the audio version of my latest ‘Life Dimensions’ piece, Reaching Forward. More like that in the pipeline, but for now, here’s some rambles and rambling!

I recently got a retro-upgrade vehicle. My old car had a cassette deck moulded into it, playing tunes from the early nineties or before, but the player gave up on life some years before I moved on from the wheels. Now instead I’m the proud owner, for the first time in a while, of a functioning CD player: likewise most of the music takes me back in time nostalgically, if not quite as far as the cassettes did. In recent years I’ve mostly seen CDs being used to scare suburban birds off areas with too much of their poop. But it’s an opportunity to breathe a little that I can manage, an indulgence perhaps in these days of preselected podcasts for sharpening the mind in traffic. We’re heading out east again, over the Helderberg mountains and towards the southern Cape coast, though we’re breaking the drive up halfway in Suurbraak.

This little village lies a way beyond the wide avenues of Swellendam, the relatively prosperous town above the magnificent Breede river. The story goes, as with one or two other places around the Cape, that here was a relatively prosperous ‘Coloured’ community who, unusually, never got pushed off their land. Lush landscapes and shady trees and a smart self-catering spot in a rural ‘township’.

And an organic grocer on the main road. For the hippies have, it seems, moved in, although in a kind of anti-gentrification sense, for the lovely people I know are on the shadier side of the slopes from the established ‘Coloured’ community in the valley, and access to their plots is via a fair few treacherous tracks that make me more familiar with how low clearance my little car is built. It’s an evening with a fire, a birthday, some elegant ice-breaking playful games, some dance, surprising catch-ups with old friends I didn’t know had retreated to these woods, and a parting message for our upcoming hike: watch out for puffadders on the path.

I didn’t really associate puffies with the relatively cool and wet coastal forest, but when stepping past one a few days later I’m jolted back to that unexpected warning. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so lax in that thinking: the snake is still quite small so I initially thought it was a less dangerous species, much to my chagrin, as my alert to my partner behind me felt a little too late for comfort. Here also are seen the dangers of basing too much planning off the hearsay of official guides, which had told me that there haven't been any snakebites recorded round here, and thus put me back to sleep. Africa’s most successful serpent remained curled up in the sunshine, falsely benign, as we headed on up the dripping hillside. Raindrops had become dewdrops that morning, hanging from ferns and feathery fynbos, as they have for millennia, the original Xmas baubles. This was on our third day of serious hiking on the Tsitsikamma trail, with rather less on our backs (at last) than the hard days before.

Initially we would land, however, in Kuthumba, an experimental eco-village community which was envisioned nearly 30 years ago and has been developing in a slow-burn South African way since then, up in the indigenous forest between The Crags and Nature’s Valley at the furthest edge of our wide province. ‘Nature’s Valley’. So many rather mundane superlatives abound in placenames around here, on the edge of Eden (the municipality). An old friend has lived in Kuthumba for decades already, his practical creative spirit carving a ramshackle Hobbit-home of wood and mud and a lot of improvisation, his garden an evening haven for fireflies that once delighted my children when they were smaller. On this occasion we’re staying with other friends though, equally escaping the city concrete. Forest and fairies. I play my trombone for two little ones who go on to excitedly keep each other awake for far too long, oops. My partner Joanna plays the guitar and sings a little, warming the space in the way guitars can do. Their home has a warm bass though, in that solid woody way; another building is more cob, a third clay and sandbags. ‘Green technologies’ with pedigree, but it’s the life in practice that feels very different. I’ve never visited Japan, an overpopulated set of islands who’ve nonetheless performed miracles of reforestation over recent centuries; but as our friend serves up tea in that east Asian way (probably tuning into a past life, as his Zen lifestyle doesn’t seem that likely to emerge from his Afrikaans upbringing), I can sense the quiet care slowing me down to something minimalist and Shinto. It is a gentle synchronicity that Joanna’s reading a Murakami novel, and does so out loud to me a few times on our journey.

Another musician is at tea, James van Minnen, who’s been watching a master craftsman at work further east: Marc Maingard, South Africa’s luthier par excellence. I’m told of a special Italian spruce he uses, from a jealously guarded copse maintained by one family. Heirloom varieties are not just an organic vegetable market thing. He works by tweaking and testing the tweaks; painstaking, meticulous. With solutions for James’s own drum making project that might not actually solve his craft problems, but ask questions that reveal a valuable line of thinking for him to dive deeper into, as he aims too as crafting instruments that hum a little closer to natural source energy: such, at least, I guess is the theory.

One afternoon we drive down to hidden beaches, lying in rock pools. The autumn winds whip a little, keep us alert, so that I reckon on the shelly treasures here. There are perlemoen poachers along our coastline – abalone, which I’ll eat for the first time ever (and legitimately farmed!) some weeks later. The first story I covered in depth on my arrival in the Cape, thirty years ago, was abalone poaching, and it’s still a major issue. The darker side of east Asian influence – at the time, Taiwanese ships, probably now Chinese gangsters paying sums that are too tempting for cash-strapped locals, and the enforcement patrols to stop it aren’t strong enough. However, whether it was poachers at work or not, the perlemoen shells strewn around the beach are magical talismans, rainbow spiralling dishes for holy smudge back home. We wend our way back from the beach through the hardy milkwoods, and unfortunately bearing a standard haul of plastic bottles. We leave the purple condoms someone scattered there: perhaps a secret tryst, more likely kids enjoying transgression. The little girl’s parents hide biscuits for her trip back to the car, lightness in silly games again a way to smooth over the bumps.

And so we begin our trail, entering the forest on the far side of Nature’s Valley. It’s a short initial trip to the hut, from where we can come down again to enjoy the wide, safe lagoon. There we find another friend with two of her children, gently soaking up the vibes before the approaching storm. It’s easy to do a little backstroke, and look up at the gathering clouds, though the sun still heats. We also head east, to rolling surf and sands touched that day only by some hikers tracing the western end of the more famous Otter Trail along the coast. But then, for us, it’s farewell to the ocean for a while, and into the buzz of the forest. Life abounds, sparkling its way through the flickering afternoon shadows. We have this first hut to ourselves, and that evening the first contemplative moments on a bench under the moonlight. This magical arrival, finding these forest oases, is repeated on subsequent days, though it comes with some burdens too at this end of the season – when things are a little slack in oversight perhaps: baboons have trashed one rubbish bin before it’s been emptied; elsewhere we find an empty gas canister, and wet firewood, though luckily we’re overprepared. Joanna also is able to find solutions at speed to things my slower mind hadn’t yet twigged were problems.

There are two long days ahead of hiking in intermittent rain, with heavy backpacks and waterproof ponchos; with imperfect footwear causing blisters and painful scrapes, needing strapping and ointments; with mental and physical fatigue setting in alongside an end-of-day sense of achievement. We stop on the first long march at a magnificent cascade, a rock pool in which a whole dead tree is submerged; a beautiful dip in between the showers. New treefalls with the stronger winds; new patterns of growth to follow. At one point we stride across a muddy pedestrian underpass beneath the national highway, the incongruous city-style concrete a brief intrusion to the sounds of this woody world. It’s a wet world, which reminds me of hiking in northern Britain, particularly as the wetness doesn’t fully recede from the paths even on the drier, hotter days and beyond the forest. Bogs are not really a South African thing, in my experience, but they come quite close to existing in this territory.

We’re used to stripping off completely to cross chest-high coastal rivers. The difficulty in these zones is that the higher gradients and tighter paths for the streams lead to faster currents, so anything more than knee-height is ‘not advised’. Indeed one group that we leapfrog have been told to stay back just in case, because they have limited time to get out of the forest. We push on, into a zone where we might have to spend two nights cut off from the world without reception. It almost sounds blissful, but in fact the rivers are lower than would be risky, and we can cross with the ropes and stepping stones. The autumn leaves are mushy, European style: quick to become humus. In the heaviest rains we pass some of the cutest rock pools, but not at times we want to strip off. The valleys become another world. Most people only see the forest from that highway, deep gorges leading rapidly to the sea, high views of paradise that cause rental cars to grind to a halt. Yet the forest is just a hairier part of the fynbos, alongside the sandstone rocks that lead us up and over, or around the sides of the slopes, the baboons standing sentinel on higher contours than ours.

Sometimes there are plantations, even here; easily burned, reducers of diversity. They poke out as somewhat unpleasant reminders of the intrusions here. The highest peak is known as the ‘Grenadier’s Cap’. Colonial lore grasping at lands long inhabited more sustainably than the invaders knew how. (Weeks later, I reflect on this again as we climb a revelation: a tiny koppie in the suburbs of the seaside town of Hermanus. ‘Hoy’s Koppie’ used to be known as plain old Klipkop, and it sits unobserved by those whose horizon is usually occupied with the beautiful mountains inland or the beautiful waves and whales out at sea. But there it is, and we clambered up it – to find Sir William Hoy’s remains buried at the top, next to his wife Gertrude, after a concrete path out of some suburban path and several lists of his imperial achievements. A little more arrogant colonial conquering clutter that nobody’s got round to even realizing should be cleared. Ho hum). The whole trail is managed by MTO, which is part of the plantation legacy: “mountain to ocean”, our eco-conscious friends reveal, an old Imperial declaration become pine corporation. At least they're doing something here to preserve the soft true forest, but there's more investigation to be done on that than we're up for on this particular journey.

At the edge of the green there are drier ferns, the familiar bracken: also European invaders, less headline-worthy than wattle and pine perhaps, and able to grow where the softer indigenous ferns won’t go, so everyone’s happy, unless they get too thick and prevent the usual organic unfolding. So many stories that could be told. So many landscapes too: after a crystal clear dive into the river on the fourth day, we rise up to a fynbos forest. Fat king proteas appear from nowhere like giants’ cherries. The delicate fynbos trees shade us sweetly from the afternoon heat before we descend into the magic of Heuningbos. Perhaps there are honeybush plants in here; there is certainly honey, and there are bees, and rippling streams, and echoes of the ancient ones.

Joanna sees the baboons at the Heuningbos hut long before I do, and barks at them and tells me to. I’ve no idea why until I see the leader, waiting up the hill to see what we do. Time to do my best alpha male imitation so we can cook supper in peace. And have a cool dip first, watching the flying saucer-shaped bubbles burble down the stream. Our final day will involve some pretty intense clambering, up to a saddle with the biggest cairn around, everybody who passed clearly knowing that this was the final milestone. But the forest still has softness to offer. It’s been a joy to descend, time after time, into the gentleness of the trees. Each time we’re inside it, there’s a freshness, a holding, a calm. This is not the tropical rainforest I’ve also been in. Maybe the Tsitsikamma still has dangers, if we were here too late into the evening when predators might be around. But there’s no sense of that when we pad through it, even as we sweep aside untouched webs. The moss forms hearts, bristling cushions, ease. Crooks in fallen logs are perfect for our lunch stops or our sarongs for swims. It’s called us in, and with it there’s a sense of time slowed down, once more. That is the secret of the forest when allowed to do its thing; the surround sound of the eternal cycles in multiple forms. The freshness of the elements; the sounds of peace.