We awoke to a brilliant, if slightly cool,spring day. Breakfast was at 8 am. Jeannie was sitting in the sun outside on the long stoep reading, George watching the weaver birds in the trees beside the swimming pool and Brenda and I came last. We wandered into the dining room/lounge and found a long wooden table beautifully set. Coffee, orange juice,fruit salad and yoghurt, beautiful grainy bread, eggs, bacon, mushrooms waiting on a hot plate, home made preserves and creamed butter...all laid out waiting.
We met Louis, Retief's partner, who chatted to us and helped Retief serve. What a delightful couple! We had been offered a packed picnic lunch the night before as we were setting off across the mountains to St Albert. Needless to say we accepted and later discovered a feast of salad, cherry tomatoes,dressing, sandwiches, chicken, pathe, tuna salad, biltong, coffee and Coke. We were being pampered and we loved it!
We were given an affectionate send off as we left and invited to join them for a braaivleis (BBQ) that evening....again we accepted. We left Calitzdorp and headed towards the mountains. As we climbed in altitude we were driving through sheer red rock faces with bright wild flowers wedged between crevices. The road dropped ominously hundreds of feet on one side but the views were breathtaking. We seemed to climb for ever, each rocky peak hiding others, our ears popped!
Eventually we started going down hill and we were soon in prince Albert, a typical but beautiful little Karoo town. Tree lined streets, lots of coloured faces with traces of Koi and San in their features, young people in the universal outfits we see on the streets at home, small shops and no highrises or malls (fantastic!!) just old houses with wide verandas and bright flowering bushes in the neat gardens. As always the township a short distance away but with neat brick and clay houses with small gardens and children playing soccer in well kept sports fields...always the sounds of voices laughing, shouting, talking. Much more life going on it seemed in the coloured community than the white.
I am using the word 'coloured' as in 'Cape coloureds', used only in this part of South Africa...as opposed to Bantu or Black...left over from unofficial and official Apartheid for many years. There is such an exotic mixture of races in the Cape: Koi, San, Bushmen, (the original inhabitants who were wiped out with the coming of the white man) Malay, Portuguese, Dutch, French Hugenot ,English and on and on....everyone who ever landed on this fertile land and brought disease, knowledge, hard work, produce,patience and desperation to this 'new' (to Europeans) continent, fell in love with it's beauty and opportunity and stayed.
The Karoo is immense scrub-bush country with farm upon 'invisible' farm....ostrich, sheep, cattle, goats, maize, wheat. Such huge acreage that the boundaries are difficult to see amongst the mountains, kopjies, dams and windmills. Every now and then an oasis of eucalyptus and gum trees surround a low homestead with cats and dogs lounging...often no sign of human habitation although it's obviously there...somewhere! It is wonderfully quiet country apart from the wind sometimes and the shouts of children.
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