Category Archives: Family & Kids

I Suffered

So Jimmy Buffet died yesterday. This reminded me that I met Aitch in 1985.

Being polite and needing to make small talk I suppose I did tell her about the time we rented a Lincoln Continental in Atlanta. I’m sure I only told her once, or anyway less than a dozen times, but you know how she was. I also told her once that I was not fond of country music, having had my fill in the year I spent in Oklahoma.

So of course, the next trip we go on to a game reserve in Zululand, she’s playing this song full blast on the stereo in my white 1981 Ford Cortina 2.0GL sedan:

Just cos the oke drives a Lincoln Continental!

She played it so often and so loud we both learnt the words and the choon and would belt it out on many a road trip.

he's a cheeseburger eatin', abandoned Sunday meetin'
Brand new country star
He rides around in a Lincoln Continental
No steer horns on his car

I also introduced her to my Mom’s cousin Dapper Dudley Bain who would unfailingly tell you he was born in Harrismith (ca. 1923 I guess) and the sound of turtle doves reminded him of his youth in his Scottish oupa Stewart Bain’s Royal Hotel. He had a pencil-thin moustache, so Aitch would also play:

I better not let Jess see this. She did some line dancing in her day and is prone to playing loud country music on the stereo in my white 2007 Ford Ranger 3l turbodiesel 2WD bakkie on our road trips. Her mother’s genes, I spose. The suffering continues.

~~oo0oo~~

Nselweni Bush Camp

We loved Nselweni Bush Camp on the right bank of the Black Mfolosi river in Mfolosi Game Reserve. Kinda artistic/rustic, but with everything you need; solid walls with canvas ceilings above and a canvas roof over that; a good kitchen good bathroom en-suite. Windows and doors that open WIDE.

Nice and quiet; and full of birdlife while we were there. Some bush pigs visited us nightly, giving us a good closeup look by torchlight. And – we didn’t take pics!

On the riverbed, we watched an ele having a moment . .

  • Birds seen & heard (53 species): Crowned Hornbill; Ground Hornbill; Emerald-spotted Dove; Cape Turtle Dove; Red-eyed Dove; Oriole Black-headed; Nightjar Fiery-necked; Orange-breasted Bush shrike; Gorgeous Bush shrike; White Helmet shrike; Drongo Fork-tailed; Black Flycatcher; Cardinal Woodpecker; Chinspot Batis; Scrub-robin White-browed; Boubou Southern; Water Thick-knee; Greater Honeyguide; Tchagra Black-crowned; Tchagra Brown-crowned; Golden-breasted Bunting; Pied wagtail; Puffback; Crested Francolin; Barbet Black-collared; Red-breasted Swallow; Dideric Cuckoo; Hadeda; Striped Kingfisher; Dark-crowned Bulbul; Thrush Kurrichane; Fiscal Shrike; Cape Glossy Starling; White-backed Vulture; Grey Heron; African Hoopoe; Paradise Flycatcher; Ashy Flycatcher; Pied Crow; White-bellied Sunbird; Little Bee-eater; Lesser-striped Swallow; Guineafowl Helmeted; Guineafowl Crested; African Goshawk; Red-capped Robin-chat; Striped Pipit; Three-banded Plover; Grey-headed Bush shrike; Neddicky; Wire-tailed Swallow; Stonechat;
  • Elephant; Zebra; Impala; Bush pig; Nyala; Giraffe; Buffalo; Wildebeast; Warthog; Rhino square-lip; Waterbuck; Bushbuck; Baboon
  • Heard at night: Lion; Hyena; Bushbaby thicktail; Hippo

~~oo0oo~~

An early adoption of solar energy with batteries is now derelict – lead acid batteries short shelflife! Godd to see the thinking, and hopefully new renewable energy sources are being investigated in all our parks?

Think of this and be optimistic:

Ama Criminal Record

I was on the phone to an ancient friend as I neared Port Alfred when a lady invited me to join her at the side of the road. I did so with alacrity. She was a traffic gendarme in Ndlambe. The ticket she wrote tells me I was pulled over in Voortrekker Street ‘opposite the Lunch Box.’

May I see your drivers licence? asked the friendly lady in the every-stitch-on-duty uniform. ‘Sure,’ said I, ‘You will notice it has expired.’

Tut tut, she tutted me and wrote out that ticket. Five hundred bucks cos I “Drove a M/V on a Public Road with Expired Driver’s Licence.” Not quite true, as my driver’s licence is for life. What she meant was my proof of having a licence had expired. The card had expired. That was true. The driver on the other hand, he was still fresh.

I forgot about it till today and so now I have just paid it online. I hope the good people of Ndlambe municipality accept the cash, as I see I am past the deadline date!

I don’t want a criminal record! I was reminded of such often on our journeys, as it’s one of Jessie’s songs she plays as we buzz along the byways of SA.

Ama Criminal Record – by Blaq Diamond. Long before the song is over – it’s a long one – I usually ask Jess: ‘Earphones please my love!!’

Mtwalume Cottage

A quiet time in the cottage. Except when Tommy joined me for a few days! Then there was action, fires, big meals and a much fuller bin bag for the rubbish truck on Wednesday.

~~oo0oo~~

Cape Passes & Poorts

Normal people may find this post boring.

As Jess and I whizzed southwestward in search of clear skies to dry out the tent on my lorry after the floods in the Kruger Park at the beginning of the year and the soaking rains in Mpumalanga, Free State and KZN which kept my canvas damp. It got so bad I started thinking there wasn’t a sky in the cloud. On the tar roads we passed numerous signs saying some or other pass. You notice the lovely scenery, but the passes pass with no effort, so we seldom stopped for photos. Thanks to the amazing website run by the geeks, nerds and – worse – engineers of mountainpassessouthafrica.co.za anyone can go on a virtual drive over these passes. I used them gratis for a bit, then subscribed. Well worth R465 a year in my view, even if you’re only doing one trip with one pass – you’ll get so much more out of the trip once you’ve read the amount of info these guys post about each pass. A narrated video of the route, angles, altitudes, distances, directions, gain, gradient, history, can you take a Fiat Uno or do you need a Unimog, ens. Fascinating.

I had some well-known and challenging passes on my to-do list for this trip, and on those I did take pics which I’ll post.

Wapadberg Pass – On the tarred R61 between Cradock and Graaff Reinet; 17km long; On YouTube here.

Carlton Heights Pass – On the tarred N9 between Noupoort and Middelburg; 7km long; On YouTube here. It was here I remarked to Jess, ‘Look, not a cloud in the sky!’ We had found our dry blue skies to dry out my tent! We stopped for a pic and saw there was one wee cloud to the south, no bigger than a man’s hand, just like in the Bible.

Now four passes on the tarred N9 north of Graaff Reinet. Heading South, as we did, they are: Naudesberg Pass; Paardekloof Pass; Goliathskraal se Hoogte Pass; Perrieshoogte Pass; All tar, all beautiful, but none caused us to stop and take pics. Also near – almost in – Graaff Reinet are van Ryneveld’s Pass and Munniks Poort. Some of these passes were Andrew Geddes Bain passes, the famous road- and passbuilder whose reputation I accuse my ancestors of appropriating when they got to Natal!

In Camdeboo National Park we found the first pass, mountain and valley I had long wanted to see: Camdeboo Pass leading to the Valley of Desolation! Back in 1972, fresh from a wonderful Veld & Vlei adventure, I’d been invited on a Boy Scouts patrol leader camp to the “Valley of Desolation near Graaff Reinet.” The camp was cancelled, but my imagination had been fired up and I always dreamed of seeing this mythical place one day. Now, a mere fifty one years later, I was driving up the pass. – – (virtual drive it on YouTube here and here)

— Jess halfway up the pass; and the tent on my lorry nice and dry —

Next we headed to the Karoo national park outside Beaufort West, my old mate Louis’ stamping ground. Inside the park there’s the Klipspringer Pass built with great effort and care. Being in a declared nature reserve, rocks were sourced from outside the park, ruins of old houses and kraals eg. and local labourers dry-packed them by hand to minimise the damage to the area. Jess chose to loaf back at camp while I drove it. She missed out.

After Beaufort we headed for Oudtshoorn to visit Louis and Gail – and what a welcome we received! Good friends indeed. Louis told of us of Meiringspoort, saying It’s Beautiful! and he was right. We crossed Droekloof Pass on the way, then took our time in the poort, stopping at every picnic spot and walking up to the waterfall. — (the feature pic at the top shows the mighty Ford Ranger on the Meiringspoort road).

Reluctantly leaving Louis n Gail’s hospitality we headed north towards a must-do pass – the famed Swartberg Pass. After passing through Schoemanspoort near the Cango Caves we started up the pass, stopping at Kobus se Gat to get Jess her 100th hot chocolate (! approx). Ahead lay 24km of Thomas Bain’s finest road engineering. The boffins at mountainpassessouthafrica.co.za rate it so special they have made eight videos to cover it! See a shorter video here, showing north to south, opposite of our direction. Swartberg could actually be called multiple passes and multiple poorts!

~~oo0oo~~

A pass goes up or down or over a mountain. A poort goes through – often following a river course. Often you drive with high mountain walls on both sides, whereas on a pass there’s usually a wall on one side and a drop on the other.

Thanks to mountainpassessouthafrica.co.za; tripadvisor.com; and princealbert.org.za for pictures

Star, Jess!

Breakfast at Kwalata Lodge was delish. I had an egg n bacon usual health meal, while Jess had an omelette with cheese, potato and onions and loved it, so the next day we had the same.

The third morning we ordered the same again. Our meal arrived with our waitress carrying mine and the chef carrying Jessie’s. That was different.

‘We have made a mistake,’ said our waitress. ‘I made the mistake,’ said the chef. ‘I read tomato instead of potato! My bad!’ He was looking at me. I looked at Jess and waited.

‘I’m sure that will be fine,’ said Jess. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll eat that.’ The two looked relieved and hurried away. Well done goggo, said I. You’re a kind and lovely person. ‘Well, they were honest and decent about it and the chef came himself, he didn’t make the waitress do it,’ said my Jessie. Proud of ya love!

~~oo0oo~~

(I think the only pics I took at Kwalata was that lovely moth with the trompe-l’œil trailing edges to its wings that look folded over forward on top from the right angle. Bright yellow thorax when it flew. Luckily Jess took 437 selfies).

Jess in a Palace

When Jess hit seven weeks off her opioid addiction – and seven weeks of enduring Dad – halfway to her goal of beating her last record, I said, ‘You Choose a Place To Stay Tonight Jess!’ like it was something new. She mostly did that for us anyway, using lekkeslaap.co.za or booking.com apps. But her budget was usually Under R1000 and this time – it wasn’t.

I thought Here Comes a Luxury Game Lodge, but no. It was a suite in The Lost Palace at Sun City:

As we walked into our room she knew she’d made the right choice: Dad! Look at the size of the TV! she grinned.

~~oo0oo~~

Brown Silks

Thank goodness he has Elizanne for a spot of normality. See, young David Scratchmo suffers from some strange delusions. Like thinking he’s a goeie kykende ou, thinking his lop-eared puppy is beautiful, and thinking it matters which brown horse wins a horse race. I’ve tried to tell him it makes no difference and it’s pointless taking all the horses to one end of a field and putting small people on them to slap them to the other end, cos we know one of the brown horses always comes first. He came back with this strange statement: There Are No Brown Racehorses, Koos. Can you believe it? As a race-goer of some experience I have seen dozens of brown race horses at the track that time that I went to the Rothmans July!

I spose its cos of my kindly pointing this fact out to him that he didn’t have a brown racehorse in his lounge when Jess and I visited him and Elizanne in their lovely home in that unpronounceable city formerly know as Pee Ee. He had instead, an old semi-retired black race horse in his lounge.

Personally I think he knows a lot more about people races.

~~oo0oo~~

Baviaanskloof

Anton used to tell me about the Baviaans with great excitement and enthusiasm. You gotta go there, Pete! Well I finally got there about thirty years later. After, when I got to Gqeberha I phoned my old colleague, now in Jo’burg, to tell him the valley was even better and more spectacular than he’d said!

The full Baviaanskloof route was a lot longer than I had thought; it was also far more rugged than I’d imagined; and it certainly was beautiful and spectacular, as Anton had shouted while also telling me how indestructible his old Toyota bakkie was. You know what Toyota groupies are like.

On the way we met Ian, farmboy from Ireland, put-putting through the kloof alone on his motorbike while slowly going round the world. Africa is his last continent and he’s doing it slowly and thoroughly with a puptent for a home. Made me feel overdressed, did Ian, what with my Ford Ranger and canopy tent!

We stayed at Zandvlakte farm in a lovely big cottage. Only after leaving there did I realise the friendly owner Magriet Kruger was the co-author of this magnificent newly published book! Aitch would have kicked me (and bought three copies!).

~~oo0oo~~

More: Baviaans

Sea Point

Life in the penthouse was fantastic, as always! Rita has hosted us there since even before we were afflicted with children, and has had the kids there many times, sometimes even as ‘Unaccompanied Minors.’ Brave lass!

Jess had a hair makeover, thanks to Rita’s friends Raikie, Berlin and Linda, who treated and spoiled her. Braids out, Curlers in.

It’s Rita’s pozzie so food plays a central role. Gourmet meals and restaurant outings. This time Italian.

Sunset over the Atlantic from the balcony; The top pic: Table Mountain mist from the other balcony.

~~oo0oo~~

Ancient Okes

Met old school chum Fluff in Bloemfontein for coffee. We were in pre-school together at Kathy Putterill’s home, went on to the local sandstone Kleinspan school, then the local sandstone Volkskool down the road, all the way to matric up in the yucky modern brick high school on the hill below Platberg. Meantime also Sunday School in the old local sandstone Methylated Spirits church. Also quite often sport on Saturdays – rugby, tennis and cricket for him to shine and me to get ducks for balance – and jolling weekends and after hours, so me n Fluffy shared much of our childhood.

Great chat over coffee, gentleman Fluffy very kind and considerate towards my Jessie; followed by an ussie taken by Fluff (see above) – he remembers to actually take pictures. I too often remember afterwards!

Driving south-west out of Bloem towards the Groot Gariep river, there’s a beep on my phone and there was the image, sent by Fluffy.

I showed it to Jess and asked, “Can you believe we’re the same age?”

NO WAY Dad! says my darling daughter, wide-eyed.

So how much younger do you think he is than me, Jess?

“Dad, I thought he was like, in his early fifties.”

No supper for you tonight! I laughed.

Pointedly explained to her that he is actually 68 and 13 days, whereas I am a mere 67. He is actually a full year older than me for six weeks every year, Jess!

NO WAY Dad! she dug her hole deeper.

~~oo0oo~~

Montagu Pass

We visited Louis n Gail in Oudtshoorn. What lovely hosts! They invited us to their holiday home in Groot Brak. They know I enjoy the byroads, so suggested we go to George via Montagu Pass.

The first road between Oudtshoorn and George, the Montagu Pass was opened in 1848, and is SA’s oldest unaltered pass still in use. It took about 250 convicts three years to build the seventeen kilometres at a cost of 36,000 Pounds Sterling. A magnificently scenic, narrow – in places very narrow – gravel road, it ascends from the tiny hamlet of Herold, on the northern side of the Outeniqua Mountains up and over the summit and then descends to the outskirts of George. – See Mountain Passes South Africa for videos, including wonderful aerial views and detailed descriptions of the history and places to see en-route.

Just outside the metropolis of Herold a big sign blocked the road but there was just space enough to squeeze past it and off we went. Jess said something like, Dad! That said ROAD CLOSED, but I wasn’t sure she read it right.

At the end of the pass there was a neat old stone store and tollhouse, and another sign appeared, but it had nothing written on it. The Ole Ford Ranger squeezed past again. Looking back, it appeared to agree with Jess. Oh well, it was a beautiful pass and we’d have missed the roadside flowers if I’d been literate.

– Terrific Tracks4Africa map –

Hey, Rasta! . .

. . What did you catch?

The manne were curious at least, won’t say envious. Tom had caught five fish before the other ten or so anglers on the beach caught their first. Hey, Rasta! What bait are you using? Then they started catching too. And then the fish went off the bite. Tom only caught anther two. All small stone bream, he called them.

Maybe Tom had an advantage though? He had, after all, fished here before, in 2005:

This time he was his own gillie. No smelly fish bait for me.

~~oo0oo~~

Mfolosi Martial Arts

Three days in Mfolosi’s Mpila camp with two demure young ladies.

We saw a few confrontations: Two male impala, two male lions, four rhino, with one male threatening the others. Nothing much came of these feints and threats, despite the loud shouts which came from the back seat, where the two demure young ladies were seated: FIGHT! Fuck him up!

Shocked, I was.

I’m a Grandfather! and . .

. . also a Godfather! (as is Tommy!)

Here’s how it works: Thirty-some years ago I was invited to a wonderful gathering with great friends Dave & Goldie who’d just had twins to add to their Tatum. There was good food thanks to Goldie and lots of beer which Dave may have had something to do with. Also there was something in a church, I dunno why, but hey! Did I mention the food and beer?

Turns out childless, clueless me had said something in church that was actually a lifelong commitment! I had joined the Mafia become a Godfather! I immediately set about neglecting my duties, but when the twins started performing terrifically in the famous Dusi Canoe Marathon I mumbled Them’s My Godsons and got told to shurrup.

But now! NOW! Googs has just run the famous Comrades Marathon in the insanely quick time of 7hrs 14mins – over 15mins inside silver medal time! So once again I step forward out of the shadows. Although claiming some influence on his good performance, I did mention that I hadn’t won my Comrades when I ‘did it’ back when we wore heavy hobnailed boots and hand-knitted vests.

Being the gentleman he is, Googs sms’d me back: Chuffed you are back to claim godfathership! Glad I could lure you back from retirement.

Less than a week later I became a Granpa for the first time. Ziggy had a baby boy on Saturday!

– still no-name Ngcobo – maybe he’ll be named after me?! –

Tom is claiming godfathership! Knowing Zig she probly did confer the honour on him! He’s super-chuffed. Will prolly walk around with his chest out and do nothing, just like his father before him. **Some people!**

Zigs asked urgently for name suggestions. It seems if you name the child they can give you his birth certificate there-and-then in maternity. If you dither, you have to queue at home affairs later.

I know! I know! It’s obvious: Peter Frank Ngcobo, I suggested helpfully. Ziggy fell about laughing. I don’t know why. OK, Koos Ngcobo I cried desperately. She actually considered that for half a second. But nah. And he became Melokuhle, Melo for short.

~~oo0oo~~

Now – Sept 2023 – he has turned one, and he’s walking! All of a sudden. Time flew. My grandson Melokuhle: