A note to all people with me on trip- I did not add personal details, neither did I forget them.

Soutpansberg:
Of Puff Adders and Cane Rats

In my opinion the best way to begin this tale is at the far beginning, where it all started. The idea of a rite of passage has existed in thousands of cultures around the world. It has names varying from bar mitzvah to Jugendweihe (east Germany). In western culture it has been lost to us though. My dad decided that for his two sons to become men they would have to undergo a similar rite of passage during which they would receive advice for the coming days of manhood. He told me I could choose any one place on the globe and we would go there. At first I had wanted to go to Everest (this was at age 6). Then I decided the amazon would be a good choice. At one stage I felt that visiting the endangered mountain gorillas would be an enjoyable experience. When my brother reached the age of twelve he decided to go to the park of umfolozi, eastern Kwa-zulu natal province, South Africa. After he had finished I thought about going to the same place- it was close to home, wild, and a very historical place (being Shakas hunting grounds). But then one day dad told me, Have you heard of Mount Gorongosa? From then on I was convinced this was the place to go. It was much closer, literally next door here in Mozambique, and it had substantial amounts of rain forest on it. I started working on a movie using iMovie. This movie would tell about the history, geography, people, and development on the mountain and the park. Everything was falling into place. All the bookings were scheduled, the plans were done, and my movie had been completed in time. And then, two weeks from the trip disaster struck. The two main political parties in Mozambique, Frelimo and Renamo, had been at war with one another for the past few decades. (Ironically, these two had been a subject in the HISTORY section of my movie). Renamo, the losing party, had shot tourists and threatened to block a bridge that connects northern Mozambique (the area of Gorongosa) and southern Mozambique. My dad told me the news and then immediately started looking for alternative places in Zimbabwe, Botswana, and northern South Africa. He came up with a few possible sites, but eventually decided on the Soutpansberg mountain range (Northern South Africa). We would drive there after meeting up with dads friend, Uncle John Roff, in Maputo. I drove with my brother, sister and parents to Maputo. The border post was slow as usual on both sides. We arrived at Maputo after four hours of driving from Nelspruit. Uncle john was supposed to arrive from Durban with my grand parents in four hours. I busied myself by laying the table and helping around the house until uncle john came. We ate dinner and then started packing things for the trip. It would be a nine-hour drive to Louis Trichardt, a relatively large town neighboring the 1

Soutpansberg Mountains. My bother and I slept in the garage on mattresses due to the fact of my grandparents visiting and using our beds. We ate a delicious butternut dinner and I slept soundly. The next morning we woke up at half past five, still dark. My grandparents were still asleep but had said goodbye to me the night earlier. I said good morning to my mom, dad, and john (please excuse me, writing uncle continually takes time). Then I helped pack the car. Mom gave my dad and me a hug and padkos for the three of us. By then it was almost quarter to six and time to leave. With moms good-byes in our ears we carried on down the road. The drive to ressano Garcia was uneventful. We stopped at a petrol station for gas but sadly no coke. When we got to the border two hours later the cue of cars alone was at least a kilometer long. Dad said it had something to do with the holidays and it being the end of the month. Whatever the cause, we were stuffed. After reviewing our options, john suggested we could go the boane (mozswazi BP) route. I agreed heartily- anything would be better than a four hour wait in one of the dirtiest border posts in the southern hemisphere. Dad made a U turn and carried on back the way we came. We asked a cop for information on where the turnoff to boane was. Coincidentally this was the same policeman who stopped us and asked for the licenses barely ten minutes earlier. He told us the turnoff was immediately after the tollgate a quarter of the way to Maputo. We followed his advice and were soon on our way there. I was humming a soft tune and imagining what those mountains would look like when dad suddenly hit the brakes. CANE RAT! he exclaimed. Now, for any of this to make sense to you, you must first know some history. A few months earlier our family was on a long weekend and my parents had decided we would go to Nelspruit. We were just nearing the border when dad yelled RAT! He had seen a local selling the Thryonomys rodent on the side of the road. They are said to be a delicacy in Mozambique. My father was ecstatic. We can butcher it and eat it! Never! Not in the same car as me! (My mother speaking) Come on! We could give Zet the skull! Imagine the disease! Im just stopping for a pic Long story short, we never really bought the rat, which was why dad was so intent on getting it now. John said it would rot and get stinky the car. After a moment my dad hesitantly agreed. I had begun to hum again when the brakes screeched again. I wondered how long they could keep this up. We have a cooler box! he said cheerfully. We stopped and tested the rats hanging in the tree. Stiff meant recently deceased and recently in rigor mortis. We chose the right rat (hah!) and started to accommodate it. The first thing we realized was that we had no plastic bag in which to put the rat. I suggested we use a pillowcase. My dad said this was poppycock, but five minutes later when john said the same my dad agreed. So now we had a cane rat in a pillowcase. Charming. 2

We turned off on a dusty potholed road that must have been the one to boane. It turned out to be a lot longer than expected. I spent half the time looking out of a skylight in the car. We stopped to pee when we saw a puff adder in the road. Its head had been ridden over, killing it instantly. I felt its skin, which was rough and loose. I asked dad if we could keep the skin but john said it would rot in the car. I told them we had a cooler box but they were not interested. We drove on until we got to a junction in the road. We followed the road with the sign to boane. After a half hour we arrived and parked the car. It was barely a five-minute wait inside the building, so we did make up with time. If we had decided to wait the four hours it would have taken the same amount of time without the puff adder and potholes and interesting experiences. We checked the papers and then entered Swaziland. The first thing we noticed upon entry was a sign that said No uncooked meat beyond this point (foot and mouth control). Since the rat was barely dead we presumed this didnt count for us. A few kilometers later the sun started going down. We had to find a spot to stay before it got dark. We decided that we would go to Nelspruit and find a spot to rest and camp there. We turned off on the road to the nearest border post to Nelspruit. Dad remarked that it was the first night of the trip and he didnt want to sleep under a roof in Nelspruit. We got to the border just about 2 oclock. Since it was (and is) winter, the sun sets at five thirty and 2 is late. When we entered the border we somehow got through the Swaziland side without stamping our papers. When we asked a guard what to do he said we could leave the car there and re stamp our passports at the other side. Dad and I followed uncle john who said he knew what he was doing. It turns out he didnt know and made us go to entries instead of departures. We had already stamped our passports, so there was no going back. After fixing that up and going to departures, we then walked to entries on the South African side. There was a map on the wall, which showed me there was a LONG way to Louis Trichardt. I slept quite soundly on the way to Nelspruit. There was a pillow in the back where I sat. When I woke up we were entering a driveway towards a few farmyard houses. Dad told me zet had been here before for an abseiling trip and had recommended it for us. We checked the houses for inhabitants, but found no one. Just as we were about to leave for plan B, a Christian campsite I had visited with my friends 2 months earlier, a grey bakkie drove in. we asked if they had space, but he said they were full. We were almost out of options. We drove down the Maputo highway until we got to the turnoff to the Christian campsite. Our arrival took place just as the sun began to set. Thankfully they had space. We pitched the tent and walked off into the bush to slaughter the rat. Lol

UJ hung the rat in the tree and started to cut the rat into sections and skin it. He carried on like this until he got to the heart. Then he told me to open my hand. Mixed emotions ran through me at this point. One was of the total, utter GROSSNESS of this experience. Next was uncle john telling me that Every mammal on the planet has one. It is a pump of great design and is to be treated with respect, We finally had the meat (not the heart of course! What do you think we are, Aztecs?) cut into edible portions and then threw the guts into the bushes. We went back to the campsite and set up a braai. Uncle john was the first to sample a piece I tasted some and found it quite disgusting. It tasted like grass (you are what you eat). Shut up and eat your rat, said dad after I told him what it was like. Hahaha. Ive always wanted to say that. We mixed it with bacon and it wasnt so bad. Then we brushed our teeth and turned in for the night. I wrote a few paragraphs in my book, never being one to write a lot at once (okay, this is an exception). Dad woke me up just as the sun was beginning to rise. John had spent most of the night up writing poems and keeping the fire alive. When I asked him why he said he couldnt sleep. We packed the tent (it was a 3 man tent, not the 6 man one since we were too lazy to pitch it) and hit the road. We didnt say goodbye because everyone was still asleep. After 15 minutes on the N1 we got to my grandparents house. We gave zet the cane rat head (I am quite proud of this- I decapitated it myself) in the pillowcase. We had some tea with them and then said goodbye. We still had a LONG way to Louis Trichardt and its neighboring mountain range. I made myself comfy in back seat of our land cruiser Prado. Dad showed us the Mariepskop Mountain - 1800 Ft. and bushbuck ridge. We stopped at a place called Perrys bridge for breakfast. After maybe four hours we stopped at quite a large city called Tzaneen for lunch. I ate a wrap at the wimpy in Tzaneen mall. The temperature had been rising steadily the farther north we travelled, and seemed to have reached its peak in Tzaneen. The mall had an AC though. Uncle john and I swapped seats because he needed to get some sleep after his all-nighter. It was late afternoon when we got to Louis Trichardt. It had been almost seven hours of driving, three of which had been spent on a Cape to Cairo Highway. Turning left from Louis Trichardt gave us an amazing view of the Soutpansberg range. It was much longer than I had expected, though height was not particularly amazing. The ride along the Soutpansberg range was thirty kilometers in length, but this was only to the halfway point and our camping area, medike. As per directions we followed the railway to our right. We crossed over to the left and right a few times. on our third crossover I suddenly heard a loud hiss to my back and to the left. Dad slowed down and got out of the car. It turns out some sharp rock stuck into the back tire and ripped a 2-inch hole in it. John and dad started fixing on the spare tire and only asked for assistance when they needed a rock. After about an hour the tires were in place but it had started to get late. The medike turnoff from the railway line was to our right. After turning of the road got steep and rocky. We traversed this terrain until it brought us to a sign that said Kantoor/Office. We came to a house with a lush green garden. Three dogs came out barking at us. The manager walked out of the house. He was a tall, friendly yet slightly greying man. 4

He gave us a map and told us where our campsite was. We realized once we got there that the campsite was a patch of grass. It looked well looked after so we pitched the six-man tent. I was responsible for the fire, which I had ablaze in a few minutes. Dad and uncle john figured out the logistics of the campsite- there was a tap and basin, the kitchen area. The food would be placed in the back of our car, parked so it would be easily accessible. The food agenda had been pushed forward a day by the cane rat, and the constant opening had rendered the food in the cooler box useless if not eaten immediately. We cooked the rest of the meat before it could go bad and ate as much as we could. That night I didnt really feel like writing but I wrote anyway. I had just gotten to the cane rat but it was the second night. I hoped I would be able to write more the next day. The sleeping bag was not uncomfortable but U.J. had an inflatable mattress. They told me that there was a leopardess that lived here in medike. I fell asleep wondering if leopards ate 12 year olds When I got up dad and uncle john were already outside. I had put on a jacket when I woke up in the night but the cold still went down to the bone. I had to help with the dishes from last night. I stuck one pinkie in the water and it immediately went numb. This water is freezing cold! I told dad. Daniel. He said. What temperature does water freeze at? I didnt complain after that. Around me the mountains were picturesque. The sun was beginning to rise as a line of light coming down the mountain. Uncle john told me to enjoy the cold while I still could. We had a long walk planned for today, and as soon as the sun got here we would all start to heat up. I didnt have the same optimism (or was it pessimism?). There was a path off the side of our campsite that led to the friendly mans house. He lived with his wife who did eco schooling but she was out early. I borrowed a walking stick from him and he told us what to look for on the path. If we found a white footprint every few meters then we knew we were on the right path. The walk was seven kilometers (!) long. We thanked him and started down the path. The landscape around us was rocky and slightly upward slanting. True to his word, the old man had set out many footprints. The vegetation was bushy but not foresty, in other words you couldnt see very far but it wasnt so overgrown that the path was dark. After maybe 500 meters of the up and down of the path it started to get hot. I was now in my tee shirt but I was sweating. Mercifully, john called for a break halfway up a mountain like incline. He presumed that the footprints would lead up through a valley between the two crests. I tried to look buff by sharpening a stick while we rested but all I succeeded in was giving myself an inch long cut on y finger. We drank some water and carried on. After we were over the hill the landscape changed. The feet grew less and less. We found a wooden banana tree with its signature banana shaped pods. We eventually got to a sparsely vegetated grassy plain.

The footprints now appeared at random. The manager had casually warned us that baboons occasionally moved the rocks they were painted on, but this was the last we expected. We in fact found a recently overturned rock, which had been flipped, or babooned, twice. The footprint looked as if it had been on the underside of the rock. The flat terrain proceeded for about 2 km. We came to a lookout point by a large rock, and there we ate lunch. Uncle john had packed a banana fermenting in a bottle. He claimed it would attract fruit chafer insects called citonidae. The view was amazing. We saw the valley we were about to descend into. It had a few baobabs and resurrection plants. Down in the heart of the valley was the waterfall. We had a downward sloping kilometer left before we would hit the pipe that transported water from the waterfall to our taps at the camp. After a very rationing snack of biltong we found the next foot and carried on down the slope. The resurrection plants looked very dead. Uncle john told me I should take a piece with to camp and we would experiment on it. I stuck a piece into my pocket and forgot about it. The trees and bushes were just beginning to clump together when we hit the pipe. According to the manager we were to follow the pipe uphill to the waterfall. When we were done there we could follow it down to the railway line, which would lead home. We followed his instructions and got to the waterfall. Dad and U.J. said they would wash while it was hot afternoon. When they started to remove their articles of clothing I politely left and went exploring. I started lower down at the stream and found my way to the top of the waterfall. I came back down and we left. A few hundred meters of pipeline later we got to the railway. There was a bushman painting site on the other side of a rail tunnel. It was fenced off but was obviously a hotspot for graffiti artists. The path up the rocks to the paintings was slippery. The paintings were discovered in 1916 when they built the railway. The graffiti was as much an artifact as the bushman art as it came from almost 100 years earlier. We spent a few minutes there until it began to show signs of getting dark. Then we followed the railway back to camp. I realized that walking along the railway begins to get uncomfortable after a kilometer. Thankfully after not too long we were back at our campsite. The seven-kilometer walk plus a few more of railway had taken its toll. I fell onto the grass and lay there for a while. We made a fire and ate. Then we sat around the fire and told stories. I came to the Christian campsite that night in my book, though I was already on page eight. I heard a leopard when I woke up in the middle of the night.

The next morning uncle john and dad told me that yesterdays walk was physically tough so we would take today easy. We walked don to the river next to the railway. There were many boulders in it. On our left was a boulder that had been spit in half by a fig. Somehow a seed had blown into a crack in the rock. Over the ages it grew into a tree whose roots had split the rock in half. The river would be overflowing in the rainy season, but as it is now winter it was reduced to a few pools here and there. We explored the riverbed for a little while and started to leave. Dad said, look! Jasper! it was half encased in a rock and according to dad and uncle john a lost case. I didnt think so. I grabbed the biggest liftable rock and smashed it out. The manager had built two houses for guests, one out of stone and one of bricks. When we got to the stone house we realized this was no ordinary house. It had a beautiful, lush garden of grass, but the most amazing part was the inside. In one corner of the house was a massive boulder, which everything was built around. On one side of the boulder was a bushman painting. There were two bedrooms and a loft, a kitchen, a toilet, and some chairs and couches that made up the living room. It was of course open plan. We took a few pictures and moved on to the bungalow. The bungalow was small and seemed to be for a honeymoon couple. To make up for its size there was a large garden with a braai area. Inside were a basin and a couples bed with bedside lamps and a cupboard. The two rocks on either side of the house were shaded and therefore cool. We decided to rest there and move on later in the day. This turned into two hours. Uncle john read a passage from a Celtic Spirituality book. We left back in the same direction as we came, towards the river. I found some jasper again at the riverbed and then we went up to the old mans house to take up an offer he made for tea at his house. We talked for what felt like ages on his porch. Then a European couple came to say hi. They had also camped for the week and were touring S.A. We said goodbye and left to the campsite. It was getting late. That night we made another fire and ate. We talked far into the night to the bitter muddy taste of uncle johns special coffee. The next morning was cold as usual. My breath was steaming out of my hoodie as dad told me today would bring another long walk. We were to follow the river to a path in a gulley. When it got to how we would get back dad became unclear. After a breakfast of future life, a new cereal-type food we followed dads instructions. We stopped for a break on the river when we got to the path into the gulley. Then we followed the path. It was along a small stream. There was a dam in the stream with no way around apart from a few fig tree roots. We climbed up and around on the roots. It took some time and was probably life threatening but we got to the other side of the dam. There was a hill to our left that had looked grassy on Google earth. We had to climb up rocks, which proved to be a lot more physically straining than expected. They were massive and only by pulling each other up did we get to the top. At the top of the maze of rocks we had a nice view, which showed us that we were only halfway up the hill. 7

We carried on farther. It was starting to get hot and I had left my hat by accident at the bungalow. Dad told me that I was losing water and I needed a hat. There was a low-lying tree near a scree slope. We stopped there and dad, using sticks, converted his beanie into a hat. It looked ridiculous and became known as the great Tricorn hat. When we carried on up the slope we encountered a problemscree. If you did not walk carefully these rocks could avalanche on those behind you. Every time you turned around there was a breathtaking view getting larger and larger. I could see the train tunnel and the valley with the waterfall. The river was clearly visible, even specific spots where we stopped. Farther up we saw a large rock that we made our goal, thinking it was the top of the hill. After another scree slope we got there and realized this was just one of hundreds of large boulders. Nonetheless, we climbed to the top of the boulder. From this height the view was spectacular. I could see the nearest city to our right, and even the road. I saw the railway and our campsite, and a patch of green I judged to be the old mans home. There was amazing neon yellow lichen on the rocks. Dad figured he was in range and called mom, saying he was at the top of a hill in the Soutpansberg. We found a shadier spot in the shadow of a different boulder and ate the prepackaged ready-to-eat food. The piles of boulders formed deep caves, which helped persuade us to move on. We hadnt yet hit the top of the hill. On the other side would be a path and a stream. Dad said we could go around the hill and then go downhill to the stream. Uncle john agreed. It was slow going through the fynbos environment, especially with a backpack on your back thats half the size of you. On the other side of the hill we entered an aloe microhabitat. The evening sun on the aloe was enough inspiration to keep us going even though we were tired enough to sleep right there. Lower down we entered a gray rocky environment. We heard water and followed its sound to the stream. There we lounged on rocks and splashed ourselves with water. We still had to find the path, so we entered the gray forest again searching for white feet. Uncle john was ahead. Suddenly he screamed some unmentionable words. I watched something long and gray and quick as lightning shoot into the rocks. It was a black mamba! Luckily it hadnt bit him. We walked up and down a few times. We eventually just gave up with the path and went down in the general direction of the river. There were thousands of irritating thorn bushes that slowed us down but after half an hour we hit the road that went to the bungalow and followed it to the river. Uncle john said he would take the baobab walk that went up the way we came towards a large baobab. We told him we would meet him back at the camp. Dad and I explored the river looking for rocks until the line of light had left us. Then we walked to the camp. When uncle john arrived dad suggested we go and talk to the old man and his wife since we were leaving the next day. Uncle john brought along his flute and his jaw harp. They were very hospitable and offered us drinks and whisky (not for me, of course.)

It was long dark and dad and I were longing for our sleeping bags. Uncle john stayed to talk and play his flute for them. He looked in his element so we left him and climbed into the tent. I slept soundly and didnt hear any leopards. Tomorrow would be a lengthy day and there was still (quote) a LONG way to Johannesburg where john would catch a bus home to Pietermaritzburg.