The urge to migrate, to quest, to go on a journey lies deep-rooted in our DNA. For hundreds of thousands of years before we became sedentary, urban dwellers it was how we lived. We were hunter-gatherers, nomads. I certainly still feel this instinctual pull. It is the reason you so often find me hundreds – sometimes thousands – of kilometres from home and it is why I am always quick to respond to an invitation to do a road trip. For me, there is something magical about going to a place you have never been before and feeling an immediate connection to it.

Thus it was with the Baviaanskloof.

The Baviaanskloof – ‘Valley of the Baboons’ – lies mostly in the East Cape and is dominated by the Baviaanskloof and Kouga mountains which run parallel to one another in an East-West orientation. Separating the wet coastal belt from the dry interior these mountains form part of a ragged chain that make up much of the South-East coastline of South Africa. Two main rivers drain it, namely the Baviaanskloof and Kouga. They converge at Smitskraal where they travel in an easterly direction to the Kouga dam. The Grootrivier and Witrivier also flow through the reserve and there are a few other minor rivers, streams and odd springs formed where the rare rains come down from the mountains. Here birds and animals come to water.

As a first time visitor to the Baviaanskloof, I was most fortunate to have Goonie Marsh as my guide. Besides making a good travelling companion, he lectures in Geology so was able to explain to my sister Sally and me how this world of marvels came into being. He is also a man with a deep interest in the world around him and as a long time East Cape resident has acquired a great general knowledge of the area.

Driving down the dusty, twisting, often tortuous road, it is hard to believe there was a time when the climate and landscape were different but some of the Baviaanskloof was once underwater. As part of what is known as the Cape Super Group, its geology consists of alternating layers of sandstone and shale that were deposited on the bed of a large inland sea between 300-400 million years ago. Since then it has been tilted, folded, twisted, faulted, buckled, redeposited in new layers and eroded into its current fantastical shapes (see notes below by Goonie Marsh)*.

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We were not, of course, the only nomads, driven by curiosity, to come wandering into this almost mythic landscape. The first anatomically modern humans emerged in the Baviaanskoof during the Middle Stone Age – between 120 000 and 30 000 years ago. They are believed to have been the ancestors of the San who would later live in the area. They left their traces in a large number of caves and overhangs which provided them with both shelter and walls to decorate.

They were displaced and eliminated by the Khoekhoe and early European settlers. Although various explorers and hunters had passed that way before, the first white farmers settled in the Gamtoos Valley in the 1730s. As more arrived, the deeper into the Baviaanskloof they penetrated.

Lonely, sparse and cut off by its mountains from the rest of the world, life could not have been easy for these early settlers. Initial access into the area was by way of an ox wagon. Because of the difficulty of travelling over the terrain, many farmers only made the journey out the valley once a year using the Ouberg track. Getting in and out got just a little bit easier with the construction of a dirt road between 1880 and 1890 by the hard-working, prodigous Victorian road-builder Thomas Bains, son of Andrew Geddes Bains, South Africa’s first geologist and another great road-maker.

Having approached the Baviaanskloof from the East, through the important citrus growing region of the Gamtoos Valley and the towns of Hankey and Patensie, it was along this road that we now travelled. On both sides of us, dry trees rose towards the dusty mountains. Above them would normally hang the hazy blue sky of Africa but – as if to thwart my sunny mood – it was cloudy and cold on our first day. It was still mightily impressive. Here one could sense what the continent must have been like before its wild animals were not confined to a few parks but roamed everywhere and man had not had such an indelible – and, at times, destructive – impact on the environment.

We began by taking a detour off the main road to the Kouga dam. Although a marvel of engineering it made a sorry sight. The East Cape is battling a severe drought with its dams averaging out at only 15% full. At 4,5% of its capacity, the Kouga dam is currently at its lowest level since it was constructed in 1957. Here, like everywhere else, climate change is taking its toll…

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It is not always so dry in the valley. Sometimes there are floods. In 1916, for example, over 350mm of rain fell in the catchment area and a great solid bank of water came tearing down the narrow valleys sweeping all before it. Four members of the Campbell family lost their lives when the tree they had climbed to escape the raging torrent gave way under them. There is now a memorial to them.

We spent our first night at Bruintjieskraal in the Rivierspoort, just outside the entrance to the park, on a sheep farm, enclosed in a narrow valley between two ramparts of dark mountain. Our thatched-roofed, timber-framed accommodation proved more modern and more stylish than I had expected, blending seamlessly into the surrounding bush and the mountain itself.

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The sky was clearing as we set off the next morning. Pale wisps of cloud danced and dissolved along the mountain peaks casting shifting shadows on the valleys below. After stopping at the Park’s Interpretative Centre (the whole park has now been classified as a World Heritage Site), we followed the road that snakes its way up the Combrink Pass. The higher we went, the more spectacular the scenery got. It was along this stretch of road that we encountered the only other travellers we were to meet in the park – two Germans on motorbikes who stopped to enjoy the same view we did.

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At the top of the pass, the country opens up into the extensive Bergplaas grassland plateau which, when we visited, had an almost Alpine feel to it on account of all the swirling cloud, mist and drizzle on its upper peaks. Crossing it, we were greeted by yet more breathtaking views. An interesting oddity here is Winston LeRoux’s rusting, cable system which spans the gaping Waterpoort Gorge. It was once used to link the Enkeldoorn and Bergplaas farming communities and to transport goods between the two but was abandoned in the 1960s.

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From Bergplaas we descended the twisting Holgat Pass through more craggy overhangs, clefts and soaring rock The surrounding slopes were covered in fynbos and proteas and – further down – spekboom, aloes (Aloes ferox, africa, speciosa, striata and arborescens all occur in the area) and euphorbia. Strange plants and succulents, that have adapted to vertical living, clutched onto the cliffs. A pair of Black Eagle wheeled overhead.

The country grew steadily drier the further west we went. In places, the desolation was offset by the dense growth of trees which grew along some of the river banks. The water in these rivers was beautifully cool, clear, tasty and refreshing. In places, pondweed, lilies and something like giant cress grew so thick they looked like little green islands rising out of the water. We stopped at one of the streams, scooping up handfuls of the precious liquid and then sipping it with the all the reverence a person in a parched desert might do.

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At mid-morning we pulled into the Smitskraal picnic site for a coffee break. Goonie hauled out his furnace, gathered some kindling, and then fired it up. It was a sight to behold. In no time, the water inside was boiling and the metal contraption was belching out plumes of steam and smoke like an active mini-volcano.

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Aside from a bored-looking baboon who watched us from the shade of a tree, we were the only ones around – or, at least, so it appeared. There are buffalo in the park but they must have been lying low that day for we didn’t see any of them although their dung was everywhere scattered across the roads. Black rhino also lurk in the thickets around here but they, too, declined to show themselves. It did not bother me. With their poor vision and small powers of deduction, they are, like the fierce buffalo, notoriously short-tempered. I would prefer not to have a face to face encounter with either and always keep a close eye out for hospitable trees to climb when I am in their presence. Here, unfortunately, the available trees consisted mostly of sharp-needled Vachellia karroo (Sweet Thorn).

There are still leopards living in this mountain wilderness. Maybe one was even watching us from some rock ledge with eyes that see everything but reveal nothing? Cape Mountain Zebra have been reintroduced into the area and there are also Klipspringer, Mountain Reedbuck and several types of highly poisonous snake (including Puff-Adder and the fearsome Cape Cobra). Them I was happy to avoid too…

From the picnic site, we headed up the Grasnek Pass, stopping high up on its neck so I could take yet more photographs of its panoramic view. Pressing on, we passed several tattered and long-abandoned old habitations, disintegrating memorials to those who had tried their luck in this harsh environment before calling it quits. We stopped for a roadside lunch directly opposite one such derelict farmhouse. Looking at its collapsing walls and sun-bleached, corrugated iron roof, I decided it might make a meaningful painting about the fragility and uncertainty of human life (a subject much on my mind since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic) so I hauled out my camera again and photographed it from various angles.

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Exiting the park we found ourselves back in farmland. Down the hills came herds of goats and sheep, little white flecks against a vast expanse of rock. The scenery remained as majestic as before.

We spent our second night at Speekhout farm, nestling in a vast amphitheatre of mountains with a crocodile-shaped outcrop of red rock at the one end. Sitting outside the flimsy, reed-walled house, that served as our night’s accommodation, with our evening drinks, we watched the dying sun turn the mountain tops gold. Below us, a small band of springbok slipped across a field. Nomads themselves, these buck (once called trekbokke or “travelling buck”) used to migrate across the Karoo in their hundreds of thousands, trampling all before them. Now their movements have been restricted and the few that remain exist mostly behind fences, like these. As a wanderer myself, it was hard not to feel sorry for them.

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Lying on my own, later that night, in a tent I had found erected around the back of the reed shack, I got to experience just how cold the Karoo can get when the sky is clear and the stars are out. I slept poorly.

The next day we resumed our journey west, heading up through the jagged walls of Nuwekloof Pass which links the western section of the Baviaanskloof with the higher Karoo hinterland and the towns of Willowmore and Uniondale.

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The moorland-type country, at the top, was covered with low bushes with tough, wiry leaves that can survive where grass cannot. At certain times of the year – like now – little perennial daisy plants pop up all over the place, providing a cheerful contrast to all the greys, browns and ochres. Hardy succulents of many kinds also thrive here, providing additional food for the fat merino sheep who blend in so well with their surroundings.

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Up here in sheep country, the valleys start getting a lot wider than the mountains they separate. The further west one goes, the more enormous the landscape becomes, and the straighter and emptier the roads. Once you get onto them, it is hard to believe you will ever reach your destination. It certainly felt like that when we hit the N9, about halfway between the towns of Willowmore and Uniondale. Instead of continuing West towards the jagged outlines of the Swartberg mountains, running along the far horizon, however, we turned East again heading back towards the more densely populated Indian Ocean side of the sub-continent.

We stopped in Uniondale for coffee and a quick shop (succulent Karoo lamb was on the menu for that night). The town is famous for, among other things, its ghost, a young woman who stands alongside the same lonely stretch of road we had just driven down. When people stop to offer her a lift she gets in and then scarily vanishes. The story has inspired an Afrikaans film and a song by Andrew Goosen, both titled “Die Spook van Uniondale”.

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Back on the ghost road, I kept watching out of the corner of my eye but did not see her although, in this deserted landscape, it was quite easy to believe she exists. We passed through Unionpoort and carried on to where the road branches off eastwards, down the Langkloof – the ‘long valley’ that separates the Kouga and Tsitsikamma móuntain ranges – following a long-used route that runs roughly parallel to the one we had been on in the Baviaanskloof.

A bit of family history here. Many of my ancestors have felt the same, restless urge that had caused me to be cruising down this road. One of them, Benjamin Moodie, the last Laird of Melsetter, had, in 1817, crossed the globe from his home on the Isle of Hoy in the Orkney Islands and set himself up in an old Dutch-style farmhouse at Grootvadersbosch, near Swellendam, at the base of the Langeberg. He was later joined by two of his brothers, John Wedderburn and Donald Moodie. Although he later emigrated to Canada (his two brothers remained, both founding South African dynasties that spread across the country and into neighbouring Zimbabwe). John Wedderburn left an extremely entertaining – and insightful – account of his time in the country in his book Ten Years in South Africa (first published in 1835).

A few years after he arrived, John Wedderburn (who had fought in the Napoleonic Wars and had returned home to find there were few jobs available for ex-soldiers) also came travelling down the Langkloof, en-route to the Grahamstown area where he and his brothers hoped to be granted some land. Like a lot of early travellers on the sub-continent, John Wedderburn found the parched and ancient Karoo a frightening, hostile, place. He was not overly impressed by the more arid and treeless upper parts of the Langkloof even though its fruit growing potential had already been recognised:

“I was much disappointed in the appearance of this tract of country, which, notwithstanding the number of farmhouses and well-watered gardens, was rather bleak and forbidding, from the total absence of wood, and the uniformity of its mountains,” he would later write.

As a Scotsman, he possessed an obvious natural bias towards wet weather and greener pastures and it is only when he reached the coastal end of the valley, where the rainfall is higher and the vegetation more luxuriant, that his opinions began to improve:

“The eastern extremity of the Lange Kloof opens into the valley of the Kromme river; and here the landscape becomes interesting and romantic.”

John Wedderburn is generally a reliable guide and I find myself in agreement with much of what he writes but here I am very much at odds with his views. I think the Kouga mountain range, of which he was so dismissive, is an area of extraordinary variety, beauty and – dare I say it? – romance.

Our destination lay in a remote, secluded valley in the Kouga Mountains Wilderness Area. To get to it you have to drive down another rough and lonely road, through a perilously steep gorge and then up the other side. It made for a dizzying, jittery ride.

The closer you get to the mountains the more impressive they become. Stream beds and ravines trench the foothills. Ahead of the house, in which were to spend the night, a steep gorge cleaved through the mountains, well-wooded in parts, belying John Wedderburn’s thoughts on the matter. In the late afternoon, my sister and I wandered through the peach and apricot orchards which were in full blossom, entranced by the light. Afterwards, we followed up the stream into the mountain gorge. In places, the water flowed straight over the road, so we had to cross on stepping stones.

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This was, – and still is – Ferreira country. Long before John Wedderburn came riding down the Langkloof, there had been Ferreiras living in the Onder-Kouga. Among these hardy frontiersmen was Johannes Stephanus Ferreira (1848-1896) also known as “Jan Been” on account of his bandy legs (hoepel been), a legacy from his being shot during one of the countless Frontier Wars. According to Bartle Logie, in his book Boots in the Baviaans, Johannes may have been the inspiration for the famous Afrikaans folk-song “Vat jou goed en trek Ferreira” [literal translation: “Take your stuff and move on, Ferreira”]. The romantic in me wanted to believe it was true.

Isolated by its topography it, too, must have been a tough environment to live in although I imagine they must have also developed a strong sense of community still embodied, in many of the Karoo dorps you pass through, by their beautifully built churches, in which the faithful gathered on Sundays. Although in some places houses have been modernised or rebuilt, many of the whitewashed outbuildings are still the same as when they were when constructed.

Other aspects remain the same. Back doors open up to vegetable gardens which run into orchards which stretch down to sheep paddocks which, in turn, melt into the rough, rock-strewn hillsides. Chickens scratch around in dusty backyards, ducks and geese float on ponds, Border collies snooze in the shade, Ostrich eye-ball you…

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Here generations of children have grown up and taken over the running of their parents farm, building on what has gone before.

I was to get further glimpses into the continuity of life in these isolated communities as we headed out along a dirt road that runs along the base of the range the next morning. There are still many working farms in the Onder-Kouga but inter-dispersed amongst them are yet more abandoned old homes which are slowly being reclaimed by the fynbos. The sites of these houses had usually been carefully chosen, often with a mountain as a backdrop and a view that looked on to yet another mountain.

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Having crossed the Kouga river yet again we found ourselves back on R62, near Kareedouw where we stopped for more coffee…

And so my journey into the Baviaanskloof came to an end. As we headed back to Grahamstown, along the N2, I realised that travelling through it had been far too big an undertaking for me to be able to give anything other than a shallow summing-up of my thoughts, impressions and experiences. Nevertheless, I still emerged from the journey feeling I had learnt a little bit more about my country and – just as important if travel is to prove redemptive – myself.

My life had been both broadened and enriched by my foray into the Valley of the Baboons…

GALLERY:

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*NOTES ON CAPE FOLD BELT

by Goonie Marsh

The Cape Fold Belt has a long history starting about 500 million years ago with the

formation of a shallow marine basin, the Agulhas Sea, along the southern margin of

Gondwana, a single land mass or supercontinent, which was made up of the continents

currently known as Antarctica, Australia, India, Africa and South America.

For the next 170 million years until about 330 million years ago, this basin received sandy

and muddy sediment derived by erosion from the interior of Gondwana. With compaction

and cementation the accumulated sediment formed a succession of sandstones and shales

more than 8 km in thickness. This succession is known in formal terminology as the Cape

Supergroup and it is subdivided into 3 major units depending on the proportion of

sandstone to shale in the sequence. The oldest and lowermost unit is the Table Mountain

Group which is dominated by quartz sandstone of exceptional purity. This is overlain by

the Bokkeveld Group which has thick units of shale interleaved with thinner sandstone

layers. The topmost, and therefore youngest unit, is the Witteberg Group with

intercalated shales and sandstones in approximately equal proportions.

Starting about 330 million years ago and continuing for over 100 million years, the

southern margin of Gondwana was subjected to powerful laterally compressive forces

directed northwards. These forces destroyed the Agulhas Sea and Cape Basin, squeezing it

against the continental mass of Gondwana, rumpling, folding and uplifting the sedimentary

strata that had accumulated to form a major fold mountain belt, the Cape Mountains. The

folding process also fuses the grains in the rocks tightly together and they harden,

particularly the quartz sandstones, which are converted into exceptionally hard quartzites.

The general processes and products of this fold mountain building event are known as the

Cape Orogeny. A good ‘modern’ analogy would be the creation of the Himalayas – Earth’s

still active major fold mountain chain formed by India pushing into Asia

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Baviaanskloof – A World Untouched. Compiled by Liesl Hattingh (published by Baviaans Tourism).

Boots in the Baviaans by Bartle Logie (Bluecliff Publishing).

Ten Years in South Africa by Lieut. J.W.D Moodie published by Richard Bentley)

SPECIAL THANKS to Goonie Marsh and Sally Scott for organising this trip and being happy to stop whenever I wanted to take a photograph – which was very often – or have a cup of coffee…