Bombay Works

Sand coloured smog. Fans. Air con. Swooping kites. The thin film of humidity that coats the skin. The smell that clothes acquire when they get damp, then dry, get damp, then dry. This is Bombay, the steamy city that never sleeps and where anything is possible. For example, being offered Fifty Shades of Gray by a street vendor through the window of my taxi opposite Dhobi Ghat, where the washermen process 100,000 pieces of clothing a day, each article discreetly coded so that it reaches its correct owner. 

Last Friday I boarded the Ladies Carriage on the commuter train from Bandra Station to what used to be Victoria Terminus, now CST (return ticket = 12 rupees). The Bombay (latterly Mumbai) trains carry over 7.24 million commuters a day - the highest passenger density of any urban railway system in the world. Teenagers in salwar kameez, hijab and burkas giggle on their way to school, and sellers of tacky jewellery proffer their sparkling cargo. A transgender hijra circulates the carriage in her sari, blessing each one of us – though only about five passengers part with any coins in exchange for good luck. We pass stations with the names of empire: Sandhurst Road, Dockyard Road, Cotton Green. Other commuter trains shoot by with open doors, men hanging out.

The charming and humorous Armando awaited me on Platform 1. Having completed a Masters degree in Fine Art at Stanford, he is now negotiating the extremist bureaucracy at the Sir J.J. School of Art, Bombay’s oldest and most prestigious art institution, where Rudyard Kipling, son of the dean, grew up in a large and picturesque wooden double-storey house. Outside are unkempt gardens where the trees and plants grow prolifically with no attention. Birds chatter and a cockerel wanders around proudly. The shade encloses this other-world, separating it from the working chaos of one of the largest cities on earth. Many important artists and architects were trained here, going away to produce some of India’s best-known buildings and public spaces. As one of the school’s only international students ever, Armando goes from office to office acquiring forms, signatures, photocopies, stamps, more signatures, more authorisations, additional forms. Paperwork will in fact be the subject of his art. 

Built by the British, the school buildings are over a century old. Their interiors are a bizarre and liminal world like Harry Potter on oriental steroids: huge stone buildings with grand staircases and ornate metalwork, acres of high ceilings with old-fashioned fans, cathedral-size windows, and a chaotic litter of sculptures, murals, paintings, easels, work stations, and antique hardwood furniture. 

In the printmaking studio are Harrild & Sons printing presses that have been in situ since their arrival from London a thousand moons ago. Harrild was an English printing pioneer in the first half of the 19th century. The life drawing studio is kept firmly out of bounds thanks to the ‘sensitive’ subject matter. We sneak in anyway and marvel at the (real) skeleton with decaying teeth in its glass case. Armando tells me that the life drawing models are apparently 3rd generation – like other professions in India, it has become an inherited occupation. 

On the other side of the school, the Crawford Market begins: street after street of fabric shops, tiffin sellers, purveyors of fine sweets, jewellers, all loosely divided into their respective sections. We do some swift business, Armando’s Hindi proving to be excellent value. At the sweet shop, our two small boxes of delicacies are selected by some of the 9 men behind the counter and then vacuum-packed by a tenth man with a hairdryer. We do our best not to laugh. 

In the tiffin shop I buy stainless steel food containers that are the kitchen hallmark of India, and Armando persuades me into buying a pressure cooker. The salesman looks on, wondering why on earth it is Armando the man, not me the woman, who knows all about the intricate workings of such a device. He gets increasingly impatient as we discuss what to engrave on the bottom of the cooker (another Indian tradition), and when we finalise on “Cooked with Love” in Hindi, he tells the inscriber to get a move on: ‘Ok, ok, your love, my love, everybody’s love!”.

On the way back to the closest station we walk through a Muslim burial ground which is one of the most beautiful inner city gardens I’ve ever seen. It’s a commuter short cut as well, so also the busiest inner city garden ever! Interesting how religion in this case promotes and protects the environment. Back in Bandra I’m supposed to meet a mystery man who speaks very fast on the phone and who’s delivering my salvaged iPod, which I handed over into the unknown tech realm before travelling to Mysore. Bandra Station is, like most Indian stations, a flurry of activity with hundreds of people on the go. Within literally 30 seconds, whilst I’m digging for my phone and stressing about landmarks and how on earth to find my ‘contact’, a man I’ve never seen before appears in front me of me and says my name. Of course. This is Bombay. It works. iPod and cash change hands, he evaporates into the crowd, and I’m gleeful to have had 8GB of data rescued by some tech whiz. 

Down the road at the printing shop, I’m having business cards made to publicise my new book. They can do the job in 9 hours, of course, despite being inundated with greeting card orders for the upcoming Diwali festival. The tiny front room is crowded with a thousand paper samples, wedding invites, personalized stationery of Bollywood actors, Muslim family photos, theatre posters. I sip a petite cup of hot chai and look at fancy invitations for Parsi socialites at the Race Course Turf Club and hotels in exclusive Juhu. Later in the day, the card designer personally delivers my cards on his motorbike to Armando’s flat by St Andrews Church, where hundreds of striking orange marigold garlands are being laid on graves for All Saints Day. 

By mid-evening Bandra is more awake than ever. I ask for the opening house of a nearby pharmacy and the attendant looks at me with some surprise. “Twenty four seven, madam”. Of course. How could I think otherwise?

[With thanks to Armando for his photo of the hallowed halls of J.J]

Coffee, Cardamom & the Forests of Coorg

The bus driver to Madikeri had a beaming smile, an immaculately maintained mustache, a steering wheel with a two-foot radius, and a take-no-prisoners attitude.  Sitting at the front of the bus, sweatily snuggled amongst mostly men, is better for the view but worse for the nerves.  Like, quite a lot worse.  The driving in this place is unreal. The bus also has a Suggestion Box though it was hard to tell if anyone ever had ever used it.

Three hours later on arrival, after arguing with a smarmy rickshaw driver who then got a commission from the hotelier, I spent the night not far from the bus stop at a characterless but clean hotel where the receptionist sleeps behind the desk so that he can be available twenty-four-seven.  There’s no getting away from the mosques and temples, so it was the usual 5am wake up call, which was also when a group of other guests decided to start making lots of noise in the corridor.  Sunday morning, god strewth.

Despite a somewhat uninspiring start, Madikeri turned out to be a true highlight of the India trip.  My randomly-found hiking guide Channappa was a local coffee farmer who’s been guiding for nine years.  He speaks six of India’s twenty-two official languages (122 languages are spoken by more than 10,000 people) and wears slip-on sandals, in contrast to my full-on hiking boots.  We spent two days trekking up and down through muggy emerald forests and expanses of rice paddies, chatting with other small farmers who we met along the way in their burbling Kannada tongue.  Without wanting to romanticize these people, I was struck by how content they seemed – a light in their eyes or something in their faces that suggested the benefits of leading an outdoor rural life inscribed with agricultural labour.

I was blown away by the forests.  Several centuries of exploitation by colonisers and latter-day loggers, yet this earth is bountiful.  The monsoon brings 150 inches of rain here each year.  Many of the common crops grow happily amidst the jungle: coffee, cardamom, pepper, vanilla, ginger, lemongrass, cashew, pineapple, wild tobacco and the occasional avocado, orange and lemon trees.  There are less savoury things in the forests too: leeches which dance frantically on the forest floor and then back-bend their way up your shoes to bite through your socks; poisonous vipers lying quietly near the paths, one of which put Channappa out of commission for weeks as a teenager; nettles which will make you itch for a month; and yellow poisonous frogs.

Channappa’s grandfather purchased 14 acres of forest here in the 1920s during the British Raj, at a time when poisoning tigers was rewarded by the government.  He grew cardamom, an unassuming plant whose seeds grow in small fleshy bulbs just above the ground. India is the second largest producer in the world of this third-most-expensive spice. Nowadays farmers focus on coffee because the price has doubled in the last year or two, especially for organic coffee.  Many of the trees are already 40-80 years old. 

 Channappa’s spotless home is at the top of a steep climb, marked by roses, geraniums and hibiscus but otherwise fully ensconsed by forest.  He and his neighbours have put in their own road, their own water system and their own electricity.   These are impressive and expensive feats given the dramatic terrain.  He has two impeccably behaved children (there are government benefits for families who only have two offspring) who are fluent in English, a dutiful wife who spent hours preparing a sumptuous dinner, breakfast and packed lunch, and, importantly, a bathroom with hot water heated on a fire. 

The night brought soft rain and deep sleep.  I liked this place so much that I offered to come and help pick his coffee for free during the harvest season – though I imagine I’d be one of the most unproductive labourers.  Perhaps even the laughing stock.  In fact, almost most certainly the laughing stock.

The Common Soul Shines: Mysore

Each morning I rise at 5.30am and get ready within a few minutes. It is still dark as I leave Door No. 1472, 7th Cross in the neighbourhood of Krishnamurtypuram, Mysore. It is one of the few quiet times of the day, for people in India are busy most hours, and God is everywhere, drawing prayers from all sides, all corners, all minutes. Some mornings the Muslim call to prayer wakes me first at 5am, other time the devotional chants are already underway at the nearest Hindu temple. 

I walk 5 minutes to reach my yoga shala, situated at No. 1317, 3rd Cross, passing the Shree Ladies Beauty Parlour and Surya Medicals on the way. This is usually a very quiet time of day, like I said, but there is a small tearoom already open, where the working men on scooters and motorbikes stop for a quick idli and hot chai. 

Upstairs the shala practice room is already getting warm and busy as the students from around the world stretch, meditate or say prayers.  From the rooftop one can see Chamundi Hill, the place where the goddess Chamundeswari slew the demon Mahishasura (after whom Mysore is named) in a battle that lasted for nine days and nights. These nine days came to be called Dussehra, which celebrates the victory of good over evil, as well the power of women more broadly.

The temple on Chamundi Hill - the original shrine dates to the 12th Century

Our teacher has already been up since 3am when he does his own meditation and practice before turning his attention to us. Each morning begins with an opening prayer chanted in Sanskrit as the clock strikes 6am:

Jeevamani Bharajath Phana
The common soul shines like an emerald on the head of the snake
Sahasra Vidruth Vishwambara
Which has one thousand heads and is all pervading
[and the prayer continues...]  

Mysore-style ashtanga yoga is not led but only supervised by the teacher -- each student must remember and implement the sequence of some 60 poses and their variations, in the correct order, preferably with no memory aides.  The students are at different levels, and several do apparently impossible contortions that I can only dream of.  Our teacher circulates the room to improve the students' positions, stand on them with his full body weight, or even pick them up and swing them around, sometimes shouting instructions across the room: 

"Hello!  HELLO!!"
"Head up. Head up! UP!! Eyes! Knee to floor! No, floor!! RELAX!!!"
"Tssst!"
 
Around 8am, as our vigorous practice is coming to an end, the fruit and vegetable sellers start to steer and ply their wares up the street. We know their voices and their individual hallmark cries by now, even though we don't know their faces.  Somewhere next door is the sound of running water and a woman beating her laundry with gusto.  Charcoal fumes drift in from nearby kitchen stoves.  The train horns blare in the distance, on their way to Bangalore. By the time we emerge, sweaty and stretched to the enth degree, life in the residential world of Krishnamurtypuram is all a-bustle.

If you take the first right at the construction site and turn left at New Globe Tailors, there is a one-room one-man laundry operation where you can drop off your laundry virtually around the clock. Just down the road is the Vijay Motor Driving School, as well as a printing press whose machines spin till late. Next door to the yoga shala is a classical dance teacher whose teenage students are busy preparing for their exams, still practising at 9.30pm at night.  Amidst all this, residents go about their daily lives, cows wander by and keep the road adorned with cowpats, and boys play cricket in the street in the afternoon. Collectors of alms come and go.   

People here, like elsewhere in India, are enterprising: homes often double up as business premises.   I pay 30 rand/USD $4 a night for my room at the home of a woman who must make a small fortune cooking delicious lunches and giving cookery lessons to word-of-mouth foreigners who appear in droves to sample her cuisine.  In the morning the small kitchen is by far the most crowded part of the house, comprising the three ladies preparing lunch (for up to 30 people), the domestic worker, two small children, the cat, and the two Czech yogis (my neighbours upstairs) who are cooking their customary sizeable pot of oats.

My simple room with the hardest bed in India is upstairs at the back, with shutter windows overlooking the Dr Ambedkar Park on one side, and into the courtyard on the other.  The courtyard has a small altar and the greenest-leaf-tree I've ever seen, and below the ladies of the house wash, clean, sort and dry, in the way that women do everywhere. It is cool and clean, if not messy. To reach the courtyard, and thus the toilet and bathroom (each of which has a blogpost-worth of damp individualities) requires descending a steep metal ladder which would avert even the most avid of night pee-ers.

Many of my meals have been had at the no-frills Hotel Mahesh Prasad Veg Restaurant, a fast-service diner situated next door to a chemicals shop. Mahesh Prasad has a cashier who prides himself on the speed at which he can return your change, and turns over 1000 customers a day. Now that's business for you. The menu is highly classified according to times and types, the full rationale for which I haven't yet figured out, but one's ordering has to be carefully done with these many timings in mind:

Tiffin Select 3.30pm - 7.30pm

Dosa            7.30am - 12 noon; 4.15pm - 6.30pm

Chat            5.30pm - 10pm

Chinese       5.30pm - 10pm

North Indian 7pm - 10pm

South Thali  12.30pm - 3.30pm

North Thali  7.30pm

The Mahesh kitchen, which you pass through on the way to the loo, is another world -  New York speed, Bombay heat and a lotta workers.  You can get take-aways at the 'Parcel Counter' where your food will be expertly wrapped in plastic and newspaper, secured neatly with string.

It's not all romance, of course.  At least one of the famous yoga schools that I enquired with in person was unwelcoming and exclusive, leaving me with the impression of being a bizarre mix of a business and a cult. The yogis (practisers of yoga) are often territorial and competitive about their teachers, affiliations and the correct way to teach/study; they remind me of rowers to the extent that they can talk about nothing besides...yoga.  There is not nearly as much humility as I was expecting.  And many of them prefer to stay in what I call the 'yoga cocoon', ie. only in the safe comforts of places frequented by foreigners, offering Western health food, smoothies and bountiful quantities of spirulina.  The local economy has adapted around these demands of course, particularly in the neighbourhood of Gokulam: the couple who sell silver jewellery, incense and spirulina from home; the man who sells overpriced rooftop lunches; various Ayurvedic masseuses; and best of all, the family of dentists who sell chocolate on the side (!) 

Today is the 9th day of Dussehra, with preparations and celebrations already well underway for tomorrow, the festival's apex. Today is celebrated with the worship of the implements and machines that are used in day to day life and which help people earn their livelihoods. This means that everything from bicycles to buses (including the computer I'm typing on right now) is decorated with banana leaves and yellow flower garlands. Till next time...

Earth and Water: September in Zimbabwe

The Gairesi cottages are only some 12 kilometres from the Mozambique border in the eastern highlands of Zimbabwe. Near here, in 1975, the young Mugabe was smuggled across the border by Chief Tangwena and his people. I wonder who and where the Rhodesian patrols were. It is worth including this excerpt below from Edgar Tekere's autobiography which comments on the significant role of Tangwena's wife, the 'small woman', in facilitating the safe escape:   

"We stayed in the forest, looked after by Tangwena’s wife. It was misty with a light drizzle, and so she was able to light a fire to cook for us, without smoke being seen by our pursuers. Mbuya Tangwena called on us to join her in traditional prayers, and take snuff, as is the tradition in Zimbabwe. Tangwena was waiting for his wife to give the signal for us to move. She was a spirit medium, a host to Sekuru Dzeka Tangwena, her father-in-law. On the second day, at around seven in the evening, Mbuya Tangwena became possessed with the spirit, and instructed us to leave. She told Chief Tangwena to take us to Tangadza, another sub-chief of the Tangwena Dynasty, who was living on the Mozambican side of the border. She ordered her husband to take us by the most difficult path, at which he demurred, but the old lady told the great chief, “You just do it, or these people will be caught.” It was amusing to see him defer to this small woman."

We are staying in a quiet valley, just us and the caretakers here, and the rush of the Gairesi river below. The walking is idyllic and the water is crystal clear, strong enough to swim on the spot. Up on the hills there are scattered hamlets and homesteads, though not many. From there, nobody's business is private, because the landscape is open, ceding far and wide views, including of the paths by which the villagers get around in these parts. There are no other vehicles besides ours. Most people seem open and greet us in a friendly fashion. They have a good laugh when they see me going for a run. The caretaker here is confident and engaging. This morning she asked me about my work, and pushed a stray lock of hair back behind my ear in a sisterly fashion. It was a gesture that would never (or very seldom) happen in South Africa between (black and white) strangers. 

This morning we drove through the hills to The Waterfall, as it is known. On an old map I spotted markings for ruins and ancient terracing, so I went off to explore. In an open grassland, the dense thickets of trees are an archaeological giveaway: trees have taken root in the damp cracks between stones that were carefully walled here in the 18th and 19th century, perhaps earlier. They are thickly grown over with creepers and vines; it feels slightly eery being there in the midday shade. The Nyanga stone pits - now just sunken depressions in the earth - are well known by archaeologists. The effort that went into their building was significant. I found four pits in total, all in close proximity, and no doubt there were more. Significant research has been done on the pit structures, and though there is still debate about their function, cattle kraaling seems to be the best founded. 

I clambered up further. The hill proffered quintessential Zimbabwean scenes: isolated homes on rolling hills framed with spring msasa trees, their dark copper satin leaves so smooth and fine to touch that you wonder how they will survive the coming heat. And behind, the rocky granite debris with its lichen fields. From there one can see everything that would have needed to be seen: the scale of the clan's cattle wealth, or perhaps its dimunition in hard years; the approach of enemies or kin; beasts of prey, for lion are certain to have been many in those years; fire smoke on the horizon; and the coming storms. 

Our next stop was much further north in the country: Chitake springs near Mana Pools, for the annual wildlife game count - an activity with a primarily white subscriber base and apparently more social than scientific in nature. After a flurry of unpacking, repacking and food preparation in amidst Harare power cuts, led by my camping powerhouse mother, we set off for Chitake. Our 40+ degree campsite was on the edge of a steep cliff overlooking a thread of stream formed by the only springs in a 9 kilometre radius.  In true white Zimbabwean fashion, we combatted the heat with the indefatigable cooler-box-at-large (that is, several filled with ice, cold water, beers & Coke, which had to be shuffled from patch of shade to patch of shade in continuous fashion).

Chitake is well known now for being an 'extreme' wildlife experience, and it certainly lived up to expectations. The first night, after dinner, some 30 elephants came down in the almost-full moonlight, many of them babies or young with the first stubs of tusks. During the hours of sleep, all sorts of sounds of the wild: lion, elephants, hyena and then the bellowing of buffalo. Around 2am we emerged from our tents and, under the cover of darkness with the moon having sunk low, watched more than 40 buffalo nervously flocking around the water below. Quickly and with no warning, a group of 7 lions swept down the bank and across the sand. An extraordinary stampede up the steep bank opposite followed, the air so thickly drenched with fine dust and dung that we could see it even in the dim light. The fear and panic was pulpable. One lone animal was left behind, not knowing what to do. Yet it seems to have escaped, for moments later the lions had made their kill. We could not see it but the remainder of the night was filled with the sounds of meat being devoured and snarled over. By early morning the only sign of the carcass was a stretch of dark skin and a few tossed bones. This is nature in the raw. 

 

The next night, two lionesses passed the camp 20 metres away as I stepped out of the shower tent. Me and them. We saw each other but their intentions lay elsewhere. In the morning their spoor, and that of others, showed that they had passed several times along that same close-by track. The remainder of the weekend we were swept with wind and dust, a layer of Zambezi Valley earth deposited on our faces even during sleep.

Oh this earth, this water.

Origins: From Orania to Taung

We rolled into Williston in the Namakwa Karoo in time for sunset, some 540km after leaving Cape Town via Ceres, Citrusdal and the abundant spring flowers of Nieuwoudtville.

If dry and dusty describes this former Rhenish mission station during the cool winter, then hell knows what it’s like at the height of summer.  For a particularly modest sum we rented a substantial 3 bedroom house for the night – Die Bankhuis, built in 1913 – along with its creaky wooden floors, enormous old fashioned bathtub and generous stoep.  The landlady looked worn out and explained that the village residents were still recovering from a festival a week earlier.  We figured that if things move slower in Williston than Jo’burg then maybe people take longer to recover from their hangovers too.

We were the only customers at one of two local restaurants where most dishes come out the freezer except for lamb, which grows on trees in these parts. Or shrubs, more likely.  As part of our plot to try visit Orania in the Northern Cape Province the following day, we innocently asked our teenage Afrikaans waitress about it, all the while aware of Orania’s reputation as a 100% white stronghold for right wing Freedom Front voters and Afrikaner separatism. 

We think she pretended not to know about it (and indeed there are plenty of Afrikaners embarrassed by this sector of their brethren), though we couldn’t say for sure.  Perhaps she was grappling with how on earth to explain to us that as a multiracial pair, we wouldn’t be welcome there.  Either way, she returned later on to say that she had gleaned some Orania information from her female relative in the kitchen.  In Orania, she declared, there was a giant koeksister monument to visit.  J. and I looked at each other in amused disbelief.  Was she for real? A colossal history of proud self-determination, racism, self-reliance (selfwerksaamheid) and ethnic defiance, an African place where no black people are seen, all subsumed to South Africa’s syrup-sodden national dessert delicacy?

Later, however, we realized that The Koeksister (now with capitals, note) was our green card to Orania.  Perhaps the waitress was actually being uber-strategic. You see, we needed a reason to go in.  The signs on both sides of the road state that Orania is private property.  So we stopped at the garage and asked a youth with a thick accent for directions to The Koeksister.  He seemed to think the request reasonable enough, though an older tannie with a dried-peach face (sucking on a lollipop, nogal) pottered over to us with curious suspicion and asked what we were looking for.

The settlement itself is small, apparently some 300+ families, probably reminiscent of a lower middle or working class neighbourhood in the rural United States.  Small pre-fab houses with caravans or bakkies outside.  Neat roads and verges, and a billboard map at the entrance. Orania has its own credit union and even its own currency, the Ora. Their mayor is the son-in-law of former apartheid Prime Minister Verwoerd. All jobs, from management to manual labour, are filled by Afrikaners only. Apparently parties are not allowed, but they are progressive environmentalists, and we saw a straw-bale house from the road.

   

It was eerily quiet that Sunday afternoon.  Do people just sleep after church? Not even the smell of a braai.  (Are braais categorized as parties?) We soon found the ‘giant’ Koeksister, which turned out to be disappointingly small.   But it was at the foot of a hill where the metal busts of five unnamed but easily recognisable fathers of Afrikaner nationalism stand in a semi-circle.   Their beady guiding eyes are fixed on the figure of a small but defiant boy rolling up his sleeve to in a gesture of resilience, and perhaps in preparation for combat.  Nearby, the Orania flag flies high with its Dutch-origin colours of orange, white and blue.  Both of us were nervous to even be there in the first place, let alone to set multiracial foot on an exposed monument hilltop where we’d make an easy target for any half-decent extremist marksman.  But J. loudly declared that her ancestors had been there first, so up the hill we went.  Definite sighs of relief on the way out.

If Orania wasn’t quite enough for one day, then Taung in the North West province was an additional unexpected eye-opener.  During the journey towards Taung, we couldn’t understand why this site of the famous 2.5 million year old Autralopithecus Africanus ‘Taung Child’ hominid discovery in the 1920s, wasn’t mentioned on any road signs.  None. Anywhere.  We drove through the irrigated lands of Hartswater where olives, pecans and grapes grow in abundance, thanks to a crazy idea that Cecil Rhodes had back in the 1880s about irrigating a semi-desert with hand-built canals using family labour.  Just after sunset we finally drove into Taung -- and realized that this was no 3-street village frequented by amateur paleoanthropologists, but rather a sprawling and unlit township featuring one Kentucky Fried Chicken, acres of litter, and rows of small brickface RDP houses. Taung used to be part of Bophuthatswana, the former bantustan ethnic homeland for the Tswana people. 

We followed the one and only guesthouse sign that took us winding down increasingly dark and dusty roads.  It was the second time we were nervous that day, albeit for different reasons.  Needless to say, the guesthouse wasn’t in action that night.  After a few wrong turns and managing to avoid the stray dogs and jaywalkers, we found a second guesthouse where the hustling hostess took quick note of our Gauteng car registration and our middle-class-rainbow-nation vibe, and promptly upped her prices for the night despite the broken shower.  We didn’t have much choice, but complained to her and amongst ourselves over the course of the next 12 hours.  A township layover wasn’t exactly what we’d planned, but we both agreed that a potentially dodgy township was infinitely preferable to a staying any longer with the white extremists in Orania.

The night passed uneventfully and we left early next morning for the disused limestone quarry hominid site, which is about 15 kilometres out of Taung in a rural scrubland setting.  And what a remarkable site it is.  Beyond the gouged-out quarry pits and the deserted workers’ hostels lies a wide gorge sporting ancient cliffs, dotted with rock pools that nestle amidst a network of underground tunnels and lakes.  With the assurances of our guide, I pushed aside my claustrophobia and lowered myself into a body-size hole in the corner of a cliff.  Underground it is warm and moist.  A series of extraordinary stalactites is revealed, each as thick as a pillar.  If you listen carefully, there is a soft but definite drip-drip of water.  Apparently all sorts of people of faith (including Muslims and Hindus) come here to pray, make offerings and collect sacred water.

Above ground, a pair of nesting Black Eagles treated us with a magnificent fly-by series, showing off their two-metre wingspan – in fact the best eagle sightings I’ve ever had.  They mate for life, unlike most humans. Swallows dart and nest in the cliffs where the limestone-pale is made even whiter with guano. Best of all – camping is free by prior arrangement.

The remainder of the drive back to the city of gold via Potchefstroom is soulless if not depressing.  The townships become larger and poorer, sprawling as far as the eye can see, the sight of mine dumps and fancier cars more regular.  The odd gumboot is abandoned on the roadside.  This is in many ways the landscape of the recent Marikana mine-worker tragedy – the worst state violence seen since apartheid, which took place just 1 hour and 37 minutes in a north-west direction from Jo’burg.  It’s timely that a report on South Africa’s rich was just published this past weekend:  whilst the Marikana miners are protesting about their 4000 rand (US$ 484) per month salaries, the first half of 2012 saw 640 South Africans buy Porsches in the first half of 2012 (a 17% increase in sales) and 513 buy Jaguars (a 99% increase in sales). From Orania and Taung we learn something about this nation’s origins – but its destination feels most ambiguous right now. 

[With thanks to J. for her photo of the Orania boy]