escape

I have been a bit silent for a while for some very good reasons:
The first being that the internet stopped working for a good 10 days. This is Maputo - it does that. Then you try to communicate with the internet provider man who speaks only Portuguese. Ho-humm. It all takes a while.
The second is that I escaped to South Africa to see my sister. (Yay!)
Together with my littlest, we travelled down to the Western Cape to spend a week in a small town called Prince Albert. (Yes, its named after Queen Vic's hubbie!)
George is an easy one and a half hour-ish flight from Johannesburg, and Prince Albert is a two hour drive from there.
At George airport, we were issued a Chevrolet Spark (very apt - since there really isn't enough car to cause a fire...) by the trusty car rental company, into which we squished my large bag, my sister's two medium bags, a booster seat (with child) and bags of provisions for our stay. Boot and all seats were very full. It is indeed a wee car, but there is some sort of small advantage in being able to lean over to open the back window on the opposite side of the vehicle (although one cannot easily reach into the boot from the front seat - you have to stretch.)
Aaah. The Western Cape. Up over the Outiniqua mountains, past the flurry of Oudsthoorn and into the remarkable Swartberg through Meiringspoort. I snapped picture after picture, but couldn't quite capture the sheer awesomeness of driving through those mountains, with the red folds of rock dwarfing the road like the battlements of some ancient castle. The road slips between the mountains and they rise up on all sides. closing ranks before and after you. Its a piece of magic.

The road crosses the river over and over, with every crossing place quaintly and aptly named:  Skelm's Drif (translates roughly as Yob's Drift) and Dubbel-draai Drif (Double-turn Drift) being just two. It is stunning and I was just as enchanted going back as I was on the trip through.

Prince Albert. Well, I wouldn't want everyone to flock there and spoil the quiet of it all...
A little town with lots of old karoo houses. The ones with the tin roofs, deep verandas and high ceilings. There's a dairy which makes excellent cheese and yoghurt and you can pick up fresh baked loaves from the hotel. They have a Saturday market and a vineyard just off the main street. You can walk everywhere and when you sit out at night, the milky way is in full display.

The self-catering cottage we were staying at had no telly - and my small child didn't notice. That really says it all. The drive through the Swartberg is like climbing into the wardrobe and emerging in Narnia; so separate does Prince Albert feel from the real world.
We spent much of our time drinking wine (there are several vineyards in the valley just outside town) , eating excellent olives (from the Karoo Virgin olive farm on the edge of the valley) and talking to the locals, many of whom have escaped the big cities to live in this little piece of serenity.
Yes, I wax lyrical.
And it had to end, as most things do.
Back out through the mountains to reality.
As we de-wedged our bags from the Chev Spark at George airport, a bunch of huge blokes in Sharks shirts strolled by - presumably the Sharks rugby team. A minor excitement in an otherwise nightmarish journey back through the looking glass.
Did you know that its okay in South Africa to get on an aeroplane with no shoes? Yup. I was somewhat gobsmacked (in my best colonial manner) to watch 2  boys gad about the airport with no shoes and then trip across the tarmac and into the plane. I didn't know you could do that....
A small cretin called Declan (by his endlessly whining mum) kicked my chair all the way back to Jo'burg, where the smog was waiting to greet us. Then it took the small child and I an hour to clear customs for our 45 minute flight back to Maputo, where the delightful representatives of belligerent officialdom stared us down for another hour (well, me - the small child got fed up with the situation and took herself off for a walk and then engaged in a fight with some child off the TAP flight. All very amusing at 10 at night.)
Yup, Toto, we aren't in Narnia any more. (Sigh...)