the corner office

A quick note on our holiday.

We spent a few days in the 'Berg. After taking care of some resignation-related admin matters on Wednesday, myself and Ronwen set off south towards the Drakensberg. We took the 'back route', which included going down Oliviershoek Pass and going past the Sterkfontein Dam. Absolutely beautiful sites. The last stretch of the journey was in the dark, but we got to the holiday cottage in time for a quick dinner with M & B (Ronwen's brother, and sister-in-law) and young K. Since I'd had an hour or two's sleep the night before, I was soon lights out in front of the fire.

Woke up the next morning to look out of our bedroom window and realised just what the cottage looked over: a couple of Drakensberg mountains in all their glory. Mountains like Cathkin Peak, Champagne Castle, the Monk's Cowl. Beautiful.

A few notes on the cottage we stayed at. A short stretch up the road from Champagne Castle Hotel, this log cabin (actually, two cabins, one built a while after the other) looks out over Champagne Valley and the mountains. As Ronwen said, you couldn't get much closer to the mountains without sleeping in a tent. The cottage's name is Pumula (Zulu for 'rest', I believe). It's also referred to as Verster's Cottage. At first I thought this was simply because it belonged to a Dr Verster and thought little of it. However, we found a small, limited-edition booklet containing a retrospective written by the good Dr Ryno Verster, and I spent an afternoon battling through the doctor's Afrikaans writing. I learned that it's called Verster's cottage because this remarkable man not only owned it, but built it. Literally. In his mid-forties (the doctor was born in 1897), he discovered the Champagne Valley area and fell in love with it, and spent every holiday and long weekend hiking through the mountains. He documented many of his recollections of his experiences in the mountains and with the local people, and how things had changed over the years. Years later he was able to buy the piece of property, upon which Pumula is now situated. He planted a small forest of pine trees, and hit on the idea of building his 'dream cottage' on the property. In his 60s or so, he started planning out the house (with no other examples to go by, he designed the house and roofing by building a small model). Slowly but surely, he started construction. With the help of a local Zulu worker, he spent 7-odd years building the cottage, painstakingly preparing and treating logs from his plantation, stacking and unstacking and shuffling and hoisting them as he tried to build the walls, sometimes going so slowly and having to retry so many different combinations of logs to get a proper 'fit', that an entire day's work resulted in only two or three logs being laid down.

A few things about this story moved me. First was the fact that Dr Verster's love affair with the area only happened so much later in his life. For someone who's just getting into his thirties and still bemoaning the fact that his twenties are over, it was a wake-up call for me. At my age, the idea of me only stumbling onto something so life-changing and fulfilling, only in another decade or two's time, is incomprehensible. It gave me a sense of what it might mean to say one has had a full life. 90 years on this planet is a long time, if you use it wisely.

Also, it completely changed my perception of the building we were staying in and just how much we take for granted. When we arrived, I thought 'nice, rustic', and by the end I found myself in love with the place and its nuances (often documented and explained by the doctor). It gave me a completely new appreciation for things we'd have thought little of. For example, parts of the floor were incredibly uneven - apparently because they were done by the doctor's Zulu helper, who was (in the doctor's translated words), "going through one of his heaviest drinking patches at the time."

The doctor passed away in 1990, at the age of 93. The cottage is still owned by his family, and rented out to others whenever the Verster family aren't using it. A guestbook contains entries of visitors as far back as 1986. Included in the guestbook are write-ups by Ronwen and her family, from the 80s. That's history for you.

We did two hikes in the Monk's Cowl nature reserve. On Friday we hiked towards (without reaching) the Sphinx (a rocky outcrop in the area looking like the uh, you guessed it) and back. On Saturday we spent two hours schlepping to the Sterkspruit Falls. By the end, I was well and truly hiked out. Beautiful scenery, though.

Apart from that, the week and weekend was spent chilling out, spending time with Ronwen's family (her folks joined us over the weekend as well), and destressing. The whole resignation thing put a damper on things to an extent, but hey - what better place to sit and think about things than in front of a fire on a cold winter night, knowing that mountains that have been around since time immemorial are just outside your window, reminding you that in the greater scheme of things, some things are far more important than others.