Clifftop Capers

G'day once more. Time to get on with a little more of the diary, before I head out this afternoon. So, looking back at where I left off last time, I was just rejoining the Baz Bus in George. There I encountered one or two people who had been on the bus when I joined it in Stellenbosch (when, the more devoted amongst you may remember, I was suffering just a little) - as those of you who've travelled on these kinds of buses which follow a set route doing drop-offs and pick-ups will know, meeting what seems to be the same people all the time is very normal.

In this case, though, even though I was only on the bus for a couple of hours, everyone else got off before me (in a little town called Wilderness) leaving me effectively with the Baz Bus as a giant taxi taking me the last section of the way into the town of Knysna (pronounced NIZE-na). Unfortunately, my bus driver took this as a cue to put on his favourite music, which turned out to be a bunch of quite long, loud "Jesus Loves Me" style gospel-like affairs. Given that I'm about as secular as they come, this obviously wouldn't usually be my choice of entertainment, so I was glad to disembark at the Highfields Lodge in Knysna. This was one of the few places I stayed at that I wouldn't necessarily recommend immediately to people, as, although people seemed nice enough, it just came across as being rather disorganised - they screwed up my booking for the Baz Bus the next day, meaning I almost couldn't get the bus.

So yes, I was only staying one day - this was against my normal practice for the trip, as my previous holiday in South Africa had largely showed me that one day wasn't really enough to see anywhere. However, one of the places I had spent a day during that last visit was Knysna, which had been quite nice, with one or two more things I wanted to do, but without really grabbing me. The combination of that, plus the fact that I was realising that even the 4 weeks or so I had allowed myself was going to leave me rushing at times to get around, meant I decided to love Knysna and leave it. In the meantime, though, I wanted to make as much of my time there as I could, so I booked myself onto a trip for the next morning and wandered into town to get some food and a beer or two.

My venue for this was a pub called "Olde's" (pronounced "Oldies"), which set me up very nicely with one of the more incendiary examples of Peri-Peri Chicken I have ever had. Again, I don't think I've gone over the joys of Peri-Peri before, but please feel free to skip this if I covered it farther back in the log. Peri-Peri is actually a Portuguese term, used for a variety of sauces, marinades and the like which all have two basic thing in common: they're normally from a tomato-ey base, and they're generally pretty hot. Students of geography or history may well be aware that one of South Africa's immediate neighbours is Mozambique, which was settled by Europeans as a Portuguese colony, and it is believed that it is from here that the South Africans discovered and embraced Peri-Peri to the point where their great contribution to the international fast food scene, Nando's, is actually based upon it. In any case, the Peri-Peri chicken I had at Olde's was one of the tastiest I'd ever had, while simultaneously being hot enough to make me think I was stripping the lining off my mouth and throat. As those who've heard me wax lyrical on the subject know, my definition of the perfect heat in a dish is if it just about makes my nose develop a thin patina of sweat by the end of the meal - those same people have often also seen me sitting there roughly the colour of beetroot, mopping my brow and and close to crying from one of those occasions when my hand has slipped pouring in dried chillies or I've misjudged the likely strength of some new addition to my collection of chilli sauces...

Anyways, it was good chicken. You get the point. I also had a few pints of Windhoek lager, only slightly disappointed that they didn't stock Knysna's locally produced brews from Mitchell's Brewery, and watched a pre-season friendly match involving Arsenal and Porto. Good hot food, good cold beer and footie on TV. Bliss! After that, I decided that discretion was once again the better part of valour and headed back to the hostel for a pretty early night - in the end, I just sat around with some of my room-mates from the dorm, watching a DVD before retiring to bed.

The next morning I was up bright and early to check my stuff out of my room and then get picked up by S.E.A.L. Adventures for my "Awesome Foursome" tour. Now this, I must point out, is just a little bit of an exaggeration: of the 4 activities involved in this little half-day trip, only 2 were actually awesome, and the other two were pretty tame. The tame ones being canoeing across the mouth of the Knysna Lagoon to the Western Heads, and the hike back down the hill to the canoes after the other activites. But the other two were pretty cool: my old favourite, Quad-Biking (yes, I am obsessed...), and something of a challenge to me, Abseiling. My companions in this were a couple of Americans, Greg and Leah, a Dutch girl called Clare who had spent a long time in England and so sounded bizarrely like a South African, and Clare's South African friend Frankie, who'd overslept in the morning and ended up frantically chasing the Kombi van we were in in her bakkie (pick-up truck).

Anyways, the canoeing was pretty easy, in Canadian Canoes rather than Kayaks, and in pairs. We were helped somewhat by the minimal wind and tide, as they apparently sometimes have problems with people gettting washed towards the actual passage between the Heads, which is not conducive to prolonged good health. We then got a lift up to the top of the Heads in a bakkie. One or two of the others thought this seemed a bit like cheating. Given that it was a pretty warm day, and that I'm not that fond of hills at the best of times (I blame that on growing up in Cambridge, where flat is a way of life), I was quite happy with getting a lift.

The others, who were all just doing the Abseiling trip, got dropped at the top point for that, while I carried on further up to the Quad course they have on top of the cliffs there. I'd been a little worried about how my first post-Namibia trip would feel, but it was actually really good fun - obviously with a clifftop course you don't get up to anything like the speeds you do in the dunes, but there were all sorts of twists and turns and a few bits where the course went through underbrush and I had to duck around a bit and the like, so it was still a pretty cool rush. Happy, albeit covered in dust, I headed back down to the upper station for the abseiling, where the others were still only just doing their first descents. Now, this was the first time I had seen where the abseiling was going on, and I suddenly appreciated that 71m is a long way down, especially when you're doing it over sea-cliffs with the ocean crashing on rocks down below...

Still, I had paid for this, and I was here, and everybody else was doing it, so I figured the last residues of my childhood vertigo could go hang. I was going to do it. I don't know if it made it easier or harder to have already seen the others all do it when I went - though I guess some unreconstructed chauvinist part of me probably decided that since all the girls had done it there was no way I could back out...! The preparation for the descent was pretty nail-biting for me, though our guide, Willy, made it a bit easier by telling me the breaking strains of all the ropes etc, explaining that there was a full redundant secondary line involved etc - something of the engineer training in me appreciates that when all this has been calculated, there is no rational reason that anything should go wrong. Soon enough, it was time to step backwards to the end of the walkway that marked the start of the descent and then, resolutely refusing to look down, lean backwards over the edge of a very big, nasty drop, and start to lower myself down a rope.

The immediate problem I had was that I could not do a simple one-handed brake - I had to use both hands on separate sections of the rope to actually bring myself to a stop. I quietly cursed, once again, all the good food and beer I had consumed over the years, and reminded myself of one of my favourite sayings: "Anything good in life is either illegal, immoral or fattening"... Within about a minute, though, I realised this wasn't a problem, as coming to a complete stop actually made life much scarier and more precarious than allowing for a slow, steady descent. So I moved from stepping down the cliff to more of a bouncing approach, at least starting to resemble what an abseiler should look like, rather than just someone lowering themself on a rope. And actually started to really enjoy it. Until I looked over at the rest of the guys over on the observation point, and my peripheral vision took in the drop below me and everything. At which point, I got a bit nervous again. But it passed, and I was really quite stoked when I made it safely down to the bottom.

And then, the knowledge that I had been keeping from myself came back and hit me: having abseiled 71m down a cliff, I now had to climb 71m back up one. On paths with no safety rail or anything, and with my legs feeling like jelly. I eventually made it back up to the summit, having been reminded of my frequent refrain from climbing sand dunes in Namibia: "I think I'm going to die...". And this was just about in time to see Willy demonstrate the other way of getting down the cliff: rap-jumping, which is effectively forward-abseiling. And looks disturbingly like just running down a cliff! Having been really quite scared of going down a rope backwards, there was no way I wanted to go down it face-first, seeing exactly what kind of cliffs I was going towards!! Oh, and I really didn't want to climb that cliff again either. So, in the end, I watched as some of the others did it (Frankie and Clare were both quite amusing, especially the latter as she loudly informed Frankie that "Bullshit is this not scary!!!" just after she went over the edge...). And then it was time to walk back down to the canoes, which obviously my poor knackered legs, having been used as shock absorbers and then forced to descend and climb a cliff, weren't too chuffed about. And then we canoed back across the lagoon, which added my shoulders to the list of parts of my body that would give me hell in the morning. After that, I headed back to the hostel to shower and clean up, popped back into town to grab some fresh fish'n'chips for a late lunch and then settled in to wait for the Baz Bus to make an appearance.

For it was time to roll on to my next destination, Plettenberg Bay, the last of the Garden Route towns. But that will wait for another day, as this entry is already more than big enough. And I'm starting to get peckish for lunch. Take care and have fun!

Pat