Cederberg

Cederberg is on the map, north of Cape Town and Winelands

Cederberg is a wilderness area including a series of high arid valleys with a single dirt road running up and into them (yes, more corrugated dirt roads). The most dramatic features are the rocks (which we took many pictures , many more than the few included here) and San rock art paintings. The rocks are sandstone which has been sculpted by the elements to form caves and fantastic shapes. The San paintings are odd in that they show elephants, an animal that was not present in the Drackenberg paintings. The odd thing is that there are no elephants in this area. The Oliphants (elephant) river runs through it, but that's as close as we come to elephants being here. More research needed.

Almost as amazing is that 20 miles into the austere wilderness area on a dirt road there is a lush (colors, not lifestyle) winery. They have a high altitude microclimate that allows them to produce great wine using bio-dinamic principles (pesticide and artificial fertilizer free). They also harvest at night and are able to leave grapes on the vines longer to develop more flavor.

Our B&B for the night is named Hebron and we thought it might be a hippie kibbutz. It is a group of adobe style buildings, slightly like Arizona, plus a wild flower farm. There were dogs and kids running all over when we arrived. The 40ish couple who run it had taken it over a few years ago from her mother after returning from London with the idea that this would be a much better place to raise a family. Quite a leap, but since her mother had the property it is now a question of what they can do to make it work financially.

On the way there we encountered more road projects. Since the roads here are mostly 2-lane, when they do work it usually means closing one side down so that they have flagmen, one-way traffic, and waits of up to 30 minutes. It really throws off the timing on our GPS, but hey, it creates jobs. There are usually several flag women plus the men doing the work, some using heavy machinery and some doing work by hand (the old fashioned way with shovels, pics, etc.) They do the line painting with trucks but to locate the lines they use tape measures and a long rope that they run down the center of the road with a truck then mark by hand. The project near the B&B has been going on since November 2010 and may (the owners hope) be done soon.