Trip to the Vaal

(Guest Blogged by Mma Jossie)

The girls (minus Djibo, who was slaving away in the lab) had the pleasure of joining a fellow LA professor Frans and his family plus friends of theirs for a weekend at the Vaal River, about two hours southwest of Pretoria. We all stayed at a farmhouse in the valley, six children and five adults, outnumbered but luckily with plenty of room for the kids to “tend each other”.

The Vaal River is the major tributary of the Orange River—South Africa’s largest river. The Vaal’s headwaters are in the Drakensberg mountains, in Mpumalanga northeast of Johannesburg, and the river provides water to 12 million residents of the Gauteng Province as it flows southwest to join the Orange, south of Kimberly in the Northern Cape.

We stayed near the town of Parys, named for a nostalgic likeness to Paris’s Seinne, but with a uniquely South African landscape history. The area was formed 2000 million years ago (not an Eisenbergian hyperpolism) by the catastrophic impact of a meteorite. We did not travel into the heart of the Vredefort Dome, but rather trekked around the rippling ridges that were formed by the meteorite’s impact.

On Saturday we hiked with all the munchkins, including one curly headed lad even younger than Violet, up into the hills, and back along a dried creek bed. We stopped for rest and water at a beautiful overlook of the area, and again beside a cool shaded water hole, in the creek canyon. The kids had a great time splashing like hippos in the mud.

Both evenings we built campfires and cooked out under the stars, Friday a traditional chicken and boerwoers braii, Saturday steaks and Sunday morning a lamb potgie to conclude a lovely weekend. Luckily my eco-crunchy inclination to skip bacon for Saturday brunch proved successfully pleasing, not because the group appreciated the meat break, but because there was enough sausage leftover from Friday’s dinner to add to my gourmet veggie scrambled eggs.

Mense Regtedag

Yesterday was Human Rights Day. It’s a public holiday here in ZA, so we have the day off. HR Day commemorates the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960, when blacks protesting the passbook laws were gunned down outside the Sharpeville Police Station. 69 people were killed and more than 200 wounded, and this was a watershed event during the Apartheid era. In the new era of the Rainbow Nation, it’s a holiday, so no school or work for us. As Veronica so aptly put it, “It’s a day for the family to be together”.

We decided to take the car out to Groenkloof Nature Reserve, which is just a little south of Pretoria. My best transliteration of the pronounciation is “hhrrrrrrunkluf”. We drove in to find many mountain bikers, and set off for a hike of undetermined length. The girls were quite intrepid, especially Violet as she demanded portage (“Up, up”) for most of the way. We had heard tell of the wildlife to see in Groenkloof, including zebras and wildebeests, but we only saw some rock dassies, which are something like a rabbit-sized guinea pigs. They’re most closely related to elephants, if you can believe it (see bottom pic)

Our march took us up and down, with views of Freedom Park, the University of South Africa (UNISA, not our university), and the Jacaranda Tower. Veronica was a real trooper, marching most of the way with only brief portage, rest and water breaks.

We had an afternoon swim with V’s good buddy Beth, whose little brother Jamie is about Violet’s age. Hooray for Human Right's Day, I believe next month we get Freedom Day off as well.

National Botanical Gardens

We’ve had another lovely weekend, with lots of excitement including the acquisition of a CAR!

Yes, we’ve left the hoi polloi on the buses behind, and we will miss them. We may visit the old double deckers again for nostalgia purposes. But we’ve bought an old Mercedes 230E that will make getting where we want, when we want, hopefully a bit more manageable.
We celebrated the addition to our kraal (corral) with a trip to the National Botanical Gardens, which are just a short trek east of Pretoria proper. Here we saw many lovely South African plants, including the succulent garden (‘fat plants’ in Afrikaans), the useful and medicinal plant garden, Ndebele compound (top pic) and traditional doctor’s office (second pic with the girls), and the cycad collection (pic 3). Also, lots of bird of paradise flowers (Strelitzia reginae, pic 4) which are everywhere and a national symbol.

Magnolia Dell

Hallo, again.
We had a lovely weekend, with another walking tour of Pretoria. On this adventure we headed to the southwest of stately Unicadia, to Magnolia Dell. This is a lovely park featuring one of the better stocked playgrounds (perhaps V and Vi can help with a feature rating Pretoria’s playgrounds, who’d like to see that?), with an adjoining café. We played on this playground, on the swings, jungle gym, and on this neato horsey thing, kind of like a cross between a see-saw for four and a mechanical bull. That was loads of fun. We decided to forge onward past the café to seek the Blue Crane, a restaurant next to the Austin Roberts Bird Sanctuary.
The Blue Crane was a nice place, though it seemed to cater to ex-pats. We arrived too early for the brunch buffet, so we didn’t get to try their potgie (poi-kee) to see how it matched up with Oom Piet’s.

We also went to a going away party and braai (BBQ) for our good friends whom we've just met and are now saying goodbye to, as they head back to Germany. They presented a great puppet show and we're sorry to have them leave. Auf Wiedersehen, Julia, Wolfgang, Selma and Noe!

Braai = lots of meat!
In other news, we may have found a car. Stay tuned...

Our View

Here's a picture of the view from our apartment. Here you're looking south at what we call the "Jacaranda Tower", though it really has a more boring name. The Jacaranda tree is a municipal symbol, and the neon really captures the color of the flower. On our first night in Pretoria, I asked when the jacarandas bloom. "In spring, October-November". Sigh, we won't get to see the city lit up with these lovely flowers. But we still have the Jacaranda Tower every evening.

Here's another pic during one fantastic electrical storm.

LeSheba Wilderness

We spent the last weekend up north, just a hair north of the Tropic of Capricorn, in the LeSheba Wilderness in the Soutpansberg Mountains. It’s up in the Northern Province, aka Limpopo Province. We got a ride with Jossie’s colleague Piet, who is quite a naturalist and as it turns out, potgie-cooker. Up north past Polokwane (formerly Pietersburg) and Makhado (formerly Louis Trichardt) and then west to LeSheba Wilderness, with over 340 species of trees. We drove through the valley and then up the dirt road for a good stretch up into the mountains. LeSheba was formerly a hunting and safari estate before being a nature preserve and indigenous knowledge center.
We were there with Jossie’s 2nd year students, as well as colleagues Graham (and family) and Piet. The guesthouses were beautiful, with solar electric lights and solar hot water, and we got to see plenty of wildlife, including baboons, monkeys (what kind?), impalas, blue wildebeests, zebras, giraffes, and dung beetles. We had an ethnobotanic tour with Pieter, who lives on the site, and visited the Venda Village, where Thabo Mbeki (President of ZA) stayed.
Friday night we had a wonderful braai (BBQ), and Saturday night Oom Piet (Uncle Piet) made us potgie (pronounced POIK-ee, see photo below), which is made in a small pot, with lamb, potatoes, carrots, onions, pattypans, and who know what made it so delicious but it was.
All in all, it was an amazing adventure for all of us. Violet was (rightfully) a little scared of some of the wildlife, but it was fun for our first family trek outside of Pretoria.

Digging termites

Hallo!
I just spent yesterday digging up some termite mounds with some Dutch researchers. Actually, it was two Dutch, one Finn, a South African, and an American. No, we did not walk into a bar, but we did go to a farm near Naboomspruit (about an hour and a half north of Pretoria) to search for hidden treasure under some termite nests.

Our quarry was the fungal gardens of Macrotermes natalensis, which are a basidiomycete species of Termitomyces. Also present were the nests of a symbiotic termite, Microtermes sp. which uses a different species of Termitomyces.

We dug up one nest and got lots of fungal treasure, then dug up another nest for several hours to find no fungus. We probably got a meter and a quarter down and NO FUNGUS (just a little bit of Microtermes' fungus). Well, that was a lot of picking and shoveling for a disappointing return.
It's been pretty dry, so the termites might have moved shop down further below the surface to keep the garden moist and cool. Who knows.

Here's a pic of the Dutch digging at a nest.

Why Zed Ay?

I should note that Zed is for Zuid, and A is for Afrika, the Afrikaaner name for country.

We're here!

Greetings from Tshwane, also known as Pretoria. We've been here almost two months, and will be here for another 4 or so. Life's been pretty good so far. Hopefully we'll have some great adventures to share with y'all.
We're in ZA, pronounced ZED-AY for 'mericans like us who usually call the first letter ZEE. Folks here refer to our homeland as "the 'States".

Hopefully we'll be sharing some of our cross-cultural foibles, like culinary matters, linguistic oddities, and of course "What's magnetic in ZA?". And the animals and stuff like that.

Now, let's see if I can update this thing regularly, shall I?

Cheers!
Oom Djibo (Uncle Djibo)