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.