AMAZINGLY enough, the rest of the holiday went fairly smoothly after that. Of course, I still bashed my knee on the steering wheel every time I changed gear, but that was a small price to pay for being mobile.
We headed in a vaguely south-easterly direction, in a not-so-vaguely holiday mood.
As the first of the outlying peaks of the Drakensberg range came into view, David yelled for me to stop. I couldn’t figure out why, unless he had dropped something valuable out of the window, he should suddenly want to stop there. I
t turned out that he wanted to take a picture of a flat–topped mountain. I assured him that, after a couple of days, he would be yelling for me to stop if he saw a round-topped one!
As we climbed higher, the clouds seemed to come down to meet us, until we disappeared into the middle of one, and didn’t see the sun again for two days.
I suppose, if you are going to get stuck in the middle of a cloud, there are worse places to do it than the Champagne Castle Hotel. The welcome was warm enough to overcome any weather, except when I walked into the ‘men only’ bar by mistake.
South Africa had some crazy licencing laws back in 1973, most of which have now luckily been repealed.
One of these was that, if you had only one bar, it had to be for men. That might have been alright in a city centre, or even a small market town with more than one watering hole, but in a tourist hotel on the top of a mountain, it was downright ludicrous!
On our last evening there, the weather began to break. At dinner, the manager came to our table and asked us if we would like a ‘flip’ around the area in a light aircraft in the morning.
We explained that we had a long way to go and had to be away early, but he seemed so upset that we had not seen the mountains at their best and the price he quoted was so reasonable, that we agreed to delay our departure for a couple of hours.
Morning dawned bright and clear and, for the first time since our arrival, we appreciated our surroundings. Our rondavels were set among established, exotic gardens, where sun birds buzzed from flower to flower.
Above us towered the Drakensberg range in all its might and majesty, dwarfing the hotel to the size of a Barbie doll health farm.
After breakfast we would see it from the air. and we didn’t regret the decision. At least, we didn’t regret it once we were airborne, but I wouldn’t fancy doing that take-off again. The trouble is that there is no flat land in the area for an airstrip, so the runway is on a gradient of one-in-something-ghastly and takeoff has to be made downhill in order to avoid hitting the mountain.
My bacon and egg breakfast voiced a mild objection, but luckily we were in the air before its complaints could become serious.
The mountains towered above us, while a herd of eland grazed below. Mountain streams cascaded down the valleys and all around us rose the great circle of peaks. To have gained enough height to have crossed them, we would have had to circle for over an hour. We did see the Drakensberg at their best. And landing uphill was much better than taking off downhill.
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