IT’S World Oceans Day today and a friend of ours has just done a five-day hike along the Pondoland Wild Coast and just can’t stop raving about it.
The hike is very much a hands-on (not to mention boots on the ground) experience of nature and the people of this extraordinarily beautiful and so far unspoilt corner of South Africa.
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It started with a taxi pick-up on the lower South Coast of KZN and a longish trip to the Mtentu River mouth, the starting point for the hike.
The first night is spent at a backpackers’ camp and then the hike proper begins. There is no set route, the guide and the group decides exactly how it’s going to happen, but it tends to hug the dramatic Wild Coast.
The hike includes the Mkambati Nature Reserve, the Grosvenor wreck site and those wonderful waterfalls that plunge straight into the sea, and of course rivers forded by boat.
The next couple of nights are spent in Pondo villages in comfortable accommodation and lots of good and locally produced Pondo food (with some concessions to Western diets), and there are also visits to local shebeens for some extra liquid refreshment.
The hike ends at Khuthwini (about 50 kilometres from Mtentu), from where a taxi takes you home.
Our friend says that it’s just a great experience, emphasising the flora and fauna of the Wild Coast and of course the people.
The guide and contact man is Sinegugu Zikulu and he can be found at 072 4285109 or zikulusinegugu@gmail.com. It really is just down the road from here, so you might want to enjoy this stretch of the ocean coast before they drive a major highway right through the middle of it.
Staying with local food, we were in the Kumnandi farm shop (Sebenza Village in Margate) the other day and there we spotted a large alien vegetable in a basket.
No one could give us a name for it but it looked like a zucchini on steroids, so we’ll call it a Zulu marrow. We brought it home, halved it, scraped out the innards, stuffed it with spicy mince and baked it.
Some of the innards went into the accompanying ratatouille and the rest went into a soup – all were excellent. Funny that people should be growing, eating and enjoying vegetables that are completely unknown to some of us, just a couple of kilometres away. Bless the Zulu marrow.
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Much further afield, numbers of the world’s largest herd of reindeer, up in Russia’s far north on the Taymyr Peninsula, have dropped by 40 percent since the year 2000.
Scientists have established that the herd, once numbering about a million animals (the Peninsula is twice the size of Britain), is down to about 600-thousand.
They believe the reason for this is global climate change, with the original patterns of snow, ice and rain moving steadily northwards, affecting normal migration and grazing patterns.* I should really have kept this report until Christmas I suppose, assuming that these must be Santa’s reindeer.
*The Week: the Best of the British and Foreign Media.
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