The weather seems to be the main driving factor in deciding where I drift next. Zukes (my car, I named her) and I are just going where the wind doesn’t blow us (away) at the moment. So, to avoid 50kph winds at the coast we headed inland a bit, over the Outeniqua Pass, where the mist was swirling and doing this mystical thing of flowing upwards and spilling over onto the road as I drove. I do love mountains!
I arrived at Louvain Guest Farm and found myself in a magical, enchanted forest campsite. And I was the only camper, which felt like heaven! I can’t actually describe the sense of peace that I felt, and freedom. I’ve realised that if I seek out the spots that caravans can’t reach, which are more for 4×4 travellers, but where my 2×4 can go, those are the campsites that resonate with me. The spots where they ask you to pee in the forest to save water. There was no electricity but I didn’t mind, because I made friends with the camp manager and he showed me a hidden gem of a site, tucked away deep in the forest, which for some reason was the one site with electricity. So I was sorted. Rugged forest woman, with power.
I went for a long walk into the forest and it reminded me of my childhood, with the smells of damp, decaying vegetation and the sunlight filtering through the tree canopy. Does anyone know if spider’s webs have nutritional value? I ask because I think I ate a gazillion of them on my early morning walk. And…is it worse as a vegetarian to unintentionally eat the spider in one’s sleep (apparently we eat on average 8 per year) or to accidentally eat its entire home? I’m just trying to establish a spider guilt gauge here.
It was so incredibly quiet in the forest. Not silent, just quiet. Just the sounds of nature. I’ve been longing for quiet for so long now. For some reason, no matter where I go, noise follows me. Wherever I’ve lived my neighbours have, I’m quite sure, waited for me to move in before starting their renovations, and even on the farm there was noise from the freeway. I once had a dream vision memory of being a large rock floating in absolute silence in space. It was a lonely, super quiet life and I have a suspicion that at some point I wished for sound, any sound. And sound I got. In this new lifetime. Here on the bigger rock called Earth, we call it noise. So the quiet of the forest was remembered bliss.
I did feel safe there at first and the energy had no weirdness, except sometimes at night. Twice I felt an entity hanging around and I wasn’t sure if it was just being curious or if I needed to pay more attention. When I went for a walk the one day my Spotify spontaneously started playing the song “In Dreams” (this song seems to be following me on my trip), which was weird because I had my phone in my pocket and it was switched off. I thought maybe it was forest spirits reaching out, for comfort and connection, or to remind me that I am loved. I’m not sure. I had to leave there after 5 days because of the weather again, but the energies had shifted and I was ready to move on.
From there I went to De Rust in the Karoo, to The Travelling Tortoise, because I wanted to sleep inside a Tortoise. It seemed like a fun idea at the time, but it’s the Karoo…and February…and the Torthouse was designed as a pizza oven, so I got no sleep in that tortoise after all. I did get to commune with probably ALL the insects in the Karoo. They are very friendly but perhaps a bit unboundaried. And I got kitty loves from a cute, black cat. Black cats in the wild are a gift when they come to share energy and I always find myself singing “Rhiannon” by Fleetwood Mac, a song which for me has the most epic lyrics of all songs, ever. “She is like a cat in the dark, and then she is the darkness”. I would love to write an entire blog on the resonance of that song for me…
My travels to the Tortoven took me via Oudshoorn, a town I swore I’d never return to, after my last drift. It’s so depressing, even the cemetery seems soulless. Yet, here I was. Again. I have this notion that it’s a very conservative town, so I was relieved in a way to see a queen with funky hair and a feminine style mincing past me at the mall. And then I saw another. Then I noticed that the mall is called “Queens Mall”, and I wondered if a developer hadn’t had an epiphany one day and thought “If I build it, they will come”.
At the same mall, I went into a Chinese cheapcheap shop to find everything I needed for my trip, and found myself singing along to these catchy Christian songs, which promised that Jesus loves me. The OG Jesus maybe, but the current fan favourite version will kill me for being gay and a childless cat lady. Cats are children too btw, contemporary Jesus. I’m profiling a bit here but I did wonder why the Chinese guy was playing Christian music. Was he a Christian, or playing it ironically, or maybe to attract his profiled customer base? If the latter, I would suggest he rather plays Cher or Madonna.
I left De Rust after just one night, because I don’t do well in such extreme heat, and headed for Camdeboo National Park. But I made a huge mistake. It involved petrol. I’ll tell you about that drama in my next blog.