After visiting the Mac Mac Falls I decided to quickly pop over the mountain to Pilgrims Rest. Of course there’s no popping anywhere on the Panorama Route, because the roads are so bendy and curvy and they take you up and down and around and around, through the mist then blinding sunshine, between occasional potholes (which are more dangerous because you forget to look out for them), and of course the wandering cows. So it’s always slowly and carefully all the way.
I had no idea what Pilgrims Rest was all about, I just enjoyed the sound of the name and was curious. I half, actually fully, expected another small town with a Pep and a USave store, so I was pretty much overjoyed when I drove into this quaint, historically preserved gem, with its old signposts and buildings and nothing modern in sight. I was so excited to explore the ye olde shops, especially The Leather Shop, because my Dad owned one back in the day and, although I’m a vegetarian, I have a very disconcerting happy memory hook to all things leather. I can’t reconcile it. It’s embedded in me and so I’ve had to accept that contradiction and the cacophonous clash with my beliefs. I walked in, feeling a bit nervous, bracing myself for that moment when my eyes would see the animal skins and maybe the heads. I don’t know why I thought that. My Dad never had those in his shop. One doesn’t usually need to convince people that the leather in a leather shop is animal leather. But this shop did! I mean, it didn’t have the skins and heads, but it didn’t have much leather anything either. Just plastic junk as far as the eye could see. I felt relieved and disappointed and weirdly deceived all at once. I wasn’t going to buy anything in the leather shop anyway, but I left feeling peeved that there was no leather to not buy. Very confusing and muddled emotions.
At the moment I’m all about the scones with jam and cream. I have to have it, wherever I go. It’s my comfy travelling treat. So I was excited to see a sconesandjamandcream sign outside a lovely restaurant, which had roses outside to stop and smell, and a view of the mountain… and no crowds of tourists. It was perfect! But then… this guy who loved his music so much he wanted to share it with the whole town, parked his car outside and turned the volume up so loud that even the promise of yummy sconesandjamandcream wasn’t enough to keep me there. So I left Pilgrims Rest. I loved it. But I didn’t. But I was happy I went to see what it was all about.
That evening I committed to a fire and to making curry and cheese jaffels, because for the first time since I’d arrived in the area the weather was predicted to be clear that night. I was going to take advantage. I was so excited! The thing about weather predictions though, is that they are unpredictable. And so I cooked my jaffels in the rain. I didn’t mind so much. I was used to doing everything in the rain by then and my fire stayed alight, so I was happy. I had this sparky thought at one point though, where I wondered what bubbles in the rain would look like. So I stood there blowing bubbles in the dark and watching them floating around and colliding with the raindrops and each other and eventually the wet grass and then disappearing in a pop. It was the best! Each bubble had two tiny rainbow light reflections on them from my headtorch, and these looked like eyes, so it was like hundreds of tiny aliens hovering around me. Maybe they were? When the Universe realised that its sneaky plan to send me back into my tent wasn’t working, cards were folded, clouds were scooched away and stars were allowed to twinkle again. I turned the fire up to high, and burnt every piece of wet wood I could find in the camp. Pyrohappiness!
The next morning, when I woke up to a hectic wind, I tried to regret my decision to stay an extra night, but I couldn’t because of all the gifts of happiness and insights that I’d experienced the day before. I did give myself permission though to be grumpy (on steroids), in the now of that morning, trying to pack away a 7m x 3m tarp in 30kmph winds. I mean, it probably looked really funny. To the Universe. Nobody else was around. It didn’t feel funny. It took me hours and hours, and all the while my new tarp was tearing with each new gust of wind. And then I had to wash the ground sheet because it still had the river mud underneath it from the storm. Hours… and hours. Eventually I stopped and just screamed into the wind in frustration to “please just give me a break for five minutes. Just five… f#@!!$$ing… minutes!” I got nought minutes. Zero. Deaf when you want to be, Universe. I decided to calm down and be super Zen about my situation, and not push against it or the wind anymore. Deep breaths. Take it slowly. Lots of singing to myself. And that really helped. Much, much later when I went to checkout, the camp manager said she could have sent some guys down to help me. Aaaarghh. Too late she cried. I thanked her, then said that actually it had given me a strange sense of achievement to have struggled through and to have finally managed to pack everything away (cleanish and dryish) neatly into Zukes.
Finally it was Kruger Day! And off I drove, with my growing menagerie and my ancestral greens, to find dryness, stillness and big, wild animals.