Have a look at the picture. It's a collage made by Jenny using material collected during our walks through the indigenous forests of Uitsoek, placing it on a scanner and woola a collage.
We nearly had full house, 14 of us: Jenny, Lydia, Oscar, Judy, us, Herwegs, Eric the organiser and Tiens. Frans cancelled last minute when he couldn't get no lift. It is a long drive and all of us left early on Friday to get there before dark or just after. As usual on this trip the tollgates annoyed us, R27 at Middelburg, which we bypassed, and R41 at Machadodorp, it's a crying disgrace to have such a greedy government.
For those not in the know, the place is in the Eastern Transvaal, belongs to SAPPI Forest and is near Sudwala. The base hut is on a horrible road just 20 km past Sudwala cave.
And since we were all present fairly early we started the entertainment on Friday night. After dinner was the e-slide show of the Faroe and Shetland trip, that was after Christopher and Oscar had sorted out the connections between the DVD player and the projector, I keep on forgetting what to connect to what and the operating instructions are not very clear.
The other excitement of the evening was a shower that would spew out water now and than and, of course, mainly stop when all soaped up.
Saturdays hike was through to the Bakkrans waterfall, that was a 14km. A lovely walk through grassland, bush and some pine forest. Everybody, with the exception of Oscar, attended. There wasn't much uphill, the spirits were high and we soon got to the waterfall for our lunch stop.
We got back fairly early and spend some time trundling through the village (a couple of houses) to have a look at some flowing bushes of rhododendron. In the evening we looked at pictures of previous hikes.
A reduced contingent went on the Besterkraalspruit route on Sunday. Here we had long stretches through pine forests, the magic of walking through these forests is the silence and the softness of the ground, it always fills me with feelings of pleasure despite those pine forests being aliens in this part of the world and only grown for commercial reasons. So I suppose it's politically not correct to view them with fondness, I'll do it anyway.
Also of interest the various types of rocks, the trail passes through a number of geological layers, mostly sedimentary and very old. The brochure even talks about some gold being around there. I was looking, didn't find any.
The return trip on Sunday went somewhat wrong, although not for us. Most people took a wrong turn and landed on the Schoemansdal road. Not us, we had intended to get out via the Schoemansdal road and I had the 1:50000 map of the area, thus no problem.