The Last Blue Mountain

by James Chilton

  Fundo Curanilahue had an English touch; there were geraniums in tubs, roses and jasmine wound around a shaded loggia and comfortable sofas were upholstered in Colefax fabrics. Red Angus cattle grazed in knee high grass and conversation with Louisa and John Jackson was of friends and relations back home. But a dozen horses and a dozen farm hands in sombreros, fields of alfafa, log fires in the timber lined bed rooms, pisco sours before dinner, flowering paulownias and huge Monterey cypresses anchored the farm to Chilean soil. My diffident entry in the visitors’ book read:

  ‘Up from the granite south to travellers’ rest,

  I found a garden by sun and rain caressed.

  Here was tranquillity and smiles of friendliness,

  Laughter and all the seeds for happiness.’

  On the previous page, John Julius Norwich had written of what a hopeless guest he had been.

  Down a dusty side road skirting the whitewashed adobe walls of the little town of San Pedro de Atacama, one arrives at a tangled fence of acacia branches, a clump or two of pampas grass and a high white wall. No signs, no varnished railings and no flags. Rumbling over the stones of a stable yard, a chubby man with a shiny face and a broad nose raises a hand in recognition. Twenty three horses of placid temperament and in perfect condition watch from stalls shaded by a slat ted canopy and then a strange building of sharp vertical and horizontal angles, blue shutters, narrow fenestration and white concrete is approached by two wide banks of steps. The façade dazzles, the contrast is clearly contrived but the effect is stunning. You have arrived at Explora Atacama.

  Do not expect convention in the Atacama Desert, the world’s driest and oldest, 700 miles (1,100kms) long and 70 miles (110kms) wide. There is little sand to be seen but volcanic turbulence has scattered rock from truck sized to pea sized and either corrugated, crumpled and crushed the landscape or, in the high altiplano, rolled it into great wide, soft undulations that stretch to horizons. The consequence of malignant winds and searing sun has sculpted monumental art from pillars of sandstone. Under its dislocated and contorted surface lie sulphur, lithium, copper and all manner of minerals brought up from the bowels of the earth. Evaporating vapour has left behind huge salt flats some crusted, some painfully surfaced in crystal shards. Where rain has fallen (for not all of the desert is infinitely dry), the torrents of millennia have cut deep gorges and steam hisses into the freezing air from vents slashed in the veneer of the altiplano. One day, perhaps tomorrow, another cataclysm will rupture the land.

  Until then, there was life. Plants – fruiting trees, tough shrubs, spiny cactus and waving grass – colonised their own special band of altitude; birds – geese, ducks, tinamou, waders in profusion, finches and flamingos; a few beasts – llamas, vicuna, viscacha and mountaineering guinea pigs; fewer insects – a fly or two and occasional dragonflies; and least of all man – dark skinned from Indian inheritance, stocky and resolute. He has endured the capriciousness of nature with apparent resignation and astonishing cheerfulness.

  Later, 1,000 miles (1,600kms) south, downtown Santiago had a painted plastic horse at every street corner, dark suited business men entered doors of glass and steel, balconies overflowed with little private jungles and Pablo Langueria, wearing jeans, a sweater and an eager smile was running for senator. His cardboard cutout had crumpled in the rain.

  South Africa

  March 2006

  ‘For the born traveller, travelling is a besetting vice. Like other vices, it is imperious, demanding of the victim’s time, money and energy and the sacrifice of comfort’ – Aldous Huxley

  The N3 heads south from Johannesburg and turning off at Vrede you come upon Volkrust and later Newcastle and Dundee before reaching the villages of Non-dweni and Nqutu. (Adding to this confusing transposition of towns, Heidelberg and Frankfurt are also on the route but no guidebook could explain why two north German towns should be remembered here.) These names reflect the foreign encroachment that characterises the history of this country; here, in Kwazulu Natal it is the Dutch and the British trampling over the land. The uses of the land and the design of the buildings also mark the different nationalities from Dutch three-storied prosperity in neat towns where each had its own stone built church, to British colonial farms sheltering in stands of eucalyptus, through to the round thatched huts of the Zulus scattered in little groups over the great grazing grasslands.

  Treacherously potholed tarmac changed to smooth rust-coloured dirt and then, turning left down an undulating narrow track, through acacia scrub and 12 ft (three metre) high aloe of great age, we arrived at a small group of buildings with timber walls and corrugated roofs all set about with an abundance of plants and mature trees. Here two smiling Zulu girls lifted our luggage on to their heads with Olympian ease (the cases still bearing a ‘Heavy’ tag from the Heathrow check in) and guided us down basalt steps flanked by canna lilies, heliotrope and solanum to a cabin of spacious rooms that looked out over the Buffalo River to hills hazy and lazy in the heat of late afternoon and whose slopes interlocked like clasped fingers. Further out still, just visible over a saddle of ground, the eye was led to a hill that stands alone and whose shape resembles a sphinx. We had reached the warm embrace of Fugitive’s Drift and gazed on Isandhlwana, the site of one of the most terrible defeats in all of British military history.

  The battles over the rolling plains where the British fought Zulus and Boers are all tragic; the product of political expediency, military incompetence, borders mistaken, ignored or deliberately altered, trusts broken and treaties torn up. But on the ground, in the hills and along a river, extraordinary courage and exemplary discipline were shown by each of the red-coated British, the black skinned Zulu and the bandoliered Boer. David Rattray, the master story teller of the Zulu Wars, describes events in such gripping terms and with such fluency that after two and a half uninterrupted hours you will swear that you have smelt the cordite, itched with the dust, dripped with sweat, heard the terrible cries of wounded men and horses and been paralysed by the fear of death in the ghastly jaws of hell. Should you not then have wiped away tears, your heart must be chiselled from granite. [In a violent armed robbery at his farm, David Rattray was murdered in January 2007.]

  The polygamous traditions of the Zulus have meant that old men have sired sons by young wives and so tales of the terrible events of 1879 and 1880 have been passed down through only three generations. Whether today’s great-grandsons can forgive those authorities who currently order their lives and have turned the greatest sub-Saharan fighting force ever assembled into small time farmers and domestic help, I do not know but the history syllabus of the schools that are now state-provided recognise the distinguished exploits of their forbears.

  As we drove south towards the Drakensberg Mountains, little swifts and white throated swallows perched in long columns along the telephone lines and flew off in fluttering clouds as we passed. On the country roads nothing much else moved and even the dust seemed reluctant to settle. The scattering of huts that from time to time formed a village were lifeless although once, a group of four schoolgirls, smart in their green skirts, yellow blouses and brown ties (it was 40 degrees!), giggled their way along the road to distant homes. The towns, however, buzzed and hummed with activity. Markets were served by taxi vans packed with large women and thin men that constantly rattled in; huge diesel-belching trucks lumbered through, tractors pulled trailers of pigs for slaughter and as always, a ragtag band of wastrels, unconcerned of where to go or what to do, passed the day in bored circumspection of others similarly vacant of thought. Occasionally, intent upon a different view of their world, they would wander across the road without warning and without a glance left or right.

  We climbed up from the hot plain, turned west on to a steeper road passing stands of eucalyptus and pine that broke the silhouette of the shallow slopes of the hills and continued through lush fields as green as Tipperary with Devon Reds munching their way through succulent, knee-high grass. Lakes sparkled in the hollows. At 5,5
00 ft (1,680m), a herb garden of Elizabethan intricacy appeared and in a thunderstorm of epic scale whose lightning lit up the stone lips of Cleopatra’s Mountain that sneered 3,000 ft (900m) above, we sought refuge in a room where a log fire crackled and a bed of large and luscious proportions invited immediate salvation. Outside the window, a scarlet chested sunbird indifferent to nature’s raging, was intent upon sipping nectar from a fuchsia. We had reached Cleopatra’s Mountain Retreat, an altogether different establishment from Rattray’s guest house. Food was the watchword here and cholesterol only a word to prick the conscience. There were neither greying roués nor stick-like women in sight; the palate was king and the gut its servant.

  Log fires, sunbirds and clean clear air aside, Richard Poynton is the lure that keeps twelve double rooms booked every day of the year. A living replica of those Escoffier caricatures, his short, rotund, pebble-glassed, grey-bearded body was wrapped up like a swaddled baby in starched, monogrammed white cotton. He resembled a decorated Easter egg. Before dinner he presented his menu – six different courses, not a salad leaf amongst them and no choice. When he was finished, I was torn between putting his rhetoric to the test (“We serve proper food here. We bake our bread twice a day and ice cream is 20 egg yolks and two litres of cream”) or going to bed there and then uncomfortably replete simply on his descriptions. As it turned out, the food was too fussy for a simpleton like me but the cooking was of a very high order. A Hamilton Russell Merlot, at 14 per cent and darker than blood, helped to alleviate the disappointment of eating alone; M had buried herself in the foot thick duvet with traveller’s tummy and a high temperature. After dinner this hirsute, short-sighted Humpty-Dumpty gathered opinions as he dispersed port. “You survived the onslaught?” he boomed. “It’s all a lot of fun isn’t it?” Here was an artist with a refreshing attitude to enjoyment; I warmed to him and looked forward to tomorrow’s preamble and the gluttony that would follow.

  While M lay in the warm embrace of duck down, I walked across the high veldt of grasslands in a warm drizzle and was astonished to find the true parents of plants in our Oxfordshire garden, growing in natural profusion. Here, at 7,200 ft (2,200m) were kniphobia, dierama, artemesia, senecio, ligularia and many others. Alpine lakes were home to herons, moorhen and duck and in the distance, six eland (the largest of all African antelope) grazed and a troop of baboons scuttled off. While the land on the summits lay in comfortable folds, the way up was steep and scattered with boulders of immense size, left there by retreating glaciers many millions of years before. I contemplated the huge difficulties of the Voertrekkers with their wooden wagons each yoked to teams of eight oxen, yelling, sweating, swearing and cracking their long leather whips. Where mud and rock required all available muscle, harnessed women and children heaved on ropes and men put their shoulders to the wheels.

  The fanciful names in the Drakensberg such as Cathedral Peak and Champagne Castle (11,000 ft, 3,377m) give an unfortunate theme-park flavour to some of the most dramatic mountain scenery on the African continent. As we drove up a long wide valley between towering cliffs and precipitous overhangs, school lessons were finishing for the day in small villages and for several miles not only was it necessary to avoid the pot holes that made the tarred road slower than a dirt one but we also had to slalom around children wandering across the road in little groups on their way home.

  I have toiled up the twisted trails of the Karokoram, the Tien Shien, the Alps and the Andes but the Swartberg Pass beats them all for drama, for the terrifying compulsion of vertigo and the skill that is required to maintain momentum through tight triple hairpins and dizzying spirals. With all four wheels skidding sideways on the loose gravel, M handled each of them with the aplomb of a seasoned rally driver. It was getting dark too and the descent had as many perils as the way up and so it was with triumph and relief that our little two-door, two-toned, too small Toyota eventually cruised through orchards of peaches, apricots and olives into the town of Prince Albert on the southern edge of the Great Karoo. At the Swartberg Hotel (1840), our huge first floor bedroom was enlarged by a wide balcony that overlooked Main Street – the only street. Next door was the Slaghuis Butchery and opposite, a garage which unaccountably housed a small jeweller behind the left hand pump but more usefully The Bottle Store behind the right hand pump; at six o’clock on a Friday evening it was doing good business. Grey eucalyptus of great age lined the street whose cottages, some with Dutch gabled ends, had corrugated roofs painted in pastel shades and whose owners, neat and tidy with straight backs and polished shoes, walked the gravel pavements nodding to neigh bours as they passed. A few cottages had thatched roofs but all had pretty little verandas with trellised corner pillars that supported bougainvillea and plumbago. The Dutch Reformed church was stone built in the style of English Perpendicular and next door the Anglican chapel cowered in its shadow.

  We sat on our balcony overlooking the comings and goings of the Bottle Store and the street. Pickup trucks packed with black labourers were going home and white locals exchanged Afrikaaners chitchat and lifted a hand in greeting to men in shorts, paunchy and confident. They were the product of a tough pioneering race driven out of the coastal band over two ranges of mountains to rear cattle and sheep on the dry and dusty plains of the Great Karoo. In the hotel rooms, sepia portraits of these sturdy pioneering families hung on the floral wallpaper; the wooden floorboards creaked with every step, the brass work was polished daily and the dining room had dainty lace tablecloths on which was served Lamb Pie, Sticky Malva Pudding and ginger beer. Had an ox wagon lumbered by marshalled by dusty and bearded men, no one would have turned their head.

  While the Swartberg Pass provided heart-stopping views, the way back snaked through narrow canyons whose rocky and contorted strata displayed the agonies of geological movement. And then we were out onto the wide open plains, with wheat stubble to each horizon and kori bustards and blue cranes scavenging whatever the harvest had left behind – Africa’s largest birds reduced to the size of magpies in the shorn landscape. Wild thyme bordered the long straight road whose end, masked by the distortions of heat, seemed infinite.

  ‘While barred clouds bloom the soft dying day

  And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue.’

  Plettenberg Bay (or Plett to the long-time resident or pretentious traveller) displayed its credentials with nine polo fields, four golf courses and three cricket pitches. Here was a community of crisp pressed linen, clubhouse gossip, Friday bridge, Sunday lunches, good deeds and old values. Fading god-botherers with all its implications: gardening, bowling, cricket-watching, churchgoing and jumble sales; Cheltenham aligned with Palm Beach. The rooms of Mallard River Lodge looked out incongruously over the Bietou River where an oxbow lake, fringed by reeds and bullrushes, harboured cloud cisticolas and yellow warblers. A hoopoe looked startled and disapproving as it strutted around the base of a cactus, probing for ants.

  The town was in darkness when we arrived (the consequence of a spanner dropped accidentally into the turbine of Cape Town’s nuclear power station), and searching for life in a community that had suddenly had to adopt a war footing, we came across an Indian family of six children wandering on the beach by the dim light of a waning torch. They had driven from Beaufort West especially to show the children the beach and the ocean. They were remarkably cheerful about this wasted four hour journey but in spite of this country’s newfound tolerance, they would not have felt comfortable when daylight shone on the white formality of this South African Frinton-on-Sea.

  Hermanus echoed Plett but was less sporty and more sedate and oozed the gentility that comes with the genes of old colonial stock. Afrikaans had moved in at the eastern end and some of them, driven out of their homes and farms in the Transvaal by lawlessness and refugees from Zimbawe, were adding to the shacks at the western end. This may have been a sanctuary for these refugees, but each permanent resident in their neat, tree shaded, shuttered, pastel painted, rendered house had a high wall and a high gate
. In such a social environment, the walls were not there for personal privacy.

  Kensington Place, true to its elegant name, came with elegant people. So discreetly was it tucked into the steep hillside of the fashionable, residential Gardens area of Cape Town that we circled around it for a while until, like a raptor waiting its moment, we suddenly swooped from a road above and arrived at a locked gate with an elaborate electronic entry system and a small brass plaque that confirmed our destination. Carefully stepping around beautiful people, we passed through billowing organza and suede pool side upholstery to find our room. Decorated in three shades of taupe, the telephone, TV and fridge were so artfully concealed and our experience of such places so limited that sheepishly we had to return to reception for instructions as to where to find them. But the view over the city was spectacular and Table Mountain rose sheer behind. So ultra-boutique was this place and so minimalist its design that the bathroom was strewn with fresh rose petals. Needless to say, candles glowed in every niche. What the two smiling, uniformed, round black girls who brought us our designer breakfast thought of this I do not know. Each day a different colour-coordinated composition of fruit, china and napkin. Hopefully, they giggled about it as much as we did. I wondered in which band of the city suburbs they came from, no doubt starting into work at first light. The outermost band was a recycled flotsam of shacks of beaten cans and splintered planks arranged in disordered profusion – a sargasso of drifting, dispossessed and desperate humanity. Next came breezeblock-with-single-room boxes set in ordered rows north/south and east/west like a cloth of grey gingham spread over the rise and fall of the ground. And then there was a mix of modern, low income, single design houses squeezed into the cleared ground of a previous leafy suburb which had succumbed to the seduction of commercial pressure and whose remaining bungalows now crouched under the last of the avocado and eucalyptus trees and slunk into the hypnotic shadows of industry and shopping centres. Further in, larger houses but still densely packed until at the inner band, surrounding the city core. Beautifully designed homes were ingeniously set into the hillsides and shoe horned between neighbours, ADT Armed Response notices were on every closed gate and very large or very small well-behaved dogs trotted unattended on the clean pavements.