We’ve set up camp in Wilderness for 10 days, and those 10 days were filled with mini road trips, as this is prime sight-seeing country, where mountains, forests, lakes, rivers and the ocean meet. This is where birds, rural coffeeshops, world-class restaurants, scenic dirt roads, mountain fynbos, Knysna Yellowwood forests all shout out for the traveller’s attention and where my daily ‘braaivleis vuur’ beckons to give flavour to those lamb chops Appie so lovingly packed.
As many of my Bonn based non-South African friends will probably confirm by now, having good quality meat and a decent ‘braai’ is very high on my list of quality time and soul finding activities. It’s not without good reason that the licking flames of a wood fire is often referred to as the bush television. As part of my initial trip planning I contacted Appie, a farmer and owner of Boeteka Padstal (32°30”08.83’S and 22°33”41.09’E) 18km outside of Beaufort West on the N12 towards Oudtshoorn and I ordered half a Karoo lamb, cut and prepared to my order, plus some prime T-bone steaks, boerewors and a Kudu fillet for a special planned dinner. ‘Baie dankie Appie, ons het soos konings ge-eet’. Check my next post which will include some time in Addo National Park, for feedback on Appie’s Kudu fillet recipe.
‘Diederik’ Cuckoo
Greater double collared sunbird
Ten days in Wilderness promised to be pure bliss, and yes it is such an incredible blissful place, it is actually spelt with a capital W. Wilderness or wildlands, according to Wikipedia are natural environments on earth that have not been significantly modified by human activity. This is not quite true. The Wilderness we were based at is the quaint anchor (pun intended) town in the Garden Route which nowadays provide abundant modernised human modifications such as restaurants and cafés. Wilderness is even more a prime destination for it’s natural splendour of forests, lakes, mountains, birdlife and ocean. Within an easy day’s travel, you have access to diverse environments, which includes the awesome Swartbergpas, Meiringspoort and Klein Karoo to the north and the Knysna forest, town and lagoon to the east, plus the lakes and Sedgefield with its weekly Farmer’s Market in between.
Please play the video
The Sedgefield market, though crowded and busy, is always a charming stop where I love to stroll, explore, smell, hear, see, taste and experience the variety of delights it has to offer. Here you can enjoy many wonderful products from fresh farm produce to samoosas, vetkoek, coffee, beer to biltong, (even) bratwurst, pannekoek and sweets while enjoying either the local Cape music, the new street children choir or the local hippy singing all the cool blues, rock and country from days gone by. The Sedgefield ‘markie’ does have one major disadvantage though. I tend to get stuck there enjoying the music sometimes to the annoyance of the rest of my travel party. It’s also an added pleasure when you bump into an old friend whom you’ve last seen in 2011, before moving abroad, ‘nè Lydia?’
It’s the first week in February and Cologne is in a buzz. In the workplace, meetings are rescheduled to create available time for the next few days, behaviour seem to develop a ‘dodging the responsibility’ flavour, and funnily dressed people start to appear on the streets. Even the rubbish removal schedule is changed. Something odd is going on, but to be more accurate, it has been going on since 11 November, its now simply climaxing.
The ‘fifth season of the year’ begins on 11 November at 11:11 when carnival is officially declared open which indicates the start of the festivities. It’s a nearly three-month period; of which the tempo is fairly low key until ‘Weiberfastnach’ (Shrove Thursday), the Thursday before ‘Rosenmontag’ and when the highlight of the crazy time in the Cologne Carnival kicks off in earnest. As far as I could determine, the larger Cologne area is the German ‘Mekka’ (Iz it againzt ze rules for me to use that reference in this context?) of German carnival celebrations and has become a major tourist attraction too.
Music and masks
There are contrasting views on the origin of the word ‘carnival’, but for the sake of my narrative I like the one where it is believed that the word ‘carnival’ comes from ‘carne vale’, which means ‘farewell to meat’ and which leads into the Lent and the 40 days of Jesus’ fasting in the desert. The Cologne carnival is almost as old as the city itself. The Romans and Greeks celebrated cheerful spring festivals in honour of Dionysus and Saturn with wine, women and song. The ancient Germans celebrated the winter solstice as homage to their gods and the expulsion of the evil winter. Later, the Christians adopted into the heathen customs. It is traditionally held in areas with strong Catholic and Orthodox roots, while Protestant communities do not have a carnival celebration per se.
Medievel Italy is probably the real original carnival with specifically the masked parades in Venice being well known. From Italy the celebrations spread first to the predominantly Catholic nations of Spain, Portugal and France, who in their turn took the custom across the world to their colonies.
Colour
From France, it was introduced to the Rhineland area of Germany, where, in 1823 the first worldwide carnival took place in Cologne. Thus, this first week in February has been a huge babelaas (babelaas is afrikaans for hangover) for Köln for 190 years. I wonder if I’m up for the challenge to witness the celebrations in ten years time?
But now, it’s the first week in February 2013 and Cologne is in a buzz. The Germans, more specifically, I presume the Kölsch and all visitors to Köln during this week however don’t care and don’t think about the origins, I can assure you. To them it’s about the costumes, the beer, the bratwurst and the song and dance, which accompanies all parties of this public nature.
My limited experience of street parades, public fancy dress, floats and street chaos is the so much a smaller scale varsity rag (jool in Afrikaans) and which is done for a complete different reason. By the way, a little useless trivia, the Afrikaans term ‘jool’ is the acronym for ‘jou onbaatsigtige opoffering vir liefdadigheid’, which means its primary objective, is to collect funds for welfare. But in Cologne it’s huge and certainly not limited to students. Old people, young people, family people and single people all dress up, whether its just a funny hat, a full lion suit or the full-monty aristocrat costume, you are aware that its carnival where-ever you go. And these costumes are not only worn on Rosenmontag, but for the entire crazy period, from Thursday through to Rosenmontag.
Spectators in costume too
Rosenmontag then, arrives with many a hangover still well embedded while the fancy dress for the new day is carefully decorated to the body. This is the big official day with the floats and parade the main attraction. The route of the parade is a full 6.5km through the main downtown parts of Cologne, while the length of the parade itself is nearly 6km long. Spectators line the entire route for the duration of the parade, which can last up to 4 hours to proceed past a specific spot to gaze with awe at the sights and sounds around and in font of them and of course, to collect sweets. ‘Kamelle, kamelle’ are the cries from begging spectators with the occasional ‘Kölle Alaaf‘ (Cologne, above all) chant to draw the attention to you, because hands full; no buckets full of sweets are thrown into the crowds. Understand me well, its not that every parade participant has a few hands full of sweets to hand out, there are actually motor vans full of sweets in the parade from where bags are continuously distributed to the participants to throw to, and some-times at, the crowds. We arrived home with more than a large shopping bag of sweets.
And then, because its February and still so very cold outside, as soon as the parade passes, you head for the bus to get back home and out of the cold. But there in our own little town of Rondorf we stumble upon the local parade just getting ready to start. Its much smaller, its much more localized, with the local farmer, baker, and church music group etcetera parading their stuff and with much more families with small children lining Hauptstraßse enthusiastically chanting their ‘kamelle, kamelle’ pleas. It seems most of the smaller towns in the Cologne area have their own parades late afternoon.
Fittingly to German efficiency, the last float procession is the AWB (it’s the cleaning contractors in Cologne, not the right wingers from SA) with their equipment, cleaning the streets as the procession passes, leaving hardly any traces of the chaos and fun that was had just half an hour previously. Except for this evening’s party somewhere with friends or in a bar, the crazy days are over for another year, and babelaas permitting, tomorrow will be a normal productive day again. And thoughts will probably already wonder towards the planning of next year’s costume to wear.
First we ruled the world, we lived life. We were probably the oldest people there, but it was good, it was fast and rocking at the speed of sound, the clocks stood still for a while and Chris and the boys gave as life in technicolor for one evening; it was paradise.
It was a long and warm September evening, the venue was Rhein Energy stadium in Köln and it was full, so full. From the stands we were watching and they, the band, did not freeze. They rocked. They jumped and danced. They sang.
Each and every person in the stadium had an armband like this which was controlled by radio frequency and integrated with the digital choreography; stunning effect
The stadium was full of energy and the technicolor armbands handed out at the entrance were all responding in syncronisation on the radio frequency orders transmitted to them by the show engineers. Flashing, multicolored armbands strapped to each person’s wrist became part of the choreography and was responsible for a spectacle of note.
The previous rock show of this magnitude I saw was U2’s 360° tour in Soccer City, South Africa and its understandable that the likes of these giants such as Coldplay and U2 can put together spectacular productions which include the full Monty of digital effects and no limits on volume control. We were on the stand a full soccer pitch away from the main action, and still the youngsters in front of us attended a rock show with earplugs deeply squeezed into there ears. Sissies!
As can be expected from German organisers, I was mightily impressed by logistical ease of getting to and from the stadium, with plenty of extra trams scheduled, the easy entrance into the stadium and the many food- and drink stalls serving the thirsty rockers. However, what I cannot understand living in the so-called first world is how far behind they are to South Africa on a health and consideration-for-other-people issue such as no-smoking rules in public areas and in presence of children. This is one really important area of community enhancement where most of Europe are still years behind South Africa.
‘The maestro says its Mozart, but it sounds like bubblegum ….’
And then, two days later, we were probably the youngest groupies at Hockeypark, Mönchengladbach for another brilliant show, but this time at completely different pace, to nostalgically get carried away by that master Leonard Cohen. Leonard was born 78 years ago in 1934 but he still gives a performance (including a singing voice of unmatched caliber), which is remarkable, and adding the timelessness of his music, it made for a perfect nostalgic outing for Heleen and me.
I’ve always been a huge fan of Leonard and believe that the poetry in his lyrics is already worth raving about, and then he adds his voice. This was proved to be correct at this show too. Many of the people around us were not English speakers at all, but from the singing and pure joy it was evident that they all new every word of every song Leonard performed. I was taken back to Heleen and my visit to Budapest way back in 1994. We stayed in the real local suburbs after we brokered an accommodation deal with Kati at the Budapest train station after arriving early morning from Vienna. The added advantage of this accommodation was that it meant we could go to the suburbia local restaurants, far away from the known tourist areas. That night in that restaurant it was not Leonard Cohen, but Chris Rea’s ‘The road to Hell’ playing over and over again, with the waiters singing along in perfect English. However, when we ordered, it was clear that they did not understand one word of English; not even ‘one’ and ‘yes’ was understood. The result of the evening was a stunning outing with good music and excess excellent food. I ordered a whisky, Heleen and Lizette ordered wine, I ordered goulash soup and Heleen ordered salad for starters, we received three of each! After our amused giggles the waiter and us learned and we all ordered the same main dish, schnitzel, and we only received three dishes for three people. They were humungous, but delicious. Talking about that night, I wonder what eventually happened to our R10 note, which we donated to their collection of international currency behind the bar, counter.
‘I’m not looking for another as I wander in my time,
walk me to the corner, our steps will always rhyme
you know my love goes with you as your love stays with me,
……………
Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye’
But this time it was Leonard and the Germans and Dutch singing happily along in very good English, especially when ‘we take Berlin’.
aldiepaaie 