rollin' back

i used to think there was nothing much to do in dullstroom.

besides fly-fishing.

or eating.

harries pancakes and homemade mom-food, inside, away from the temperamental sub-alpine climate.

but on sunday, when i went there for a two day getaway, without mom but with cooler box mom-food, i realized there was so much that i'd missed out on doing in the town before.

like the groot suikerboskop hike, with ground growing white, pink-tinged spiky pincushion-looking flowers hiding between rocks and the burnt, soon to regenerate wild woody-stemmed proteas around the summit.

or the mistiness that overflowed in windy cascading-ness, surrounding our stone house to the extent that we could hardly see past the garden shrubs.

and could only barely make out the silhouettes of the distant, tall and exotic pine trees.

before, i'd only visited our dullstroom share house in winter, and maybe once in the summer. but then i just remember it being too hot, and not doing much else except vegging, eating, sleeping and reading, in both summer warm and winter dry, scratchy grass conditions.

but not on this just-past two day getaway.

by the end of the first full day we'd already gone for our first mission, and walked in the mist along the railway line to the town, passing furry stems of orange poppies, pink tumbleweed wild flowers and the craaaak of well-hidden marsh frogs.

and when the misty fog turned to stormy rain we took shelter in the old transvaal inn bookshop, sharing a metre long strip of twisted liquorice from the wooden floored cove of the interior bert's sweets.

while pulling, ripping and chewing the inside-brown shiny black soft-sweet tubes we also occupied ourselves with other black things, like the assorted arrangement of sitting and stretching toy cats, and rearing, ready-to-kick toy horses.

only within the store, as they were 15 rand.

each.

after that we went cheese tasting at bergen's, after reading about it in the bland but informative folded-up dullstroom information booklet.

we tried soft curd cheese and bought some, and stabbed toothpicks into blocks of cheddar, gouda, marinated feta and wensleydale.

all made in a craft cheese factory in the unfortunately-named nearby town of tonteldoos.

after cheese tasting we then ate more variations of cheese, and stabbed more of it with toothpicks, along with three kinds of german wurst and a pint of india pale ale at the anvil ale house micro brewery just a few strides across from the enclosed critchley hackle estate.

and, after walking out with more india pale ale to go with our soft curd cheese, we eventually retired to a christmas bed mattress by the fireside.

which was regularly loaded up with neatly chopped sections of POP-crash-crackle wood, fuel-burnt super quickly by countless additions of newspaper and kindling.

(sadly, we only found the firelighters in the kitchen drawer before we left)

the next day, after 11 hours of sleep, we climbed the groot suikerboskop and explored overgrown car routes in the dullstroom nature reserve, and were almost crushed by a falling chainsaw-felled gum tree, which crackled, eeeeeee-aaah'd and crashed on the ground, just after i'd run away clutching my head.

making some kind of aaaah-ooo-aaah noise myself.

after that we took a walk along the old wooden sleepers of the highest train station in the country, at an altitude of 2070m above sea level, and placed two coins on the track before a serendipitous bllaaaaaaaaah-honk blaring train came past.

chuka-chuka-chuka-chuuuuuaaaaah.

and flattened the 20c and 5c into perfectly flat oblongs.

and just as we were about to leave, as we washed the last mug, and found the firelighters hiding underneath a mass of crunched black-plastic bags in the above-dustbin drawer, i felt a bit sad that we were leaving.

but as we closed all the curtains and upstairs windows, made sure the doors were locked and pulled the roll top door down and locked it, i felt that at least we'd managed to do so much, in only two days.

things i'd never done before, even though i've been visiting dullstroom almost annually since 1994.

for most of those fifteen years, in the back of my mind, i always wondered if there was more to the town than a yearly increase of differently designed restaurants and gift shops on the main road.

more to the town than its collection of clocks (the largest in the southern hemisphere).

or its prized pannekoek-huis.

but finally, with only two days worth of time, i had done so much more there than i ever thought i would.

even though we missed the anglo-boer war blockhouse on the eastern side of the kop.

and didn't eat at fibs.

but all that we did do just confirmed for me, that no matter how overdone, kitsch or useless i've perceived this weekend town to be in the past, it's actually only been as interesting as i've wanted it to be.