With a landscape as flat and desolate as this, the wind and the silence comes from everywhere, all around you. The horizon of flat Great Karoo is interrupted only by large, canyon-like mountains that rise like exponential chart lines in the distance. In the middle of May, the almost-winter wind is unforgiving when you’re trying to keep your car on the road - a narrow tar strip that carries on in a straight perspective line about 20 km ahead.
Sometimes, life has a way of putting things in perspective. Returning to a town that's always been your second home, for instance, can suddenly seem entirely different if you visit it with different people.
It's not the most difficult trail, especially if you're an experienced hiker. In fact, you don't even have to walk the entire 13km if you don't want to - some locals simply take their daily morning walks on the trail. The difficulty comes in, however, when you have to try and keep your eyes on the road with the majestic expanse of blue horizon to your left.
The weather is dreary. There are grey clouds obscuring the sun and a rude wind picking at the branches of the trees. Luckily, I'm safe inside the wood and glass panels of the Botlierskop restaurant, where the grass roof overhead seems undisturbed by the storm that's been brewing over the area for the last few days. This game reserve is quite popular with tourists, and looking at the view of the small green valley with roaming rhinos and springboks, I can understand why.
A few weeks ago, I hurt my shoulder while swimming in the ocean. This probably doesn't seem as upsetting to you as it does to me. It was quite embarrassing, because I grew up in those same waves, at the same beach at Hartenbos, the little bit of ocean I've always been used to. It just shows you how Mother Nature keeps prevailing. Unconquerable.
Every time I'm in Sedgefield, there are five to twelve paragliders in the sky. Just minding their own business, floating in front of the hills over the piece of Garden Route valley between Wilderness and Knysna. Today was no different. They were the colourful specks of peace above the swarming turmoil that was the Saturday market at Sedgefield.
