We arrived yesterday afternoon after a leisurely drive down and a stop at the infamous Moerse Padstal in Napier. I am now able to totally recommend their roosterkoeke and their friendly welcome. It’s been a few years since we stopped there, but what a friendly place.
And now there’s just sunshine and blue skies and (almost) nothing to do. The wind is blowing, but it keeps the temperature manageable and the flies at bay.
As expected, the extra strain of all the visitors on the cell tower here means crawlingly slow internet, but there are other things to do: books to read, braais to enjoy, naps to plan.
We’ll be ok.
Oh, and if there was a good omen for this week or so away, surely it was the sight of a Black Harrier (Circus maurus) on the dirt road on the way in.
The post-Christmas limbo period is a real thing. The rush and excitement of “the big day” over and done with, but still with that holiday feeling in the air, and summer in full swing.
But there are over 30,000 tourists visiting throughout Christmas and New Year. They don’t care about the water restrictions, because their GP-registered Chelsea Randburg tractor is near the sea, and will rust overnight if they don’t hose it down each evening. And so we literally run out of water some days.
But remember that if you are a tourist, the place you’re visiting is completely yours and only yours for the duration of your stay. Never mind the other people visiting, and certainly don’t worry about the local residents – they’re just there for you to use and abuse as you wish.
…but it will still be Cape Agulhas.
And a short break away from the madness of Cape Town and deep into the madness of Cape Agulhas will do very nicely, thank you very much.
Because it is all relative. A frustrating traffic jam in Cape Town is 5km and an hour long. In Agulhas, it’s just a bit irritating to be behind someone else at a stop street.
I still prefer it in winter, when there’s just us and a roaring fire.
This is about Nelson Mandela Bay (Gqeberha), but there’s no shortage of poachers around Cape Agulhas and Cape Town. Robben Island is a huge hotspot.
They are very well funded, and treat the coastline and the law with complete impunity. And, because of SA’s issues with poverty, even when a poacher pops his clogs and joins the choir invisible – which they do on a fairly regular basis: this isn’t a low risk occupation – there are many, many others ready to step in and take their place.
No quick fix? More like no fix at all for this right now.
I’ve been rearranging spring cleaning my office, and it’s taking a while to get done. Mainly because other tasks keep getting in the way.
But I had no excuse this afternoon, when I was tidying out a cupboard and found a couple of old hard drives. And then started looking through the tens of thousands of photos on them.
I took this in January 2019. Apparently.
Probably somewhere Agulhas… the dirt road through to Prinskraal from the R319? Maybe? No streetview along there, so I can’t confirm.
But what a shot! /s
And wow. 3 hours of tidying time wasted, just like that.
This is a post about a rather unsettling piece of artwork I saw on the internet today.
But first, since we’re talking about carriers (the title is the name of the artwork), let me just document the demise of a couple of birds that I know about in Agulhas over the last two days. Both from avian influenza, one a Cape Gannet (species listed as Vulnerable) and one an African penguin (species listed as Critically Endangered). Two deaths is bad, but it’s not a lot to go on scientifically. However, AI (the virus not the annoying computer thing all over Facebook) is rife in South Africa at the moment. Are these discoveries just unfortunate chance or is this a sign of a bigger problem on the way?
Watch this space, I guess.
But then the artwork thing. And this is not AI in any sense of the acronym.
A hyper-realistic sculpture from Australian (but born in Sierra Leone) artist Patricia Piccinini. It’s… yeah. It’s this:
Created in 2012 as part of her Curious Affection exhibition, it’s a bit odd and a bit disturbing, but then so is a lot of her other work. I’m really not sure what to read into this, so I went and found someone that (thought they) did:
It seems the carrier and woman are connected in some way, physically but also emotionally, therein lies the conflict. Perched up high, she looks comfortable and content to rely on his assistance, yet what is their relationship, why is he carrying her, is it an equal partnership, or is he just performing a service? We can wonder if the carrier is the next step in post-human technology, his life seems perfectly engineered to the task he performs, and it is feasible that he is happily self-employed.
It’s a lot to take from an odd ape carrying a woman in a frock, but it’s far more than I was able to get from it. So fair enough.
Her Madonnas are not clothed for piety but brazen and naked, half-ape, bristling with hair. Babies in swaddling have adult faces and snouts. Nature’s expected laws of delineation – defining scales from skin, bones from feathers, sacs from follicles – are collapsed, all rules rewritten.
Thank goodness she wasn’t set loose on anything for Canberra’s centenary celebrations in 2013. She’d probably have come up with a giant 100ft hot air balloon called the SkyWhale with eight pendulous breasts and a friendly face. Ha.
I’m sorry… she did what? It had… ten… ten pendulous breasts. Oh, OK then.
Of course it did.
What’s uncanny about Piccinini’s work is not that an artist’s mind can conjure such creatures. It’s that the finesse of their detail make every variegated body that she crafts seem suddenly possible.
Amazing skill, but actually I don’t want them to “seem suddenly possible”. Really not my thing. Properly odd and yes, deeply unsettling.
