Tag: hoedspruit

Balloon

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Mornings are early in Limpopo. The sun rises almost an hour earlier in Hoedspruit than it does down here in Slaapstad. And so I was up very very early to get some shots as the sun came up while I was away.

Busy busy, and not much time for looking at other stuff, but when you are placed right next to the Blyde River Canyon and the lip of the great African escarpment, it seems foolish not to grab a couple of shots as the tourist hot air balloons rise for their early morning trip.

This literally taken from car park of the main subject of my photography that morning. How they get any work done there with this as a backdrop is beyond me.

Of course, when I pointed this out, they reminded me that we have Table Mountain in Cape Town, and they’d likely have the same issue trying to work down here.

Which is a fair point.

What happened here?

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I’m heading up North next week to do some stuff. I was having a quick look at the flight I’ll be taking, and I’m not sure what happened to it a couple of weeks ago:

That’s a lot of “Diverted to CPT”. And CPT is where it set off from. Bit weird.

All those flights seem to get close though, although they also all seem not to have landed, only dropping to around 4,000m before turning and heading back.

My best guess is that there’s some sort of “not switching the ADS off or on”, and the diversion to CPT is merely the return flight; the anomaly just being the landing (or lack of it) up at the other end. It’s also worth noting that almost all the flights that were “Diverted to CPT” were on ZS-CMD, and all of them were on Mitsubishi CR9s. The problem seems to go away when they ran a Beech 1900D on the route.

A turbo-prop. That would be my first one in SA, and my first one since that horrific landing at LCY last July. Limpopo next week then. Or CPT, depending on what plane I get.

Hoedspruit gone

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You can expect to hear more on this story as it continues to develop, but I thought I’d be (one of) the first to reveal that the town of Hoedspruit in Limpopo is no more. It’s gone.

And we have indeed lost a gem in “Hat-River”:

The name Hoedspruit itself was given by Dawid Johannes Joubert and was directly as a result of an incident after a major cloud burst on Mariepskop area in 1844 (when he first arrived in the area) which caused the “now called Zandspruit” to come down in a flash flood.  During this even he ended up losing his hat in the flooding river.   Bearing in mind that a hat in those days was a valuable resource for a farmer (sun protection etc) and not something that could be easily replaced as there were not “hat shops” on every corner, this in itself was a major event for Dawid Joubert and as a result, he then named the river the Hoedspruit (the Hat River) – as in the River that stole his Hat.

Crazy story. Crazy name. Crazy place. Crazy that it’s just no longer with us.

Sure, it seems almost impossible to believe that a town of close on 4,000 inhabitants could have simply disappeared, but we looked for ages on a really big map and we couldn’t find it, and we’re pretty much experts in this kind of thing, so it must be true.

Sadly, I just don’t have the time to follow up on this personally, but if you are aware of any other small, but strategically important (Hoedspruit was the gateway to the Kruger National Park and had an Air Force Base right next door) towns which have mysteriously gone missing, then please let me know.

I have plans to drive through somewhere near where Hoedspruit probably once was next month, so I’ll be able to report back on whether I manage to find it, or anything where it might have been, then.
In the meantime, it’s back to that office in Claremont where we can once again scour north-east SA for any sign of this missing settlement.