Welcome to another edition of the Shape of the Cape with your host and tour guide Julescape. Here you can see one of my favorite places along the coast, in the Garden Route region of South Africa. The landscape is like an art piece to me. I just see a gallery of inspiring sculptures created by the finest artist, namely Mother Nature.
It may look bland to you but beauty is in the eye of the observer. And the camera may not do justice to the scene, since it doesn’t capture the entire vista, as does the eye. It’s the smooth and rounded rocks, which give a softened appearance to what is actually a really rugged landscape.
I walk these seaside slops every second day for a few hours at a time, so it’s my second home now. And I see very few people here, perhaps the odd fisherman on rare days. It must have taken hundreds of thousands of years to sculpt these rocks, by the waves and the weathering of rain. Each time I go to this natural art gallery, the weather or the tides might be slightly different, adding a variety to the lighting and mood.
Any day of the year is fine here, except pouring rain of course, but even drizzle in the middle of winter does not stop me from visiting my place of sanctuary – “far from the madding crowd” – as the novel is titled. And when it does rain, there are rivulets of pure rain water flowing all over the slopes, so I could live down there. This kind of life-sustaining beauty really provides a place of shelter.
The peace and tranquility is conducive to a meditative and contemplative lifestyle, which is calming and uplifting simultaneously. Here one can tap in to the abundance of chi or life force to charge the batteries. The force is strong with this one. And the force is with me as I climb down the steep and rocky ridge to reach the shore below.
You can find at high tide on certain days, a curious accumulation of foam on the rocks from the crashing waves. It looks like a blanket covering a bed, or some cream on top of a pile of cakes. In other words it’s very inviting and comforting to the eye. And it’s all about perception and the eye of the beholder, as I say. Different people could look at the scene and get different impressions. But overall people will find the setting positive.
Naturally the ions in the atmosphere are intensified in this particular area, which probably adds to the feeling of well being one can achieve here. Add to that the vigorous hike down and up the steep cliffs and you have the perfect exercise for the body too. It’s steep and not for the faint hearted, but the extreme sports lovers and young at heart will relish the stroll. When I first started frequenting these shores a few years back, I had to find my own way down the cliffs, and what I thought was a path, was actually just a dry river bed.
Eventually it became easier with each visit to locate familiar routes so that I now jump along like a mountain goat, getting better at it each time. I have also explored more and more of the area and even have some caves in which I regularly sit and meditate. It’s possible to camp overnight if you really want to, with plenty of dry fire wood lying around. You just need to organize something soft to sleep on, since it’s totally rocky.
I’m setting up my second home down on the rocky shore – my own private camp sight and bugout zone, so that I can spend more and more time there, and less time in the mad civilization up above on the cliff tops. The world seems to me to have gone mad, engineered by the leaders, at this point in history, so I spend less and less time engaging with society and more and more time in my own sublime world alone on the rocky shore of Africa here on what’s called the Garden Route.
It happens to be the ancient roaming ground of the prehistoric indigenous Khoi/San bushmen hunter gatherers from the stone age. Even 400 years ago, when European settlers arrived on these shores, the bushmen were situated all along this coastline. There are still caves with evidence of their existence here, going back thousands of years perhaps. To be here now, in such a pure and untainted pristine environment, is truly uplifting, and helps me to be in touch with pure nature, away from the contamination of modern toxic society. Paradise is here, if you have the perception to tap in to it.
(photos my own)