CEDERBERG
Alizard is a shy creature. He might grant you a 10-second window to photograph him while he does press-ups on a rock, but then he’ll generally become a blur and disappear.
But not today, on this jagged piece of Cederberg rock, in the early summer sun. This fellow, black as night, still as a statue, holds his pose for as long as we need to click away. He resembles a tiny sunburnt crocodile who left his riverbank and lost his way. He also looks like he might want a little part of us for lunch…
We learn later that he’s a black-girdled lizard, or a swart-skurwejantjie in Afrikaans. Something primordial.
This is our first amazing discovery in a week of wonders and wandering, as we cast fresh eyes on the northern Cederberg. Come join us!
Seduced by the Sevilla Rock Art Trail
Inspired by old Skurwejantjie, we set off lizard-like along the 5km Sevilla Rock Art Trail next to the Brandewyn River. The rock formations have been shaped by wind and rain, with a multi-coloured cladding of lichen that’s slowly chomping up the landscape.
Lichen consists of fungi and algae in equal measure. The fungi produce a weak acid that dissolves the rock and releases nutrients that its partner-component, the algae, can process into food that suits them both.
As famous traveller and non-fiction maven Bill Bryson writes in A Short History of Nearly Everything: “If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don’t. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment’s additional existence.”
However, it must be said that if one had to be lichen, the Agter-Pakhuis would be heaven on earth. Every boulder seems to have cupped hollows in which some form of life thrives. Here’s a tiny frog; there’s a carpet of miniature purple flowers; a sleeping dassie on a ridge and succulents of every shape you can imagine.
For thousands of years, this was San country. People drank from the streams that feed the Brandewyn River, they found shelter here, they hunted and madegreat open-air art galleries and every painting is up for interpretation.
