I have come, in recent years, to have a special fondness for cave paintings. I was delighted then, to find out that petroglyphs can be found throughout South Africa. The trick is just getting to them.
I was disappointed when I realized, that, since cave paintings aren't necessarily what every tourist wants to see, there aren't many bus tours or organized cave painting sightseeing adventures available here. In order to get myself to the nearest rock art site, I would need to rent a car and take matters into my own hands.
This is problematic for a few reasons. On the most basic level, I've never rented a car before in my life. I have also never driven on the left side of the road. Another problem stems from the travel habits I have developed over the years. In India, I pretty much gave up on ever planning anything. Beyond buying a train ticket, there just aren't a lot of things you can successfully plan in advance in India. You roll into town and cross your fingers that the hotel your guidebook suggests still exists and that they'll have a room for you. You get places by asking people on the street where to go and paying them $1 to drive you across town. Most countries don't work that way, yet I still apply my "the best plan is no plan at all" mentality to everywhere I travel. My travel planning skills have further been stunted by my growing dependency on my wonderful, Hotwire expert of a fiance, who takes no greater pleasure in life than booking hotels, finding things on maps, and designing weekend getaways, leaving me with no responsibilities other than going along for the ride and taking pictures.
When it came to getting to the cave paintings, I guess I didn't do quite enough advance planning. I did think enough in advance to book the rental car and the hotel and to look up some directions, but on the whole, it wasn't my best effort.
My travel companion Graham and I set out from Cape Town in our shiny rental car (with a sweet, Iphone-friendly audio system) on Saturday morning. Driving on the left turned out to be not as freaky as I imagined it would be, but it was still a little confusing. Getting into the car, Graham and I would decide "do you want to drive, or should I?" Decision made, we would approach the vehicle and both walk to the wrong door. Once in the car, I would reach down for the gear shift with my right hand and find myself grasping the air. Once in motion everything felt fine--it's easy enough to follow the car in front of you--but any time I had to turn, enter a parking lot, or maneuver clockwise around a roundabout, things got more confusing. I can understand two lines of cars moving straight down the left side of the road, but all bets are off when turning as my brain tries to grapple with the sight of cars coming from seemingly random directions.
I had thought to print directions to our hotel, but hadn't put much thought into how remote the area would be. I guess the hotel's website, which lists the location by GPS coordinates rather than a street address, might have been my first clue. The website shows a hand-drawn map with the nearest town marked then a squiggly line leading to the location. For no logical reason, I assumed the squiggly line equated to about 10-15 minutes of driving, but it turned out to be closer to 45 minutes down a remote country road. The drive was stunning though. The closer we got to our destination, the more our surroundings looked like some mashup of Middle Earth and Mars.
The Traveller's Rest, as the spot was called, was a quaint collection of "cottages" in the wilderness. After finding our cottage we immediately set out for the main attraction: the cave paintings.
I take great pride in the fact that I had the foresight to book the hotel nearest the petroglyphs, so from our cottage we only had to take a short walk to get to the entrance to the "Sevilla Rock Art Trail."
The paintings were everything I had hoped they would be: funny little humanoids, cute animals, freaky monster-looking things, etc. The trail had nine cave painting sites in total, so it was a nice hike to track down each one and crawl around on the big red boulders. The brochure didn't give the best description of the origins of the paintings, but I later found out that that is because very little is still known about them other than the rough estimation that they are between 1,500 and 2,000 years-old. We got slightly lost on the walk back from the caves, but found our cottage again just as the sun was going down.
(You should see a photo slideshow here. If you don't see it, update your Flash settings or click here.)
After checking out of the Traveller's Rest the next morning we returned to Clanwilliam for breakfast. We found a small cafe, where, because of a lack of tables, we ended up sharing our meal with a an Afrikaner woman and her pre-teen daughter, both of whom had impossible-to-remember Afrikaans names. The daughter was distraught over the death of that actor from 'Glee.' The mother was one of the first people in a foreign country I have ever met who had not only heard of, but had actually visited the state of Oregon (usually I have to explain it as "a rainy place north of California where Nike and The Simpsons come from"), where her brother is married to a naturopahtic (of course) doctor.
After breakfast we pressed on toward our next hiking destination. In the same area as the cave paintings, there are supposed to be some large rock formations--something along the lines of Arches National Park in Utah. They sure do look awesome in all the guidebook pictures. Too bad I failed to figure out how to get us to them.
Part of our failure to find the rocks was my own fault for not figuring it all out in advance, but I won't take all of the blame. All of the maps I looked at of the area--Google, my guidebook, and our little rental car GPS--were infuriatingly vague and they all made it appear as though the rock formations are somewhere near the town of Citrusdal. Citrusdal has a tourism office, so I assumed if we went there everything would fall into place. I don't know why I assumed a tourism office in a tiny farming town would be open on a Sunday, however, and it wasn't. Driving around country roads where directional signs are scarce and what information there is is written in Afrikaans further complicated the issue.
After a long, country road drive to Citrusdal, an awkward offer of directions from a Citrusdal local, and closer examination of our variety of vague maps, I realized the rock formations were about an hour behind us in a direction that would have been inconvenient to back-track to.
Crestfallen, we pressed on toward Cape Town. At least we acquired some cheap and deliciously citrusy citrus from a Citrusdal citrus farm.
Desperate to make up for my heinous map reading error, I located in my guidebook an alternative stop for our drive back. Near the wine-growing town of Darling, there is a wildflower park marked in my guidebook. This being the middle of South African winter, I was doubtful that any wildflower would be there, but we tried it anyways. It turned out to be a lovely, meadowy spot. Only some flowers were blooming--including, surprisingly, a lot of wild calla lilies--but we saw some cool birds and it was a nice place to stretch our legs before the drive back to Cape Town.
We didn't get to see the big cool rocks. But we did see the cave paintings and the flowers. Though my strange travel habits may have had something to do with that, the same habits have taught me that a 50 percent accuracy rate while traveling, while only half successful, is not necessarily half bad.
On the 9th slide it sure looks like a couple of dinosaurs chasing some poor sap. I thought most dinos had disappeared much longer than 2000 years ago.
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