ESCAPE TO A FARM AT THE FOOT OF THE SWARTBERG MOUNTAINS IN SOUTH AFRICA'S WESTERN CAPE.

My country estate in the Little Karoo nestled between the Swartberg and Kamannassie mountains.

Winter aloes.

IT HAPPENED rather quickly.
First our daughters got married, then one son moved to the Karoo and the other opted to teach English to Czechs in Prague.

At about the same time I began looking for a smaller, more manageable home.

But my husband was ill. Within a year he had died of cancer and with him went all thought of change.

“Don’t make hasty decisions,” friends advised. “Wait a year or two.”

Uncertain of what to do, I waited for three, reluctant to leave the familiarity of home and friends in Johannesburg.

Then my house was burgled and I felt it was time to move on.

I dreamed of a quiet retreat in some beautiful spot, away from the stresses of city life. My older daughter urged me to join her in the Karoo. My younger daughter was relatively close by in Port Elizabeth. I’d be nearer my grandchildren and – I was assured – I’d have a more relaxed lifestyle.

So I sold my house, packed my possessions and, after months of house hunting, bought a home near the village of De Rust in the Western Cape. I fell in love with the little farm the moment I stepped on the stoep and looked at the view.

Irises in the spring.

The Swartberg mountains stretched beyond green fields of lucerne. A river ran through the bottom of the property The garden was alive with birds. Sheep grazed in nearby fields. So did a flock of ostriches.

The property was off the beaten track. I would have time to write, read and relax. Best of all, it cost no more than the home I’d sold. 

 The transition was not without difficulty When the removal van left I faced the prospect of sorting out my furniture on my own. I found there was no refuse removal service from the farm – it was a chore I would have to handle myself. The hot water wasn’t working, and the nearest plumber and electrician was 30km away.

The view was great, but it was the start of an adjustment process with some cons - but, fortunately, even more pros. Initially I thought I’d be lonely. Yet within the first few months I had more visitors than I had had in Randburg.A friend arrived from Britain to visit, followed by a young trapeze artist from Argentina and then a fellow journalist from Joburg.

My son took our various guests on tours of local attractions, showing . them Thomas Bain’s famous Swartberg Pass, the Cango Caves and the nearby Garden Route.

I made friends with my neighbours. The farmers arrived with gifts of onions, tomatoes, pumpkins, meat and wine. They shared the bounty of their lands.

The riempie bench I’d brought with me stood unused on the stoep for long periods when there was no time to sit idly with coffee and a good book. I planted vegetables and even a few fruit trees. I made jam and marmalade. I tried to get a flower garden under way – but almost gave up when a flock of sheep broke free and demolished many of the plants.

Initially I was kept busy converting an old barn into a cottage for my sons.

Farm workers prepare the onion fields.

Local builder Dawid Sass arrived to help. I spent my days running back and forth buying building materials.

When the renovations were complete, I was exhausted. I left the building rubble piled up in the driveway intending to find someone to remove it later, then went to visit my daughter in Port Elizabeth. When I returned it had gone. My entire entrance had been transformed.

“What happened to the mess?” I asked farmer Frans Delport.

“You’re not cross?” he asked. “My wife said I should have checked with you before I instructed my staff to clean up.”

I told my neighbour, George Derer, I wanted to buy a tall reading lamp. A day later he brought one he’d made for me. When I go away for a few days, he insists on caring for my pets.The community spirit in the valley is tangible.
One evening my son returned from the village to say he’d spotted a bat
-eared fox on the road home. A visitor saw an owl in my garden, another a grysbok in the lucerne patch. Baboons raided the vineyards to the annoyance of the farmers.

One morning I found a mongoose among my gooseberries. He and others became regulars.

A more exciting moment came one evening when I heard my Labrador barking outside the back door. I peered into the darkness and spotted a huge porcupine a few meters from the door. Unfazed by the fuss, he settled down in the back garden for the night. Once or twice we spotted Cape cobras on the gravel roads. I was living in paradise – serpents and all.

The local gossip was invariably about animals or the weather. Crime was something that happened in cities. Or so we thought.

Family room.

One day a neighbour returned from the village with hot gossip. Youngsters had broken into a house belonging to a foreign couple who had locked up and returned home for the northern summer. The thieves had taken the groceries they had left behind. The incident had everyone shaking their heads. Crime in the village? Unbelievable.

I was to learn that the rural poor are indeed very poor. A large number live on “all pay”, the government pension given to unemployed mothers, children and the disabled.

Alcoholism is a problem. Everything, in fact, is a problem for the poor, transport particularly. The railway system which provided a regular train service was stopped some years ago.The needy now look for lifts. Or walk – or inspan a donkey cart.

The donkey cart is still the most reliable mode of transport in the Karoo.

Most people here are descendants of the Khoisan, their only language Afrikaans. The lucky have jobs on farms, the unemployed linger in the village hoping to earn a few coins as “car guards”.

My domestic worker is a grandmother who comes twice a week to help in the house. Rosie is a sweet-tempered woman – and a preacher at the local “church”, a little building donated by a farmer where people meet to pray and socialise. I am invited to services on special occasions when mothers with nursing babies, children and labourers gather. It's an uninhibited, joyous occasion.

Just recently I was asked to attend an event where the girls were to model fashions they had created. The entrance fee? A plate of eats. The function was pure pleasure, the “fashions” concocted with strips of cloth and plastic bags. But it was the dancing afterwards that warmed the heart as girls and boys exuberantly swayed their hips to the beat of recorded music playing in the background.

I know several of the young performers. They play on the gravel road waiting for the school bus that arrives before seven on weekday mornings.

During holidays, when lunch is not a given, they arrive at my gate asking for ’n stukkie brood, asseblief (a piece of bread, please.) Now, as I watch them gyrate on the church floor, I feel a sense of pride in their lack of inhibition. They are happy simply to be.

My first years slipped by with record speed. I soon abandoned my city paranoia about locking up. On hot summer evenings, the screen door is there to keep insects out rather than deter burglars. It’s a safe world.

And at times by I am overwhelmed by a sense of isolation. I miss the social interaction that was once a regular part of life. I have come to understand why some people return “home” to the city.

Despite crime – and costs – many couples who have moved to the coast or the countryside find they miss the city lifestyle. This is particularly true of lone women of advancing age who haven’t the resources or energy to make a new start in a different environment.

Perhaps the biggest problem is medically related. As folk grow older, we invariably need specialist facilities and these are not always readily available in small places. I miss my GP, my hairdresser and freshly baked chocolate croissants from the local bakery – small issues that take on special significance.

I love country walks, and cosy evenings with new friends, but hanker for an occasional concert, good movies and even an art exhibition or book launch. life is good in the country but city life has its attractions.
That said, there is nothing better than a still night in the Little Karoo with the stars bright overhead and the crickets chirping. Then, you know that all's right in the world - and specially in our beautiful South Africa.

A farm in South Africa where farmyard animals are paramount

The old nursery rhyme, Mary had a little lamb, has special meaning on a guest farm in South Africa's Karoo where Maggie Fourie's sheep follow wherever “she is sure to go”.

 

“Come, Madeleintjie, come. It's supper time.” Maggie Fourie, owner of the Oudemuragie Guest Farm near Oudtshoorn in the Western Cape, calls a recalcitrant sheep that has stopped to graze at the edge of the road.

The ewe's ears prick up and she comes dashing towards Maggie and the group of sheep with her. It is sundown and the flock has been waiting for the black-headed ewe to catch up. Maggie pats her head, talks quietly to her and they set off again, the sheep trotting obediently behind her.

It's a curious scene. Most shepherds drive the sheep forward from behind. Maggie walks ahead. She knows the names of every one of the 18 in her flock and when she talks to them they come running. They're a motley lot: some with black heads, some with patches of brown: certainly not with fleece as white as snow but certainly determined to remain close to Maggie.

As we head towards the enclosure where they will have a supplementary feed and spend the night, she outlines the history of each.

All have been rescued in one way or another and have bonded with the woman they regard as their mother. In fact, she has become something of a female Dr Dolittle, that literary character famous for talking to animals. Others, however, view her as more of a “sheep whisperer” while virtually everyone in the area sees her as the ultimate animal lover.

When she is not preparing meals or making beds for expected guests, she's in the farmyard making certain her sheep, hens, geese, ducks and pigs are being well cared for, chatting to each creature as she moves around. And close by is her ever loyal Staffordshire terrier, Toks. She even has time to place a rose on Tallie's grave, another Staffie that died, aged 15, some time ago.

Children who visit the farm with their parents follow Maggie around, as entranced by the animals as she is – and very keen to help with the chores. They love the stories she tells about her farmyard pets.

They meet “Kippie”, a tame guinea fowl whose mate was taken by an eagle. To protect her from a similar fate, Kippie was reared indoors. She joins the fowls in the run each morning when people are around to shoo away predatory birds with evil intent.

At sundown Kippie heads to her roost in the family room. She stretches her neck, flaps her wings and flies to the top of the door and waits for the TV to be turned on. She watches with the family until 10 pm when she tucks her head under a wing and goes to sleep.

Maggie even has a gay rooster who adopted a hen's brood of four chicks when a hawk robbed them of their mother.

“His name is Wit Haan and he has a decidedly feminine side,” Maggie says. “He's always willing to look after chickens. In fact, most of the farm's fowls are part of his family.”

Then there's a little brown hen who was rescued from the jaws of a genet one night. She was so comprehensively spoiled thereafter that she will lay her eggs only in the house where she knows they will not be snatched. There are silky hens and ducks, geese and piglets, each with story of their own.

But it's the sheep that Maggie has a soft spot for – and which visitors to the farm most enjoy.

“They are no ordinary sheep,” Maggie explains. “Madeleine, for instance, was left for dead when she was born one bitterly cold winter's night a few years ago. She was still in her uterine sack when brought to the farmhouse but I was determined she would survive so I got her breathing and fed her milk with a doll's feeding bottle. She made it, with a lot of loving care.”

She relates the history of each sheep as she walks among them. Some newborn lambs had been caught in thorn bushes and left to die. Some were abandoned because they were undersized and considered to weak to survive.

Some of lambs are now wethers (castrated rams) but she steadfastly refuses to send them to the abbatoir. Nearly a dozen have grown into healthy ewes that have delivered healthy lambs. She has a special affection for Cassie, one of a twin whose “sister” was born spastic but who was cast aside because he was no bigger than a white rat and not expected to live. Another had crippled front legs and tried valiantly to walk on his bent joints.

“My husband said it would be a kindness to put him down but I refused,” Maggie says. “The lamb tried to keep up with the other sheep by running on his 'knees'. Eventually, his muscles strengthened and he was walking normally.”

A guest, impressed with Maggie's devotion, found a lamb abandoned on the roadside when she left for home. She returned to the farm to give him to Maggie.

“The lamb wasn't ours but I checked with the neighbours and they did not want her so I reared the tiny creature,” she says. “I named her Elfrieda after the visitor. She thrived and recently had triplets of her own.”

The most famous sheep is Baffie whose image has been snapped by proud parents from round the world with their child on his back. He's the one sheep who does not mind playing “horsey” with youngsters.

Though the livestock on the farm is obviously her passion, Maggie is also an accomplished cook who focuses on traditional South African food. Most of her guests want to experience life on a Karoo farm and stay a week or two.

“When the Soccer World Cup was on in 2010, several guests complained they had had no opportunity of trying South African food,” she says. “One guest told us that in Los Angelos it is possible to have a South African meal, but the same experience is apparently not easily available here.”

With Maggie the focus is distinctly on local fare with fresh fruit and vegetables always on the menu. Bobotie is a favourite dish, followed by quinces cooked in port wine or hot malva pudding. So are her hoenderpastei (chicken pies), frikkadels (meatballs) and Cape curries.

There are five self catering cottages on the property and guests can either cook for themselves, dine with the family or order dinner delivered to their accommodation. The choice is theirs.

According to Maggie, spring is a great time to visit the Karoo. The mesembs start blooming in August and are at their best in September. They come in all shades of pink, purple yellow and even white. The aloes – red, orange and yellow - flower earlier but often linger until September. For three months of the year the Karoo is a riot of colour.

The Oudemuragie Guest farm is at the foot of the spectacular Swartberg mountains: the perfect environment for guests who like hiking (the sheep are unlikely to follow) . There are three trails on the farm that criss cross mountain streams. Two take 90 minutes, the other about an hour, plus there are a good many further afield. With no less than seven waterfalls on the farm, the scenery is exceptional.

As if the domestic animals are not attraction enough, there's quite a bit of bird- and wildlife on the farm. Tortoises and mongoose, duikers and porcupines, baboons and even the occasional leopard or genet can be seen.

Oudtshoorn is nearby and so are the Cango Caves, South Africa's oldest tourist attraction. Legend has it that they were discovered by a farmer who went in search of a ram in 1780. The stalagmites continue to impress visitors from round the world. There are ostrich farms to visit, the Karoo wine route to experience and even a wildlife ranch where crocodiles, cheetahs and Bengal tigers are on view.

The cottages on the farm accommodate from two to ten guests and vary in price from R400 a unit to R1250 a night for the largest. All are fully equipped with microwaves, fridges, irons etc.

For more information visit www.Oudemuragie.co.za, email oudemuragie@telkomsa.net