The forest above my bushveld home

I feel very privileged to live in a wild place in Africa, where leopard and hyenas patrol their territories at night, and impala and nyala wander past my door during the day. What’s truly special about the area, however, is the tremendous diversity of habitats.

Where I live, alongside the Blyde and Olifants Rivers, it is a landscape of bushveld trees and bushes, like marula and commiphora trees, and raisin-fruit and gwarrie bushes. We receive about 500mm of rain every year, at an elevation of about 400 metres above sea level. It’s typical African bushveld, wonderful and wild!

But the heat in summer time from October to April can be intense, with temperatures reaching over 40 degrees Celsius, the only relief brought by magnficent thunderstorms. The winters from May to August are mild and gentle, with chilly, clear nights, and warm, sunny days – the best of anywhere in South Africa. But we pay for it in summer…

The contrast in habitats are amazing. The northern Drakensberg mountains are just 20 kilometres to the west. Here the mountains rise steeply to over 2 000 metres high, and the rainfall can exceed 1500mm every year. Temperatures at the top are 15 to 20 degrees Celsius lower than where I live in the bushveld. Up here there are old-growth forests shrouded in mist and cloud, with giant yellow-wood trees, filled with rare forest birds like Knysna turaco, grey cuckoo-shrike and white-starred robin.

These mountains are critically important, because they are the source of the rivers that flow east, through Kruger, giving all animals, including humans, the sacred substance of water through the dry season of May to October. The river that flows past my home – the Blyde River – has it’s source in these mountains, and it is one of the few rivers in South Africa that still flows all year round.

I’ve walked up into these mountains a few times, and always enjoy the contrast between the bushveld and forest. But earlier this year, one walk was extra special.

Like everyone, at some point, life seems to weigh you down. Earlier this year I went through a particularly difficult few months. We all have our struggles, and we all have our ways of coping. My antidote is to fall into the arms of Wild Nature.

Almost on instinct, I packed my backpack, and some food, and drove to the base of the mountain near my bushveld home near Hoedspruit, on the edge of Kruger National Park in South Africa. I had walked this mountain path a few times before, but that day I would spend the night sleeping at the summit, and walk down the next day. Here’s what I wrote about my experience.

I leave my home in the bushveld below, and walk up the mountain into the clouds. I find an old-growth forest, ferns and fungi, and the source of a wild African river. I slip into the icy water, drinking it in, the same water that came from comets crashing into Earth billions of years ago.

Night is coming. A wood owl, messenger of the Deep, flies onto a branch above me. “Where have you been? We have been waiting a long time,” she says. What does she mean? Her gaze slices through my prefrontal cortex, into that eternal part of me, and a feral animal wakes up inside.

Then a spark explodes in my peripheral vision. Then another one, and another. They’re everywhere. Fireflies, hundreds of them, flashing, lighting up the forest. Sparks exploding in my mind. I sit on my knees, staring at them, arms outstretched. Time dissolves and love sings through me, a sacred tune, soft as the whispers of the nearby stream.

The barriers in my mind melt away. The spirit of the forest rushes into every cell of my being. My body feels more alive than ever. I know this feeling, it always seems to happen in the wild places.

I lie down for the night in a small clearing in the forest, and look up through the fireflies, beyond the tree canopy, into the stars, a cosmos dripping with molten silver. I watch the stars moving through the treetops, but it is Earth, and me, and you, that are turning on an axis of Wonder.

Then I remember the essence. I am an ape, an animal, held by gravity on a tiny blue dot spinning through infinite space. An animal alive on this little planet for a blink of an eye in endless eternity.

Sleep tempts me, but I will myself to stay awake, to witness the Magic for as long as I can. Lions start roaring in the bushveld below, a baritone call, the voice of Africa.

Then and there, everything is aligned, everything is true. “We all travel the Milky Way together,” wrote John Muir.