Nieu Bethesda – part 1!
This weekend’s excursion took us to Nieu Bethesda, a (very) small village nestled up in the valley of an impressive mountain range to the north of the Eastern Cape, aka middle of effing nowhere. It is variously an old settlement that never quite took off, a tragically tiny village without tarred roads, an artist colony, and home of the Owl House and the best sky of stars I’ve ever seen.
We rented a car and drove 4 hours north to the little town on mountain passes, twisty roads, flat roads that went straight into the horizon, and alternately dusty and soggy unpaved roads, and were crossed by a family of vervet monkeys and babies, a clan (?) of baboons, and saw an ostrich farm and innumerable sheep and cows on the way. Occasionally we’d see a farm house with a ridiculously ornate gate, but the whole way on both sides the road was laced with fences. Big tall electric ones that protect the game parks, and small evenly space barbed wire fences to keep in the sheep. Fences sometimes broke away from the road and marched (pointlessly?) up the side of a small mountain, bisecting it with disturbing precision. Other times they clung tenuously to cliffs and the steep edges where the mountainside was blasted away to level the road. I saw a lot of fences.
While we were there, there was all of one restaurant running, where we collected the key for our room which was down the street. There is a massive church (apparently the village was founded because it was too far to go to the church in Graaf-Reinet, 7 hours in the 1800s and about 30 minutes nowadays, so they built their own) and no streetlights. Or traffic for that matter.
Welcome to Nieu Bethesda!
To be continued….
