My immersive time travel to underground epiphanies
If Samuel Johnson was alive and well, and gadding about the Cape Helderberg region in 2024, he would no doubt post some witticism on his social media accounts to this effect: “Those who are tired of Lourensford are tired of life.”
Of course, Johnson was an 18th-century Englishman, so what he actually wrote was: “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford.”
There are a few million Londoners who might disagree with him as they grit their teeth through a bleak January, wishing themselves in another location that affords more than constant cold and wet weather.
Those of us in the middle of a southern summer might also disagree with Johnson’s parochialism. Arguably, we exhibit our own version of it when we declare that local is lekker. I put this claim to the test while spending the DecemberJanuary holidays in Somerset West, where (though hundreds of leisure options present themselves to well-heeled Helderberg explorers) Lourensford Wine Estate acts like a lodestone rock to which one is constantly drawn.
And why not? There always seems to be something new happening at Lourensford. Perhaps visitors will one day tire of the delights of wine safaris and weekend markets, art and ice cream, padel and clay pigeon shooting. But the folk at Lourensford aren’t going to take that risk.
Their latest initiative is hosting EARTHBOX, a novel immersive experience that promises to take you underground and back in time
to a place that is phone-free and contemplative, connected to a deep past, offering the comfort of geology: when you are surrounded by layers of soil and rock more than 500-million years old, the cares and concerns of daily life are placed in perspective.
The brainchild of Marina Busse and Brad Baard of The Dream Commission, EARTHBOX was an enormous undertaking. The underground chamber, 24m long and 7m high, sits 5m below the surface of an old field that has been converted into an attractive garden. Most of the engineering
effort that went into its creation is now hidden, though one cannot fail to be impressed by the design.
The question remains: was it worth it? I have seen many accounts from people testifying
to the cognitive, creative and even spiritual insights generated by their time at EARTHBOX. Others have been less wowed. Others still are sufficiently sceptical about the whole enterprise that they have no intention of visiting.
There was jocular banter among my friends on a WhatsApp group when one member posted an article praising EARTHBOX as a means of reconnecting with Mother
Earth and“perhaps Maybe the even cave being is a “reborn”. Eye-roll emojis followed. womb?” someone suggested.
After my own experience, I had a different cavernous analogy in mind. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato famously imagined a cave in which a group of people have long been imprisoned, their eyes directed at a single wall onto which are cast the shadows of objects, shapes and puppets held in front of a fire. The prisoners take these projections for reality, little guessing that there is a world outside the cave.
For Plato, the philosopher is like a prisoner who has escaped into the harsh light of day, who has seen the real world, and must now convey something of this truth to those still stuck (often of their own accord) in ignorance underground. Apart from that it tends to make philosophers rather selfrighteous, the allegory of the cave has various limitations.
For example: what about art? What about the pleasures of images, of “shadows on the wall”? What about revelations that occur in the semidarkness?
I admit that, when I descended into EARTHBOX, I had just spent a very enjoyable couple of hours tasting the wine and appreciating the vistas of a Lourensford Vinfari. Still, I cling to my own underground epiphanies even if they occurred in a minor rather than a major key.
I won’t tell you what they were. But I will say that as I emerged, blinking into the hot sunshine, I found myself hankering for more time in the cool, moist tranquillity of the EARTHBOX chamber.