BRIGHT expectations
In the hope of witnessing the legendary West Coast spring-flower carpets, Nancy Richards takes to the road
‘EXPECT nothing and you won’t be disappointed’ is the Buddhist maxim we took with us. Necessarily, because the thing about the spring flowers is you just never know if they’re going to show — being weather dependent, and Cape Town’s weather being reliably unreliable.
Plus, there’s the failure of Capetonians to get their act together. A bit like Londoners who never go to see the Changing of the Guard, Capetonians don’t really go to see the flowers. They just take for granted that they’re there, doing their thing and bringing in the tourists.
True to type, it’s been years since I made the pilgrimage. Last time, the weather was iffy; hoping it would improve, we went anyway. There was a smattering of kerbside colour and a caracal — it may have been, hard to be sure, it was such a fleeting glimpse. More of a tail flick, really. We ate joyless sandwiches on the beach and saw a shadow on the waves that may have been a whale. Or not.
This time, the weather was still iffy, skies more milky than blue, rain predicted the following day. But we’d booked out the day, so we went. And expected nothing.
One-hundred-and-twenty kilometres later, we turned in to the gates of the West Coast National Park. There wasn’t exactly a queue, so we chatted to the gatekeeper in SANParks khaki, who said where the tea shop was: Geelbek, named after a yellow- billed duck and 10km from the entrance.
It’s not so much a tea shop as a full-on restaurant in an old, graciously gabled and thatched homestead, settled in its surroundings. Its colourful history includes having had one of the largest wine cellars in the country. The owner at the time (1920ish), Henry de Villiers Steytler, was famous for his parties that sometimes lasted for weeks. I suppose if guests had come all this way, why wouldn’t they stay. Especially if the flowers were out.
Today, eucalyptus trees housing nest-developments of weavers hang over the garden tables, bright-yellow residents tweeting and diving. There are mini gazebos, a discreet marquee in anticipation of weddings and a rock, shell and succulent walkway, featuring a slave bell. It’s hard to imagine that anyone would have chosen to build and live in so remote a spot, even tempted by fresh water and granted land, but spare a thought for those poor slaves who would have had no choice.
At the adjoining visitors’ centre, where the car park notably sports GP number plates on 4x4s, there’s an opportunity to think back even further. There’s a cast copy of a human footprint, said to have been made 117 000 years ago and attributed to a young woman, dubbed Eve, found by geoscientist David Roberts at Kraalbaai in 1995.
All this information was added value but, really, we were here for the flowers. A bonus then to spot a mandatory tortoise inching across the road — notices bearing their likeness urge you to “spare a thought” for them too and please to stick to the 50km speed limit.
But, aside from the isolated yellow cluster among the endlessly uncompromising green-grey fynbos, we weren’t seeing so many flowers. Until we got to Postberg, at the far end of the park, open only in season, August and September.
Making up for the paucity of sightings of anything so far, we spotted a small herd of eland soon after going through the gate, next to a stone-edged waterhole. We stopped to drink in the sight. We stopped again to admire a pinkening of flamingos, ankle-deep in water and again to look at the distant bontebok, and again and again to follow the running ostriches — and another tortoise.
And then there were the flowers. Driving into the sun, at first they’re all but invisible, only their dark undersides showing. But a look into the rear-view mirror and — phew! Drifts of white ones like an avalanche spread across the veld, interrupted by swathes of orange, like a stain. Blue ones and tiny pink heads organise themselves around rock crops in Persephone’s own flower arrangements. We stopped at the topmost point of Postberg, climbed a precarious rock and looked down over a staggeringly turquoise lagoon, studded with green islands. Langebaan, on permanent holiday so it seems, looks up and waves at us from the opposite shore. So the lesson learnt from a trip to see the spring flowers is: “expect nothing and you may be richly rewarded.”