Golden slumbers
Carlos Amato ponders some fierce history and fossil finds in a dino-hunting capital’s sleepy hills
UP in the heights of Golden Gate Highlands National Park, if you listen very carefully, you can hear dinosaur eggs hatching.
There are no guarantees, mind. First you need to stretch your time-space tendons by loading up on endorphins and/or delusional tendencies and/or psychoactive compounds of your choice. (Note: creationist fervour is not advised in this instance.)
Step two: stroll across the main drag in the honey glow of late afternoon and perch your hominid ass on a fallen boulder — one of those caravan-sized monsters that tumbled off the mountain at some point between last Tuesday and Little Foot’s Ice Age-affected matric dance.
Next, you must make sustained but non-confrontational eye contact with a sandstone cliff of your choice. You can’t miss ’em: they’ve been eyeballing you ever since you drove up from Clarens. Then carefully tune your mental audio receiver back to the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic period. If you hear distant popping and crunching noises, followed by faint, mucousy grumbles of newborn confusion, you’re in business.
Fossilised dinosaur eggs have been found all over the world, but the oldest egg discovery of all was unearthed right here, in the red-and-green foothills of the Malutis, back in 1978.
Dating back to the late Triassic period — 220- to 195-million years ago — these eggs are only about three times the size of a hen’s egg. But they contain the fossilised foetal skeletons of Massospondylus, a prosauropod dinosaur that measured 5m from tail-tip to snout. (The brood is now housed in the Royal Ontario Museum.)
Massospondylus was a spindlynecked, small-headed chap, surely none too bright. Its runty arms were too short to reach its mouth, and it had only its outsized thumbs to defend itself from the attentions of local flesh-eating villains, such as the 6m-long Dracovenator, or the small but really annoying Megapnosaurus.
Poor old Massospondylus. It would have enjoyed a much nicer life in Golden Gate circa now. The national park is rife with fossil life — it’s one of the world’s dino-hunting capitals — but there are no serious contemporary carnivores or other big fivers prowling its Afro-Alpine plateaus and slopes. This lack of A-list beasties has meant the park is less famous — and cheaper to visit — than it should be, given the world- class grandeur of its landscape.
Golden Gate was so named in 1875, by a passing Boer, one JNR van Reenen, when he camped between two vaulting cliffs en route to his new farm. His beardy jaw dropped as the setting sun’s rays gilded the beige and rust rock-faces. The area was proclaimed a 62km² national park in 1964, but its extent has since mushroomed to 340km². Enough room to swing a Massospondylus.
One of the thrills of the place is that so many rocky spectacles are right in your face: it takes just an hour to stroll around the base of the mighty Mushroom Rock, from whose projecting rim fall great big droplets of champagne rainwater — they come plummeting towards you like liquid skydivers. Two longer hikes — the Ribbok trail and Echo Ravine trail — offer more sweat value and wider-angle views.
On foot, you may see the odd gang of mountain reedbuck, oribi, eland or blesbok, but your best game-spotting option is to drive the two loops around the plateau to the north of the camp.
In the verdant summer, the vistas look a bit like the Scottish Highlands — only with a bigger sky and a much stronger scent of the ancient. And in the Cairngorms, you can’t join a Basotho traditional doctor’s walking tour and sniff magical herbs; you can at Golden Gate.
Our clan occupied three thatched, self-catering rondavels at the Glen Reenen Rest Camp — no palace, but cosy and clean. The camp adjoins a wide riverside meadow shaded by a giant oak, just below a superb swimming hole that commands views straight out of Pierneef’s wildest daydreams. Baboons yell in the heights all day — but at first light, they all pop down for brekkers in your kitchen, if you neglected to latch all your windows shut.
These dudes are evolving at a hell of a lick — they can already open door handles and bin latches. Rumour has it that some can take selfies with your iPhone and post them to Instagram. My mum had to do a very plausible impression of an outraged alpha-female gorilla to convince one gimlet-eyed invader to sod off.
If you fancy something a little smarter, pop round the bend to the Golden Gate Hotel, a hideous edifice that would have made a fine location for a ’70s Austrian ski-porn flick. It has recently been renovated, and the interior is now quite elegant. Much better to be inside looking out — and you’ll like the bar, which projects into the valley like a ship’s prow, lined with huge windows and a wraparound balcony facing the impossibly noble Brandwag buttress.
In wintertime, the well-heated hotel is a much better bet, purely for survival reasons. On the broad, exposed valley between Golden Gate and Clarens, night temperatures can dive to -8°C in July and August. On my last winter visit, we awoke in our hotel room to the bluish-white glow of a proper, relentless, storybook blizzard that settled in for the day. If it snows anywhere in the country, it’s likely to be snowing here within a day or two.
The Golden Gate hotel cooks a decent set menu for dinner — but plenty of backups can be found in Clarens, a 15-minute drive away. The dorp is now a sort of halfbaked rural Parkhurst, crammed with cafés, pubs and twee boutiques arrayed around a broad, grassy square. Massospondylus would have loved it.