I LET THE PEBBLES SING
This riverine spot is one of the finest camp grounds in South Africa, writes Paul Ash
T has become axiomatic that every time I pitch my tent in the Merry Pebbles campsite on the banks of the upper Sabie River, the heavens will open. That the sun will beat down on me for the rest of my stay is — usually — a given. But I will, grouchily Hemingwayesque, always pitch my tent in the rain.
It would help, of course, to have a pop-up tent that sets itself up but my home-away-from-home is a geriatric Sunseeker Isodome with more poles than a Vegas strip club. I bought it because the sales guy said it would protect me “from a Himalayan blizzard” and who wouldn’t want to be safe from one of those, even in little, old, warm Sabie? It’s finicky enough in the warm blast of daylight but a true bastard in rainswept darkness.
It has also been suggested — shouted, actually — from the toasty interior of the car on a few occasions that “maybe we should just get a chalet”, which, even if true, is not helpful because then we wouldn’t be camping and Merry Pebbles’s many charms would be diminished.
There are not many places in South Africa where you can pitch a tent on the banks of a clean, babbling brook, safe from crocs, bilharzia and pollution. Merry Pebbles, set on an expanse of grass and trees, is one of the few.
The stream, which babbles along under a forested cliff on the other bank, seals the deal — streams are good for cooling feet, beers and quarts of cider, and there is nothing quite so magical in the world as going to sleep holding hands with a river.
One of the things I like most about Merry Pebbles is that it lets me indulge the fiction that I am a minimalist camper. My camping box is sparse — tent, air mattress, sleeping bag, gas stove and kettle, a lamp, a bag of food, rooibos, a bottle of red wine and a Leatherman. There is none of the vast chattel I see spewing out of the backs of 4x4s in “hardcore” places such as Mozambique and the Richtersveld. Car camping — in the sense that everything must fit in the back of a hatchback — is the way to go.
The site is one of the finest campgrounds in South Africa. Sure, it is also a caravan park, and there are chalets and a restaurant and electricity connections for those who find it difficult to unplug, but the space is vast. Hidden in a copse of trees away from the centre of the things, you will not notice your neighbours.
The air is thick with the scent of pine, both in its natural state as well as sawn timber from the nearby mill — the source of an open-sided shed full of pine offcuts for making fires.
My first happy chore, once the tent has been sorted, is to drag a groundsheet full of wood back to my spot and to get building a big ziggurat of wood to put to the torch once dinner is done and we feel like staring into the flames and thinking about not very much at all.
And so, night comes to Sabie and the only sounds will be the whispering pines and the river gurgling over its pebbles. The only noise of any consequence used to be a diesel locomotive hooting at the level crossings as it made its way to Graskop early on Saturday mornings with empty timber flatcars, but the railway has been given over to weeds for nearly 10 years now and the trains are only a memory.
It’s a small pity because the train made a useful alarm clock if there were plans for the Saturday — you know, like taking a long walk on the Loerie Trail, which starts on the forestry road directly across the river from reception, or heading into town to stock up on beer.
That’s pretty much how weekends at Merry Pebbles unfold. There is no need to do much. My girl and I once tried the swimming pools — one heated — and decided that cooling off in the river was more our thing (I wouldn’t drink the water, though, especially not downstream of the mill). Sometimes we swing our legs
off the old steel girder railway bridge and watch the swallows dart over the water. Next time we’ll take the truck inner tube we scored for free at a tyre repair place in Laingsburg, and do some extra drifting of our own, and maybe we’ll shoot a couple of racks on the pool table at the retro recreation centre.
Otherwise it’s a glorious pattern of sleeping, eating and lying with our books on straw mats under the trees, the day marked by the kettle hissing on the gas stove, slow days of no cacophony and simple things. Who wouldn’t put up a tent in the rain for that?