Joburg’s The Wilds is full of surprises
WONDERLAND: SEE THE ALLURINGLY DISTANT CITY IN A GLORY OF PERFECT LIGHTING
Each week Marie-Lais looks out for the unusual, the unique, the downright quirky or just something or someone we might have had no idea about, even though we live here. We like to travel our own cities and their surrounds, curious to feel them out. This week she advises about The Wilds in high heels.
The soles of my takkies slip slightly on stones embedded in the steeper pathways up Bushwillow Walk but Isabella Pingle is making surprisingly business-like progress in a pair of high-heeled mules.
From the guardhouse with a purple, smaller version of artist James Delaney’s metal owl affixed to it, surrounded by trees wrapped in Hug Me and Me Too messages, we sauntered down, past an equally purple pangolin in a bed of clivias to a succession of smooth lawns, with Dulux pink, yellow and green benches ranged in a row along one edge.
Today seems to be pond-fixing and arum-planting day. The pools are drained, with workmen either painting their walls and beds with something black and gleaming or bedding the lilies against rocky path walls.
A brace of black 2D guinea fowl race each other and I already have my animal spotting eyes trained on pastel metal buck in our surrounds as we climb, now fixing amusedly on a pair of white metal nagapies up poles.
Past a red kudu, reading the names of the trees we pass, we reach a thicket of 67 owls in trees, some even flying between them – endearing Delaney owls. It’s predictably loony but we can’t help counting and pointing and crying out as we count more and more in different colours. There’s even a real owl box up high.
Sitting on the back of a bench, is a guy wearing headphones, listening intently, not moving in the sunlight.
The bench looks across a sward of green featuring my favourite fever trees, one of many likely picnic spots.
An old greenhouse up on the ridge contains tired euphorbias and succulents. Its brown, empty offices are just like municipal places everywhere, the air hanging dustily and a sound of a radio in the distance.
The views of our city from The Wilds display it in a glory of per- fect lighting, holding itself alluringly distant.
Delaney as a concerned neighbour of the park has enthusiastically helped a lot happen in terms of care, improvement and maintenance.
After all, it has turned into something more magnificent than a walking spot for his dog, this municipal nature reserve tamed enchantingly with wild metal animals.
My The Wilds tip is that hiking boots are ideal for the wilder east side, across the bridge.
Takkies aren’t bad and high heels are better going up the western koppie heights than coming down.
The Wilds, off Houghton Drive, free entrance.