The family spent three days at Marloth Nature Reserve, just outside Swellendam, over Christmas.
What a wonderful place to chill.
Gigi and I drove out to Swellendam (3 hours) on Saturday morning.
Once one gets beyond the belt of pine plantations that fringe the Langeberg Mountains this is the view
The temperature reached above 30degC on most days so the most attractive places to be were the patches of relic Afromontane Forest in the kloofs (ravines) where it was cool
Beautiful cool mountain streams run down all the kloofs
Suikerbekkie (Sugar bird) Cottage where we stayed
As soon as we had unpacked we went exploring
Glenstroom hut is close to Suikerbekkie Cottage where we stayed and is the first hut on the
Swellendam Hiking Trail
The cooking and 'dining' hut at Glenstroom
Really!
Cycle trail indicator lying in a local water canal
A typical local stream
Harveya stenosiphon
With magnificent red flowers
The Langeberg Mountains
Coloniesbos (left) and
Duiwelsbos (right)
The top of Coloniesbos (Colony's forest/wood) where Gigi and I walked on the first evening
The boys drove out to join us after they had finished work
Duiwelsbos (Devils forest/wood)
Rothmannia capensisAccording to von Breitenbach, 'Southern Cape Forests and Trees', 1974, the name of the genus is in honour of a Swellendam farmer, Rothmann, host and helper of
Carl Thunberg when the latter Swedish botanist explored the Doktersbos (so named after Thunberg who was originally a physician) and Grootvadersbosch in 1772 and discovered the tree there
We visited Doktorsbos the following day
Fruit of
Rothmannia capensis
Leaves of
Rothmannia capensis
Fruit and leaves of the the Red Candlewood tree,
Pterocelastrus rostratus (I think)
The leaf shape is wrong for the more common Candlewood tree
Pterocelastrus tricuspidatus
A typical Western Cape mountain stream
Leaves on the forest floor
A beautiful small pool
Gigi listening to bird calls
And there it is!
The Hard Pear (
Olinea ventosa) is the big tree, centre rear
It's wood was so hard that the early settlers could not cut it with hand saws, so many mature trees remain in our forests
Lying horisontally is a Blossom Tree (
Virgilia oroboides), a 'pioneer species', that is common on forest margins, grows fast and is relatively shortlived
Virgilia provides shelter for the slower growing dominant trees to establish
Decending through Coloniesbos we came across this magnificent stand of tree ferns
Leaving Coloniesbos
The boys arrived shortly after we got back to the cottage
Chris lighting a fire
Nic and Gigi downloading images
Gigi - chilling
Chris contemplating
Nic off to bed - falls asleep listening to music
We slept late and went off to explore Duiwelsbos and find the waterfall in the afternoon
Many trees in Duiwelsbos grow in rings like this
This ring of trees must have copiced from one large old single stem that has since died and rotted away
Who knows how old the rootstock is, from which this ring of relative young trees copiced
A closer view showing how all the trees are joined at their base
Perhaps the original tree was burned down like the one in the picture further down this post
Gigi and Chris in Duiwelsbos
Red Pear, (
Scolopia mundii)
A stunning turning wood
On the forest floor we found this interesting specimen ...
This is the fruiting body of a fungus called
Aseroe rubra.
It's apparently fungus from Australia - another Australian invasive in South Africa - enough already!
The brown 'chocolate' is foul smelling spore slime that attracts insects who then crawl/fly off and spread the spores.
Better pictures of
Aseroea rubra in Kirstenbosch on one of my previous posts
The further up the kloof one gets into the forest the more big trees there still occur, not having been felled by the early settlers
This is a wonderful Outeniqua Yellowwood tree (
Podocarpus falcatus)
Here is a big
hardpear tree, burned out from the centre
It seems that the big fynbos fires outside the forest shoot burning debris into the forest
This causes localised fires within the forest itself
A huge Ironwood tree (
Olea capensis)
A stunning, much sought after, turning wood
The waterfall at the top of Duiwelskloof
Gigi checking out the waterfall
Chris
Cape Holley tree (
Ilex mitis)
Sunset from Suikerbekkie cottage
Pitty about the invasive eucalyptus trees!
Christmas dinner is taken on Christmas eve in the German tradition
The boys thank Esprit very much for the two Ipods
Next morning, Christmas day, we took a walk up to Doktorsbos (so named after
Carl Thunberg who was originally a physician)
Nearby some idiot forester planted an extension to the local plantation high up on a ridiculously steep slope surrounded on three sides by Fynbos
Now knowing that Fynbos communities are fire driven ecosystems, guess what ...
The lower slopes of the mountains are dominated by invasive alien vegetation, pines, eucalypts, black wattle and blackwood among others
The temperature was over 30degC
So we stopped at a small stream
This was the most co-operative frog imaginable
He loved having his photograph taken
Red current tree (
Rhus chirindensis)
Red current tree (
Rhus chirindensis)
A pool in the stream
Foresters also have the habit of planting belts of Eucalyptus trees as fire belts between blocks of pines
Eucalypts just dry out and 'kill' the soil where they grow
Nic, our family geologist, pointed out to me when we were traveling in Namibia how the wind blows away the dry soil leaving a layer of rocks on the surface
Look at how dry that soil is
The soil drying out is causing the forest road to crack and slide downhill
If this is not repaired soon guess who is not going to get their vehicles to where they need to figh the next fire
Panorama to the south
The Langeberg to the north
See the burned plantation on the very steep slope
Another big errosion gully essentially caused by all those soil dessicating alien trees
The reserve buildings
'Nice' big swathe of invasive
kikuyu grass growing where buildings previously stood
And on the way past those buildings we come across flowers of a
passion fruit or Granidella (Passiflora edulis)
And its fruit
The next day the boys left early to get to work in Cape Town and we followed a more leasurely pace to join a family gathering in Stellenbosch
