Tankwa Karoo

A river runs through it…
Day one, on our arrival at Langkloof, was a beautiful blue sky, kind of day. As were day two. We sat, watched birds, had lunch, took a nap, sat some more, braaied, went to bed – repeat. Nothing exciting, but sometimes a bit of lazy can do wonders for your mental health. But then some time, during the early morning hours of day three, it started to rain. And it rained, and rained, and rained… It is days like these that you are happy to be glamping and not camping.
Because it is so quiet in the kloof, you can hear a vehicle approaching from a distance, as well as the occasional air traffic up above. It was round about midday, when I heard a strange rumbling sound. I could not make out if it was a plane or a car. Eventually I realised it was the rushing of water over the round boulders, coming down the kloof. Very excited in the thought of this, we hurried down to the very dry river, a few metres away from the campsite. We only saw this river in flood once and it was a spectacular site. Unfortunately, this river branch stayed dry, but we could hear the water rushing past in one of the other side branches. The sound did not last very long.
It rained.
At just before 15:00 that afternoon, we heard the same rushing of water, but this time it was louder. Again, we went running towards the river branch. Still no water. Now, curiosity got the better of us. We needed to find that running water. It was so close, so we decided to jump over to the next river branch. Suddenly, both of us sort of were, not so sure anymore. There were not one, but a couple of dry river branches to cross, the one wider than the other. We were still a bit in a lazy mode, so we decided to give that idea a skip. The water got louder and the next minute, as I looked up, I saw a brown wall of tumbling water coming straight towards us. Eduard did not wait one minute and jumped back to safety. Me, on the other hand, mesmerised by this phenomena, thought I could just stay there and watch the water go by. Eduard shouted at me to get across. I did not think, I paused, my mind running different scenarios. I snapped out of it and hurriedly scrambled back, just in time as not to get stranded on the other side. What were you thinking, was all that Eduard could ask. I wanted to see the water go by, was all I could answer. This time, the water did not subside like earlier that day, it was still running the next day.
Quite excited about all this water, we wondered how it looked further downstream. We needed to cross the river the next day for our drive back home. We jumped into the Cruiser and hit the road to check out the water levels. The river was getting wider, there was water rushing everywhere. We drove around a bend and reached the crossing. To our surprise, and what a mental mind freak, there was absolutely not a drop of water in site at the crossing. Very puzzled, we drove over the crossing and drove back over again. We were stunned. Where did the water go? Maybe there was a big hole it all disappeared into? Maybe there was another side branch it took, but there was no other side branches. Disappointed and very confused, we drove back. I could not let this go and told Eduard to stop. I had to know where the water went to. We decided to retrace the sound of the water and stopped at a point where we could not see or hear the water from the road. I jumped out. Listened. Heard a faint sound of water. Ran through the bushes and saw the water was still on it’s way. It was 16:00 by then. The river took one hour to travel over a distance of about only 2 kilometres. So we hurried back to the crossing, just in time to see the water passing over the road. It was truly amazing to see!