Montagu*
Population: 15 176
Distance from Cape Town: 180km
Arrival date: 4 March 2023
Today’s temperature: 23 Degrees Celsius
Somewhere in my past a photograph of me existed briefly of my face pressed against the cheek of a man I’d never met, and never saw again, and didn’t think of until yesterday when I was trying to recall the first time I ever came to Montagu.
I was 22. When you’re young it’s impossible to gauge how old ‘old’ is, but he was old. His beard and hair were long and grey, and his face was splintered into hundreds of deep cracks. Alan Taylor took the photograph while the man and I were dancing langarm. I was not drunk and I don’t remember the man being drunk or annoying. It was a fun evening.
Alan and I were on our way inland from Cape Town to cover some story for the newspaper and we had to sleep over in Montagu. The hotel – this was the early nineties – was more rundown than it is now, and it still had a sign up for the ‘Ladies Bar’, which by then was not a thing anymore – and Alan and I were in the bar where the locals sat. Not a ‘lady’ in sight. And that pub smell of alcohol-carpet and cigarette-air.
Yesterday, driving through town, I remembered that night: the photograph in which the man and I are laughing into the lens. Both of us had blue eyes. He was old and I was young. And there was absolutely nothing untoward about the evening at all. We’d all been talking and laughing, and then suddenly he and I were dancing the dance of our ancestors and Alan caught the moment on camera.
That was the extent of the memory. Where we went the next day, or when Alan developed the picture and gave it to me, I don’t know.
My years as a general reporter at a newspaper have plastered the inside of my skull with a collage of memories like that one. What a life it was.
In recent years, we’ve been coming to the Little Karoo town of Montagu two to three times a year.
I have become used to the extreme weather. The summers are sweltering. The winters are freezing. This past weekend, we had 88mm of rain in less than 24 hours according to a garden rain gauge.
It stormed and pelted and thundered from Saturday into Sunday. On Sunday at around 11am, it bucketed down. We watched the water rise in the tiny back garden until it was almost level with the overflowing frog pond. The small patch of lawn out front was sprinkled with white petals from roses and star jasmine and then with the hard white petals of hail stones.
All this in a place with an average annual rainfall of 35mm. (Cape Town, by comparison, gets about 505mm a year, mostly in winter. The Amazon rainforest gets between 1 500 and 3 000mm per year.)
In weather circumstances like these, the Keisies River, hurtling through Kogmanskloof, meets the Kingna river in town and the gushing and crashing has more than once forced closures and isolation as bridges and bits of road have been washed away. Recent roadworks didn’t just restore the part of the R62 that comes into town (this is a route every traveller must try to take at some point during their life or their stay in South Africa), but attempted to improve things so it wouldn’t happen again.
As you drive into the town from Ashton’s side – after you’ve driven through the monumental rock gateway under the Old English Fort – there’s now a tall concrete structure indicating where flood waters reached in previous years. Montagu, because of its geography, is prone to flooding. There have been ten major floods that have taken lives and property and dumped them further down the drag since the town came into being around 170 years ago. Must be quite a shock when you live in a semi-desert to find a river pouring into your front door, as I saw in one video yesterday from a house near us.
I love this town. It has several secondhand bookstores, and many paths and kloofs to walk, which we do often. The house we stay in belongs to my partner’s parents and is filled with architecture books (he and his father are both architects), including one about the architecture of this town.
Many of the old houses, like the cottage we stay in, with its thigh-thick walls, small windows and exposed crossbeams, are still in good nick and – apart from the new part of town where, inevitably, people are building double-storey mansions up against these beautiful mountains that have remained mostly unscathed until now – the place is pretty.
Like all South African towns, Montagu is clearly divided between the white areas and those places where the descendants of the original inhabitants live, even though we’ve had democracy for almost thirty years now. No prizes for guessing who lives in the better part of town.
In the mountains, the divisions in town are less obvious.
Everyone wants to be up in nature; likes a good hike to get the heart rate up; likes to eat their almonds and apples at a waterfall. On Sundays, we sometimes spot a lay preacher on that small ridge behind the house, bellowing the word of the Lord at his followers.
Build of your imaginings a bower in the wilderness ere you build a house within the city walls.
(From: The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran)
Montagu is in the Cape Fold Mountains and what recommends this place more than anything is to see where tectonic plates shifted below the continent millennia ago to thrust what was once underground into the sky.
You have to be outside when the sun is coming up, or when it is setting, to see the rock light up red, orange, yellow and purple. You have to be right in a kloof (but not when its going to rain!) and right up close to a cliff wall.
This is a place where, if your jaw doesn’t drop as your eyes sweep upwards, you really need to assess whether you’ve mastered the art of living at all.