Newlandsforest

Last one for a bit, I promise.

Another from the rainy day in Newlands Forest. The D600 is just young enough to have live view for composing but old enough that it’s awful at it.

More ferns. But this time from a walk in Newlands Forest a few weeks ago during the rains. I was having a great time out there until the eyepiece of the camera dislodged my hard contact lens - sending it tumbling to the endless complexity of the forest floor. It might as well have fallen through a wormhole into another dimension. An expensive mistake.

Newlands Forest was mighty damp after the huge amount of rain we had last week. To cross the streams with dry feet I had to do some tricky hops on slippery rocks. I amazed myself by managing to cross three of these rain gorged torrents without falling in. A second mountain biker alerted me to their presence with a bike bell. That makes two… ever. It’s such a tiny, inexpensive object but it conveys so much respect to the other mountain users. Most of them though, are not well-loved by the rest of us. I have a bell on my bike just for getting myself around, let along tearing down narrow, twisting tracks. Sport riders in Cape Town need to be better. ...

This ruined cottage was an irresistible moonlight attraction when we were teenagers. And the wall was a seat where we could climb up and pretend we were vampires.

The pines have their own charms though. When you’re raised on European culture and JRR Tolkien - and our spectacular African scenery is just the backdrop to life - it was easy to romanticise this slightly exotic landscape. But it doesn’t really belong here and as such it lacks the intense diversity of our native biomes. The one upside though is that it provides a living for fungi from Europe which extrude bizarre fruits out of the ground and bark after rains.

The native forests of Table Mountain. Dense and ringing with the calls of forest birds - unlike the bare alien pine forests that still linger on some slopes.