Of all the things we saw in South Africa, the deep brown of Kruger, the strokes of colour that swept across the hills between Stellenbosch and Hermanus, it will be the skies across South Africa that we will remember the most. The sky that stretches across and above you dipping under the visible horizon.
Our first experience of this great sky was in Kruger National Park, east of Johannesburg. Kruger, with its baked brown and blackened trees destroyed by rutting elephants, the earth flattened by animals, the Sausage tree that yawns its great branches outstretched and weighed down by the massive fruit, the Euphorbia deep green and poisonous, the aloe, the weeping Boer tree but not a baobab to be seen.
We saw the changing sky again spayed wide open for us in the Western Cape Region. Driving across the hills, the salt of the sea air in the far distance but before that we pass over mountains, the jagged silver grey rocks glistening in the sun as they push through the earth. The Fynbos deep shades of yellow for as far as the eye can see and then all of a sudden a shock of purple, a deep magenta.
