This place is a dream land. It is filled with waterfalls and beautiful green rolling hills/mountains. On a sunny Saturday, seven of us ladies got together and headed for an all-day-hike among the hills of Jonkershoek which in Afrikaans I believe it means Young corner. Living in Cape Town, I managed to learn a bit of Afrikaans but not enough to navigate myself around town. I have spent great amount of time researching words which are repeated in many of the geographical areas or land marks.
However, I have also come up with my own definitions for these land marks which can be found in many of the suburbs and parks names: -bosch (meaning bush), -hoek (meaning corner), or -kloof (meaning cliff/mountain pass). But by definition from Afrikaans it translates a little differently.
Rodebosch, Kristenbosch - around the bush is what I get from Rodebosch, and the latter is a botanical garden's name
Kloof street, Kloof - to me sounds like cliff, but in Afrikaans it actually means gorge
Living in Cape Town, you get used to hearing these endings quite frequently. Many of the suburbs, if not all, have an Afrikaans meaning to it. I loved trying to pick up the Akrikaaner accent however, most times I failed miserably. The only time it was life-saving to speak the accent was the mini-taxi stops (I don't remember if I ever blogged about these mini-taxis in Cape Town which hold almost 2x the maximum capacity, but I will definitely explain in another post). These taxis would stop at your request but it HAD to be those which were commonly used by locals. So, my most significant stop was home-bound at a store called Shoprite. Now, instead of pronouncing it in English, try the Afrikaans phonetic version: Shopraeit (I wish I could attach audio to my blogs at this time). Cape Town becomes Capetyion and get this, (Heidi you were right all along) Bellville becomes Pyelvol. It might be hard to phonetically imagine all of this if you have never been exposed to it, but to me it's music :-)
But back to hiking Jonkershoek. The beauty of this place is just magical. It's hard for me to look back at these pictures and believe that I was there. Hope that you enjoy a little taste of this magical land through some of my pictures.
Silvermine
A dear friend and I decided to hike Silvermine in search of the Elephant's eye. It's not an actual eye, but instead it is an amazing hole in the side of a mountain. After a little disoriented, and a sun which seemed to be setting faster than usual, we finally found the eye. We were both extremely glad that after our picnic with delicious cheese and wine we decided to continued our journey, not giving up on our set destination. We had faint hopes but only on our return we realized we hiked 1.5 hours extra, which could have been driven in 5 minutes, leading us to the eye that much sooner.
The day was wonderful, and we enjoyed the hike so nothing was lost by walking more :-)
Here are some pictures to prove our amazing day !
Birthday celebrations
This also happened to be my birthday weekend and was pleased to celebrate with some pretty special people !!!
Thanks for reading !
xo
