Magaliesberg

Magaliesberg is rapidly becoming my favourite part of Joburg - i.e., not Joburg. It's a beautiful area north-west of the city, about an hour's drive to get into the mountains - which are apparently some of the oldest mountains in the world. There are fun things to do in this area - see previous posts for caves, ballooning, canopy touring, meeting elephants etc. Saturday I was there for work (oddly enough) and fitted in, along with a visit to some baby elephants, two completely new activities for me: 1) climbing a mountain in a Unimog - which is, in a word, an off-road TRUCK with enormous wheels and incredible torque and suspension - the driver enjoyed terrifying us by launching this thing off impossible slopes and attacking metre-high rockfalls, etc - a bit like going on an improvised rollercoaster; and 2) quad-biking, which I wasn't sure I'd like, but it turned out to be amazing, largely because the track was through forest and a quarry and a number of mud puddles. Great fun.

A weird moment came when the Unimog driver parked at the top of the mountain and pointed out, in the distance, Pelindaba, SA's nuclear research facility - and until 1994 home to three atomic bombs which the apartheid government had developed secretly. The bombs are now decommissioned. "Who was the enemy?" I asked the driver - SA clearly didn't have any military opponents nearby at any time in the second half of the 20th century. The driver didn't know - probably the opponents of apartheid, at the height of sanctions etc. - e.g. the likes of Western Europe and the USA, both of which, one would think, are well beyond the range of any nuclear missile based in South Africa. It's impossible to think of any circumstances in which SA might have used these weapons - another indication of the regime's fundamental derangement.

Oh, and I saw the set of "Wild at Heart" - a BBC series, apparently, which I've never seen, and which is nominally set in central Africa but is actually filmed in Magaliesberg.

(Above: elephant stars of Wild at Heart - the mum didn't mind the baby being petted; the Unimog before it hit the mud; and part of the set for Wild at Heart.)