Thank God for the rain — and for the gentle Afrikaners

Limpopo Province, South Africa

Ottoshoek means ‘Otto’s corner’ or perhaps more colloquially ‘Otto’s place’ in Afrikaans. But this cabin in the Soutpansberg mountains is not so much a den as a lookout. Perched on the very edge of a green, rocky ridge, it overlooks the bushveld plain at the range’s feet, stretching grey-brown to the flat southern horizon perhaps 80 miles away. At Ottoshoek, on top of a lonely mountain range in the extreme north of South Africa — the Limpopo region — you are 2,000 feet higher, a great deal windier and cloudier, and about ten degrees cooler than the sweltering world beneath.

It is a sort of God’s-eye view: all-seeing but unobserved. You can trace the Sand River and the railway snaking towards infinity, as on a map. Almost randomly —and seemingly as the wind blows — your mobile phone picks up signals from transmitters 100 miles away. Your FM radio can be tuned to a miscellany of local stations aiming at the rural Afrikaner community, hardly supposing themselves to be broadcasting to a couple of Englishmen spending an October week in a friend’s cabin on top of a distant mountain.

October is when the rains are supposed to come. The dry season from April to October — their winter and our summer — started this year with the plains and mountains already dry, for the preceding rains had failed and less than half the expected rainfall had arrived. As it happens, I was also at Ottoshoek then, in April. Everyone feared for the winter ahead, with trees unnourished and animals unfattened and no rain in store until October. That April my friends and I turned out to be the last guests in the cabin before its water supply dried up. Returning now (with a couple of tanks of water in the pick-up truck) we entered a cabin undisturbed for a season.