A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE river

On the walls of our family house on the Breede River are photos, rich with memories, marking the passage of time. Most epic are those from the ’70s, when my parents, my young self and nine siblings would set off in a dodgy lime-green FleetlineKombi, towing a trailer loaded with provisions.

They remind me how we camped in tents beside the river, watched the sandstone cliffs turn from brown to gold and learnt towaterski. We caught fish, got sunburnt, sailed and got in and out of trouble and once spent a night with a Cape cobra in our tent.

Perhaps the stupidest thing I did was deciding to canoe down the river during a flood. I wrote a story for Getaway at the time called “A River Ran Through Me”, detailing how that foolhardy adventure left me with no canoe (it was sucked into a whirlpool) and bloody feet after walking barefoot through the dark trying to find my way home.

Now, I am some 50 years older and (hopefully) a little wiser, but the Breede remains a wild and wonderful place, ripe for adventure. And I take such pleasure from watching my boys go through their own rites of passage.

Whether you’re driving in from Swellendam,