A Loop around Southern Africa – Day 3: Herding sheep at the Vredefort Dome

We left our hotel in Johannesburg at half past six in the morning: Joel had foresightedly booked an Uber in advance, so we did not have to wait at all (indeed, the driver waited for us while we tried to figure out how to deposit our keys after using them to open and close the main gate). We arrived at Lanseria Airport a little after seven only to find out that the car rental agency was still closed. We had seen three different opening times for the agency online and on the board outside their counter, but fortunately, we did not have to wait all that long, as the place opened at half past seven. In the meantime, Tiana and Brent breakfasted on leftover ribs while I searched – and failed to find – a SIM card. I eventually gave up and paid for Safaricom’s exorbitant roaming.

Having acquired our car, we set our course to Parys, where we were set to meet the guide who would take us on a tour of the Vredefort Dome. It was our first time in a Mahindra, and the sailing was very smooth. When we arrived, we received a whole introductory lecture on the history of the Vredefort impact structure, which dates back two billion years and is possibly the largest impact structure on Earth. Our guide, who was an amateur geologist and a professor of communications, explained to us the geological evidence of the impact in the form of chocolate tablet breccia, pseudotachylite, and shatter cones. He told us how the impact created several rings of mountains, with the first one forming around Vredefort and the third reaching as far as Johannesburg. At first, the first ring created a basin where the water mounted until it finally tore through one of the walls.

Since our guide’s car (which was a four-wheel drive) did not have enough space for the whole group, we split into two groups, with Brent and Joel following us in our rental car and only joining us in the guide’s car when the terrain became too difficult. Of course, the main purpose of the drive was to view the hills created by the impact of the meteorite and the rivers flowing through the lateral cracks of the crater, but there was plenty of wildlife to see as well. We came across ostriches, impalas, sable antelopes, wildebeest, and many ground squirrels.

We made a few stops on the tour, the first being an old flooded quarry with a beautiful segment of chocolate tablet breccia. Second, we stopped by an old British heliograph which was used to communicate during the Anglo-Boer Wars and which was erected above the ruins of an extensive Tswana settlement. To reach it, we had to pass through a sheep pen, but when we opened the gate, the sheep started pouring out into the farmstead we had just entered. Our guide yelled “shit” with understated dignity, and we closed the gate again to prevent the rest of the sheep from escaping, but five were already prancing around the house. We spread ourselves into different corners, some of us blocking the sheep from running down other paths while others tried to close in on them and chase them back into the pen. We returned two sheep this way, but the other three ran away even farther, and our guide had to knock on the farmer’s door with his tail between his legs to tell him of our mishap. When we came back from the heliograph, we found that the farmer resolved the situation by letting all the sheep into the farmstead.

After breaking at various viewpoints, we made our final stop at the banks of a river. A few months ago, a big flood uprooted several massive trees and bashed them against the bridge like battering rams: one of the trees was still lodged against the body of the bridge, while the crumpled guardrails formed a silver bow across the river. The bridge, however, was still entirely passable, even if covered in more sediment than usual.

We spent the night at a delightfully decorated farmstead near Ventersburg, where our hosts welcomed us with tea and milk pie. As we pulled up, we were greeted by four dogs of different sizes: an Anatolian shepherd dog, a labrador mix, a pug mix, and a tiny mutt. The latter three were all rescues and did not have much of a function on the farm beside letting themselves be petted – or rather, I should say, demanding that they be petted and jealously biting each other when they thought they were not receiving enough attention. The labrador certainly thought of himself as a guard dog, but he was not as much a guard dog as a racist one. He snapped at Tiana when we arrived, and when two black farm workers came up to the house the next morning, he barked at them savagely.